Six good years.
"Many years later, I was to evoke that lost neighborhood of Junction Hollow, that stairway and the impenetrable factory that guarded its uppermost landing in my first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. And of all the questions that have been put to me, over the years, regarding that book, one of the most frequent, from people who don't know Pittsburgh, and even from some who do, has been, 'So, the Cloud Factory, the Lost Neighborhood. Does that stuff really exist or did you make it all up?' I'm usually quick to reply, without thinking much about the question, 'Yes. It's all real'....But what I've come to realize, looking back over the afternoon and indeed the whole of my history and even prehistory in Pittsburgh, is that this is the place where things began to happen to me, where I began to see things that sounded as if I must have invented them, when in fact they were real, visible, and true.
"Pittsburgh is the place where I became self-conscious, at long last, about the adventure, the journey of exploration that was childhood, and not just my own. It was the place where the wonder of the world, beautiful and disturbing, which as a child I had experienced fully without remarking it in the least, had simply breathed it in and out like air, first became visible to me, something that I could choose to remark upon or could simply miss entirely....Pittsburgh, in other words, is the place where I first began to think like a writer, like an explorer, like someone whose job it is to go in search of the world's marvels, and to court its horrors, but above all to pay attention, and to keep a faithful record of the trip."
- Michael Chabon, talk delivered at Carnegie Music Hall, 25 March 2001.