AN OVERVIEW ON HOPEFULLY PUBLISHING A MEMOIR

As a budding psychotherapist in l967 I was fortunate to get a job at Odyssey House – an innovative therapeutic community treating heroin addicts. For the first three months I thought I had discovered the equivalent of a psychological Garden of Eden. Then a progression of strange events occurred that transformed me from an observing participant to a participating observer.

I started keeping copious notes of my confusing experiences which became the essential research data for my book called:

                                           MY Odyssey:

                                             A Memoir

                        TREATING HEROIN ADDICTS IN THE 60s,

                        AND WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT MYSELF

To give you the flavor of what this book is about I quote from my introduction:

"What started out as the fulfillment of a life long dream evolved into an extraordinarily confused 'mind blowing' nightmare – that repeated the best and the worst of my childhood and adolescent days…. My consciousness gradually shifted from an initial experience of at-one-ment to a state of chronic fear, distrust, and paranoid-like feelings. My reality of Odyssey became a confused, dizzy whirl of positive/negative – good/bad experiences. I became obsessed with attempts to make sense of this radical shift. With my sense of reality in doubt, I couldn't trust my judgment leaving me feeling profoundly insecure. … Reality, I had thought of as black and white, was now viewed as overwhelmingly complex, multi-leveled, and multi-dimensional, perhaps best described as a smeared mess of colors on an artist's palette."

My journal entries pre, during, and post became the raw material for my attempt to order the exceedingly complex and complicated chaos I lived in my seventeen month life defining experience at Odyssey House.

This book then may be simultaneously read on multiple dimensions. These dimensions are:                                                                    

The story of Odyssey House during a crucial phase in its early development (December 1967-through April 1969); a scientific dimension diagnosing the central problem of drug addiction as the lack of a solid identity, characterized by a lack of trust both of others and of oneself; a political dimension describing and exploring key conflicts that arose between various factions at Odyssey and their effects on the treatment process; a psychological dimension recounting the personal Odyssey of the author's identity quest; and a spiritual dimension exploring the crucial importance of the presence or absence of faith, trust, hope, love and  persistence.                  

I resigned after 17 months intuitively aware that I had experienced something of profound importance but unclear as to exactly what it was. It took another thirty five years to be able to (1) take my experience seriously; (2) objectify it in the course of an eleven year psychoanalysis; (3) organize the ideas into a structure which does justice to the complex material; (4) find an editor/agent with whom I feel an attunement; (5) suffer through 20 or so impressive rejections; (6) learn to write more effectively; (7) persist, persist, persist; (8) edit, edit, edit; (09) develop an attitude of steady as she goes avoiding the twin pitfalls of either treating fantasies of  both dreams of glory and, or nightmares of utter failure as objective reality; and 10) learning to be my best advocate preparing to go all out to promote what I hopefully will be my first published book.

A Closing Comment:

I am approximately shy three weeks before sending out the appropriate proposal to multiple publishers for their consideration. Little did I realize how much time, effort, energy, and care has to be spent in creating a truly good piece of work. However, knowing what I now know, if asked has my effort been worth while, my answer is – without a doubt – an unqualified yes.