With all you’ve done at this point, do you feel that you have proved yourself—become a grown-up?

I feel like I’m getting there. The last step would be to have a kid. That’s the final step toward maturity.

I’m 38; I’m not quite there. Part of the problem is that all this really satisfying stuff professionally didn’t start to happen until I was about 32. So I feel I have to cram a lot in very quickly.

You join a law firm or go to Wall Street at 23; by the time you’re 35, you’re pretty much set. At 35 I was still just starting.

What about the search for a second book? You must have been swamped with proposals: “Here’s a million dollars; write another Perfect Storm.”

Some of them were even, “Here’s a contract; write anything you want.” Totally blank. My feeling about the supposed curse of the second book is not that it’s impossible to write two successful books. But if you write a first successful book, the conditions you write the second book in are so much worse than those for the first one.

For my first book I got very little money so they didn’t care that it was a year late. I could obsess over it. And I think a lot of second books don’t work out so well because the guy was given too much money, had a deadline of a year, it’s a topic he was maybe not in love with. And you start it exhausted, which is what you are after a successful book tour.

So I just told my agent I won’t be interested for years. Finally, I had access to the kind of journalism I wanted to do. I could go to Africa on assignment. I had to write a best-seller to get them to call me back, but now they are.

I know there’s a point at which I’ll want to write another book, probably soon. I have a topic I can’t talk about. But it’s like how I want to have a kid someday. I’m looking forward to it, but I’m not quite done with this stage.