For the past year I’ve been working on a book. It’s a collection of personal essays. Some of them are very short, less than a page. You could also think of it as a very loosely-constructed memoir. I never intended to write a memoir in the traditional sense, i.e. a story about oneself that has a continuous narrative that runs through the whole of one’s life. I never felt that I had such a continuous thread in my own life. My book is a collection of little stories that come from my own experience. They are stories of struggling to overcome neurosis and of trying to understand my life and my own nature, a long and at times agonizing process of exploration and inquiry into the nature of human life. Many people (most, probably) will not see this book as being of any relevance to them. But perhaps some other people may be able to relate to these stories and to understand why I find them to be significant, because they have experienced similar struggles and have been similarly driven to inquire more deeply into just what the hell is really going on in their own lives. I hope that in writing this book I might be able to communicate with a few of those people.
After doing a few rewrites of the basic manuscript I finally reached the point where I just couldn’t rewrite it anymore, and I turned it over to my small group of reviewers to see what they can make of it. I haven’t gotten the final reports back from the reviewers but initial indications are that they like it and that they only have a few small corrections to suggest. So that is encouraging. I hope to get this thing published sometime in September.
In the Century House 