Why I don't write fiction UPDATED

Since people are continuously banging down my door asking for a WWPD novel, I thought I should explain why none exists. It's not that I don't write fiction--I have, on and off, better and worse, since high school--but I am wary of inflicting it on the world. Thing is, although I don't write semi-autobiographical stories of the adventures of one Fifi Maltzman, I do tend to write about places and situations I know, and there's enough of what I know floating around in fiction today. No one cares about academic types, Manhattanites, Park Slopers, Hyde Parkers, Spence girls, or Stuyvesant nerds. A way of complimenting a work in the NYT Sunday Book Review is to exclaim, "Nothing about the Upper East Side!"

Even if against all odds I came up with something original to write about any of these worlds, any mention of Tasti-d-Lite, school uniforms, or the Six train would put anything I wrote into the pretentious-blather genre, and would leave readers (as if there would be readers) begging for "books with dragons on the cover" and stories about Kansas and Inner Mongolia within. For a time, being familiar with NYC was an advantage and meant a person could write relative crap as long as it referenced upscale 5th Avenue department stores. That time may not be over, but I've internalized the American populist idea that you are not really from America, did not really have a childhood, if it all took place where "Sex and the City" was shot.

UPDATE

Here are some more thoughts about the "real America" of which I, with my prejudiced conviction that squirrels are not food, will never be a part. I could call it a religious dietary restriction, but that wouldn't help deflect charges of membership in a coastal cabal.