In the summer of 1996, while I was on a trip to the Dominican Republic, Stephen King jabbed a needle in my ass.

That was just his sense of humor. I don’t know why he did it. The syringe was filled with sugar water. “How sweet it is,” he said, laughing loudly. Whatever, Steve. But two years later, when William T. Vollmann did the same, it was something else entirely. That was my first exposure to lit-roiding.

We were in the back room of a bookstore. He shut the door and looked around cautiously. “Come on,” he said. “You won’t believe how it makes you feel.”

“No way,” I said. “I believe in this art form the way it used to be: a result of natural talent and nothing but.”

“Times have changed,” he said. “Only big books are big books, if you catch my drift. You think anyone would give Djuna Barnes or Nathanael West the time of day now?” I looked over. He was typing furiously.

“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Chapter eight,” he said. “No, wait. Chapter nine.” When I left a few minutes later, he was on chapter ten. By the weekend, he had finished the entire work, a fourteen-hundred-page novel about foot fetishists in Malaysia.

I was not the first author to take lit-roids, but neither was William T. Vollmann. I cannot tell you exactly who else used, or what they used, or when, but there is a file of 104 names at PEN headquarters. Some of these authors have been disciplined. Some have come to harm as a result of their use of performance-enhancing substances. Some have resorted to elaborate lies to cover up their participation. But this is not their story. This is mine.

When William T. Vollmann jabbed a needle in my ass, I was writing mostly literary short fiction of the parlor variety: tortured young man says clever but sad thing to beautiful young woman, romance ensues, maybe sex, complications follow. About a week after my first dosage, though, I woke up at 6:30 A.M. and began a novel called “Jungle Blood.” Three weeks later, I was done. The book came easily; the only difficult part was sitting down for long stretches with a rear made sore by the needle. You may remember “Jungle Blood.” It was the literary hit of 2004, all 700 pages of it. “A more satisfying epic has not been seen since the days of Joseph Conrad,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. Kirkus called it “a pile-driver…with heart.” Normally, I would need at least five years to recover from a book like “Jungle Blood,” but the very next year, I produced another mammoth novel, “Holding the Tornado.” That one was optioned by Mel Gibson. Things were going well.

Except, of course, for the things that weren’t going well. My health was suffering. In 2006, I noticed that my sex drive was waning and that I had developed gynecomastia. Look it up if you like. I will not define it here. It’s disgusting. I went to see Vollmann. “What’s the matter?” he said, rounding chapter two of his new novel and heading into chapter three. “You don’t have the stones anymore?”

“I don’t, in fact,” I said.

I offered to show him, but he held up his hand. “Wait until chapter six,” he said. “Should be around noon.”

I didn’t wait. I left dispirited. That night, out for a long walk, searching the inner reaches of my soul, I met a woman. She was an angel. She convinced me to stop cold. “No more needles,” she said, and I nodded. You nod at an angel’s command, of course. I am lucky that I stopped when I did. I am one of the survivors, both in terms of health and in terms of reputation. A former acquiring editor at a major publishing house has informed federal investigators that he knows of at least two living National Book Award winners and at least two deceased Nobelists whose prize-winning works were written with the help of banned substances. “I don’t want to say who unless I have to,” he said. “But I can say this: one of the guys wrote an eleven-hundred-page book about sexual obsession and psychological violence, and another one wrote a twelve-hundred-page saga about multiple generations of a Rust Belt dynasty.”

These days, I am happier than ever. I rarely see Vollmann. I have gone from humongous novels about heavy industry and boxing to flash fiction about ironic moments from my day. Others have kept writing gargantuan novels, all the while insisting that they are clean. But this is not about their stories. This is about mine. Finally, I can stand up—and sit down—proudly.