In Jubilee City, Joe Andoe traces his life from a childhood in Texas to successful painter in New York City.

You pretty much stumbled into painting?

Right out of high school, a lot of my friends bit the dust. There were drugs and car accidents. I didn't want that to happen to me. I always drew pictures; it was just something I had a knack for. I was a working-class guy. I wanted to get a sun tan, work construction, drive a truck. But the construction jobs were terrible, actually. Working on nonunion sites for drunks and lunatics. So I enrolled in a local college and randomly took an art class. The teacher was a watercolorist and sold paintings through a New York City gallery for $900 apiece. That was a lot of money to me. I knew if this guy could sell paintings, then I could, too.

At 24, you moved to New York from Tulsa, Oklahoma. You describe a surreal experience.

One of the first things I did here was take a bunch of my paintings to MoMA to sell them. I'd be at some penthouse on 90th and Park Avenue, and people would be talking about St. Moritz, fashion, whatever, and I'd nod my head. They'd take me out to dinner at these high-class restaurants. I had no idea what to order, so I'd just order the most expensive thing on the menu. Coming to the city as an outsider is really tough. You're competing against these rich kids who have the best educations and support systems.

How did an established painter come to write a book?

I found myself telling this funny story to a friend, and I realized that I'd told it to him before. That's why I started, so I wouldn't tell the same story twice. Around 2003, I started writing down the stories in this moleskin notebook. Soon, I had stories come out in Bald Ego and Open City and Bomb.

What do you see as the difference between painting and your writing?

I feel like my painting has really helped my writing. The old masters always say you need a good drawing to make a good painting. You do the drawing, and after that it's all damage control to keep it falling off the wall. With stories, I feel like you have to have the content first. I type out the story as fast as I can-which isn't very fast, I use three fingers-and then spend a much longer time combing through it, making it read like the story in my head.