Pete Hautman: I'm Pete Hautman. And I wrote a book about pizza and hamburgers and growing up in a family as a middle child. It's called Slider. What I was inspired by was I grew up in a big family and I was thinking about how different the experiences of a oldest child, which I am, and a middle child, and a younger child. And I realized I had never really written about the middle child experience. So I set out to create a family which is David, a middle child, with an older sister named Bridget, who is an overachiever and very neurotic. And a younger sibling, Mal, who is severely autistic. He's mostly non-verbal and he needs pretty much 24/7 care. And I wanted to write about the experience of David, who was kind of like caught in the middle.

He's not a great student like his older sister, but he's a regular kid. He's an ordinary, normal young man of thirteen years old. And he has a lot of responsibility because he has to take care of his younger brother who can get into trouble very easily. So I wanted to write about that. And the eating thing came later, after I'd created the family. It's been an interest of mine for some time, this whole idea of competition eating. Which is fascinating and grotesque and admirable and wasteful and all the other things that you might use to describe say boxing or football. It's very entertaining. And the people that are serious about it are very, very impressive. I mean, a fellow named Joey Chestnut, who appears in the book, recently ate, I believe it was 72 hot dogs with the buns in 10 minutes for the Coney Island hot dog eating contest that takes place on July 4th every year.

And when those two things kind of came together, I realized that my character, David, could be a fast eater and he might use it to distinguish himself. He might use it to kind of find out who he is and what his place is in the family. Well, a lot of it I could do online, which was nice because there are many, many YouTube videos of eating contests. And there are many, many groups online of parents of autistic children and autistic people themselves talking about their experience and how they relate to the world. And I do have autistic friends, several of them. None of them are as non-verbal as Mal is, but I just thought it was a very interesting... Almost like exploring another culture or something. Learning how they perceive the world, how they deal with it and what kinds of things present tremendous challenges and what kinds of things they might be very, very good at.

I didn't enter any eating contests. I tried, timed myself eating sliders, as there was a local contest I thought I might enter. I'm a pretty fast eater, but I'm not in the class of these professional competitors. I could put down 10 sliders in about two and a half minutes, but the people that are winning slider eating contests do it in about 60 seconds. But I did get a sense for what it's like to eat that 10th slider. And it doesn't go down easy.

I'd like to read a section that occurs pretty early in the book. David has won a bet with a friend of his by eating a pizza really fast. And his older sister's boyfriend, Derek, decides that he wants to enter David in a slider eating contest at his nearby college. Derek and David are driving to the college and Derek is expounding upon his philosophy of life:

"Everybody's good at something," he says. "Take me, for example. I am good at recognizing opportunities and capitalizing on them."

"Such as?" I am already bored.

"Such as today. If I hadn't taken the opportunity to give you the opportunity to enter this contest, you'd never have had the opportunity to win it."

"That's a lot of opportunities."

"It's what I'm good at," he says. "You're good at eating. Did you know that you're basically a tube? Teeth on one end, butt hole on the other. Arms, legs, eyes, brain, heart. Those are just extras. Topologically speaking, you're a meat donut -- a hole surrounded by flesh. And if you take into account the nostrils, you are a three-hole donut, but basically you're a tube."

"Great, now I feel really special."

"It's important to recognize one's own nature." Derek reaches into the backseat and grabs a snack-sized bag of Fritos. He tears it open; The car instantly fills with the smell of corn chips. He shoves a handful into his mouth and starts chewing and talking at the same time. "Do you know that Fritos were invented in the nineteen thirties?" he says. I didn't know that, but I want some. I make a move toward the bag, but Derek holds it away from me. "The only thing you're eating today is sliders."

"Thanks a lot."

"Just stay hungry," he says.