I began writing this memoir in 1998, at age 50, after a complete emotional breakdown followed by three weeks of intensive therapy in the local mental hospital.
I wanted to know: How had I morphed from an energetic, self-assured software developer into someone so broken, I ran from a children’s game in a large-group therapy session of about thirty patients in the hospital’s gymnasium? How could I have fallen (or been pushed) so far that fear of failing to catch a large, soft, colorful ball about to be tossed my way had reduced me to tears and flight?
Perhaps writing about my life from an objective point of view would help me understand. The most surprising thing to arise from 600 autobiographical pages was the discovery of my life. There were so many forgotten (or deliberately suppressed) experiences, memories that only resurfaced because early reviewers kept asking questions I couldn’t answer.
“What?” one reviewer wrote. “You can’t stop with, ‘and then he raped me’! You can’t do that to your readers! You have to explain it. What were you thinking and feeling? What happened next?”
I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. It took several days of difficult concentration and painful reliving to recover a complete memory of just that one incident. Eventually, I remembered there were four such “incidents.”
When my counselor read the first draft of my manuscript, she said I should publish it. Instead, I put it away for more than twenty years — until the #MeToo movement.
In 2019, I finally sent a 176,000 word draft to a professional editor… who said it needed to be cut to a third its size. No!
A second editor said I had intermingled two completely different stories (my personal experiences with men, and my professional experiences with men), and that each had a different audience. Furthermore, both stories left too many questions unanswered, so both needed expansion!
From my point of view, what I’d written was not two different stories; it was one life — mine — and the two sets of experiences seemed far from separate as they transpired. If they had truly been separate, I might not have broken. As it happened, they played off each other, each compounding the effects of the other. I wish I could reintegrate the books, but after adding everything the second editor wanted, a single volume would be impossibly long.
NOTE: COMING ABOUT is no longer available online. I might eventually post selected chapters.