Writing the Hard Parts
Finding the way to tell your story
How hard could a book be? I’d been writing for four or five years, published a hundred stories on Medium, even collected a few thousand readers. People had been asking me for a while, “When are you going to write a book?” But I had no intention of writing one until 2018 when I heard a voice in my head saying “It’s time to write a book.” I try to listen to that voice. It’s led me to some fine places over the years.
The shape of the book seemed obvious. I had a lot of stories from the angry parts of my life, the drugs and crazy, the stealing and going to jail stories, but I hadn’t written much about the second forty years of my life. For this to be a memoir I might have to talk about someone I didn’t easily identify with, me as a successful person.
That would be a lot harder because I still identified with the person I hadn’t been for a long time. In my heart, I was still the kid of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, furious and striking back at the world. Here’s a story from that time. Once, locked up in L.A. County Jail, I was talking to a guard and he said “We don’t get Jews in here. What are you doing here?” and you know what I felt? I felt a surge of pride. I was in my chosen select company, the fuck you band of brothers. Wow, maybe that understanding of me was a little out of date.
