In one class at Iowa in the early 70’s, there was T.C. Boyle, Allan Gurganus, Ron Hansen, Jane Smiley, Richard Bausch, all of them taught by John Cheever. And they couldn’t be more different in style.

I was a student at Iowa when I wrote ‘Stones in my Passway, Hellhound on my Trail’. The entirety of the research consisted of listening to the [Robert Johnson] album twelve million times, reading the liner notes twice, and deciding – seeing, knowing – the true version of Robert Johnson’s death. For period detail I went down to Gabe and Walker’s [now Gabe’s in Iowa City] where my friend Blue Phil Ajioka was taking a break between sets and asked, ‘Phil, what kind of guitar did Robert Johnson play?’ Phil said, in his bluesman’s basso, ‘That’d be a Harmony Sovereign.’ Story over.

Ray Carver had been living in town a few years earlier, in the Cheever days (they drank together at the Mill, and I’ll never know why the local historical society hasn’t affixed little brass markers to the stools they perched themselves on during those long hard hours of draining glasses and lighting cigarettes)…

The time when I was at Iowa was a time when I became serious about writing — as my life. Before that, as you probably know, I was pretty much of a degenerate, writing sporadically, and listening to a lot of bad habits and so on in New York. I’d never been west of New Jersey at that point, and I kind of grew up, because now I knew what I wanted to do, and I pursued it vigorously. I’m very proud of the fact that I made a perfect 4.0 in all of my graduate work, that I was a good student. Prior to that — I’d been in school since I was four years old, and I didn’t want to do it, you know? It was like punishment to go to undergraduate school. So in that way, yeah, it started a whole new phase of my life. Iowa bailed me out, really.

It was late summer in Iowa, hills and square-faced buildings and leaves as green as a feat of the imagination. There was a party for new students on a muggy September day in one of those big old houses downtown somewhere, and I remember Fred Exley swaggering in with two shining and beautiful students in tow […] and a quart bottle of vodka, from which he was swigging as if it were a big cold translucent beer. It would be many years later, when ‘Pages From a Cold Island’ came out, before I understood where he’d been and what his frame of mind might have been like that day, but at any rate I was impressed: here was a writer.

T.C. Boyle’s short story ‘The Women’s Restaurant’ (first published in Penthouse Magazine in 1977) is based on the restaurant ‘Grace and Rubie’s’, a women-only establishment that once existed on North Linn Street in Iowa City’s Northside. It tells the story of a man determined to eat there, despite its strictly female reputation.