AUTHOR'S PREFACE

In 1990 I received a tidy inheritance, moved off the streets into a small studio apartment here in the Deep Sunset district of San Francisco and undertook to write the story of my life. It was therapy in the beginning but then Deep Fool-A Memoir took on its own life. When at the end of a year I had finished the first draft I sat back and realized I'd given birth to one helluva baby. May the gods forbid that it be hubris to say "I've found my true calling. I've got important stuff to tell and I know how to say it. I might even be a genius."

After that it took ten long years of compulsive polishing, editorial delays and ferocious mood swings before I finally saw the book into print. I wasn't able to find a reviewer, an agent or a publisher so I self-published under the imprint of Ironmountain Books, a company I incorporated in Nevada.

In this form it was picked up by Hara Books, a vanity publisher out of Seattle. After some further light editing it came on the market with a thud in 2000. Why it didn't sell? First of all, because it's a very dark memoir under the subcategory of transgressive literature. Its audience as considered by the gatekeepers that be was considered unknown, sales prospects correspondingly dim. Though the writing was good and the story interesting it didn't follow the traditional arc of a commercial memoir--dissolution, struggle and redemption. I couldn't write redemption because I hadn't been redeemed yet. Read more »