I think I started the first draft of the memoir thinking that if it happened it must be interesting to readers.  Even this reader, when he reread those first pages, found the story less than riveting.  Putting life into the pages required a degree of self-reflection and honesty I hadn’t achieved even in my long life and even after my training as a therapist.

I hadn’t thought the book would force me to confront my past, but I found I had to do a lot of self-confronting.   For a time I fooled myself that I could lie by omission, leave out what shamed or pained me, which meant that I was more afraid of what writing hard truths would do to me rather than how it would affect the reader.

Then there’s the problem that every sentence I write raises more questions.  Is that really why that happened, why I did that, they did that?  I found I’d been telling myself big lies for most of my life.

Best wishes, Ken

I can’t believe it’s almost four years since I blogged.  They’ve been spent worrying away at the first book in a trilogy memoir about growing up in Northern Ireland, and what happened afterwards in England and America.  It’s been a rewarding, surprising and painful experience so far, confronting material I didn’t want to write about and radically revising my view of the past.  I’ll write more about the process in the months ahead.

Best, Ken