"Once you enter the Gyllenhaal circle, do you ever get your life back?"

Today marks the second anniversary of Stephen’s wildly successful public debut as a poet at Housing Works in Soho in Manhattan. A host of luminaries of the literary and film worlds were there, including Stephen’s daughter Maggie, five months pregnant at the time, and her guy, Peter.

I have to say that of out the whole clan Peter was the friendliest to me and Michael. Afterward during a late-night clan dinner at Balthazar he came up, shook my hand and declared what a great thing we were doing.

And then when Stephen, still high from the evening’s success, went off to phone Jake (who he’d claimed was back in California doing pickup shots for Zodiac, but was actually hiding behind a hoodie in the audience) I turned to Peter and asked him, half-jokingly, “Once you enter the Gyllenhaal circle, do you ever get your life back?”

He smiled and said, “No.”