Why did I write the book?

Well Mike my husband was working on something else at the time, and he was reluctant to write my memoir.

People ask me this all the time. The answer is complex. It was Christmas 2004 and I was recovering from a near fatal car crash in SW Florida where we lived. Mike said that we had an email from someone called Tim, from Friends Reunited web site. It was 2009;  I was deleting old information, and I came across this message. It said, could I ring, Tim, and gave a cell phone number. I rang the number and Tim answered. He was looking for his sister Joyce's son, Peter. Could I help?

Joyce was my best friend, and she died when I was thirty, in fact she shot herself on my birthday in 1978. I hadn't thought about it for years, and it brought up a searching in me. Mike, my husband, started to ask about my life, and the events leading up to the way that Joyce died and the effect on me. I got in touch with Tim, and Tommy, and over the course of the next few months we talked about that time in my life, they gave me photographs, and filled in some missing gaps in my memory. What they didn't know, was the character of Joyce, and what she was really like as a young girl. They needed some form of closure and they were anxious to trace Peter, her son. It started a journey to find my own feelings, and suddenly it all poured out, my childhood, my marriage failures, and explained the feelings that I had at the time.

Mike listened to my story, and together we researched the articles, and then realised that Joyce shot herself on my birthday.  I asked Mike to write the words, and create the book. The words are his, the story is mine.  Lindsay produced the graphics for the cover. Mike wrote it as he said it would be carthartic for me, and 140,000 words later the book was published in 2010. 

The people are real, although some of the names have been changed to protect their identity. It is the true story of hope, and why some people escape the tragedy of their upbringing, appearing normal, although inside always damaged. Perhaps Joyce had more influence on me than she realised, we will never know whether that was good or bad. But it raises the question, that not all dysfunctional families produce dysfunctional children. 

That's life, you should get over it, people say.

You are right, in the sense that we have to recover and make our way in life. The question which is absent from those arguments is: how do other people recognise when things are not right? When does someone stop and think that their life is being abused? When will an adult recognise that they are in an abused marriage or that a child is in danger?

I suggest only when they compare their life to others, do they know that their life is dysfunctional; how do they realise if nobody tells their story?

Life goes on with the secrets, hidden, invisible to the social radar. My clothes came from a catalogue, and so I would appear normally dressed, yet my parents never paid. It was a form of stealing by default. But it kept the mask of social well being. 

Experience: the biggest teacher.

Mary