“It took me a very long time to realize that the ads in the back of the newspaper I wrote for were for prostitutes. I’m not sure what I thought these ladies were selling, I just didn’t know prostitutes were allowed to advertise. Well, whether or not they are, the truth is they do. In fact, the real boom time for alternative newspapers in the United States were the years between the deregulation of 976 numbers and the emergence of Internet porn.”          I took the above paragraph from my first novel, The Big Love. I took all of The Big Love straight from my life, and my life, in my early 20s, was like an old Meg Ryan movie complete with pleated-front khaki pants and very little actual sex. I lived in a brownstone on the most beautiful street in Philadelphia, just like Meg would have, and I worked as a columnist at The City Paper, just like Meg would have. The City Paper was a free weekly, and I got …