MY RESPONSE TO "MISERY LOVES A MEMOIR" AN ARTICLE IN the NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW

                       ANOTHER TIMELY COINCIDENCE

This is the 6th day since my agent sent off  a proposal of my memoir - SMACK IN THE MIDDLE - MY ODYSSEY TREATING HEROIN ADDICTS IN THE SIXTIES - A MEMOIR to four prospective publishers.

While there is alot that is indefinite, two things are certain: if I ever had an illusion that one or more of them would be so positively overwhelmed that they would call me by now, it has been laid to rest; but I haven't received any rejection letters either.

Additionally, if I have learned nothing else in the twenty five years this memoir has been gestating it is cultivating patience and learning that the right timing - being in the right place at the right time - are critically important to success.

If I had been published 10 years ago instead of having received encouraging but ultimately rejecting responses the quality of my work would have not been nearly as good as it is now.

Also - 10 years ago addicts needing rehabilitation would have been more likely to be warehoused in prisons for decades than to have been sent to therapeutic communities. Presently there is a trend to reform noting that the prisons are over crowded, expensive, and largely ineffective.

And - memoirs are clearly in vogue. Ten years ago James Frey's imaginative but fictional A Million Little Pieces" would not have been published yet so he wouldn't have been my point man opening the door for me to give an absolutely truthful account of my personal and professional experiences in treating heroin addicts.

All this means that I have waited long enough to finally be in the main stream.

Coincidentally, an article in the back page of today's New York Times Book Review Section titled: "MISERY LOVES A MEMOIR" by Benjamin Kunkel is another timely coincidence that seems to be happening with a welcomed degree of frequency.

Writing about the popularity of memoirs, Mr. Kunkel identifies a central theme connecting most of them. This theme, whether the memoir is fiction or fact - is that "suffering produces meaning."

"...Victim and hero are one. Hence the preponderance of memoirs having to do with mental illness, sexual and other violence, drug and alcohol addiction, bad parents and/or missing loved ones."

He continues: "It's no news... that many recent memoirs, good and bad, well or execrably written, deal with hurt and feelings." He concludes that the hero memorist gets an honoray Ph.D. in survival. But he adds that this falls short of what else matters.

He asks a challenging question: "... Is there nothing more to life than recovery and grief? Is there no idea of the good life we can sustain beyond the possession of health? In other terms Mr. Kunkel indicates that most most memorists focus on the theme of trauma survival rather than focusing on aspiring to thrival.

"This accent of futurity is missing among contemporary memorists. They sigh over their past woes; sigh with relief now that they're better; or sigh the long sighs of nostalgia."  {Not that those themes are so terrible in and of themselves but that for him it is unfortunate that they don't go further.}

Kunkel asserts: "But where is the contemporary writer reporting honestly, ambitiously and without therapeutic cant or smug self-help recipes on his or her effort to live a proud and decent life? Contemporary memorists have taught us mostly to survive. They haven't begun to teach us how to live."

He contiues: "Somehow it still seems brave to admit between the covers of a book to all that has gone wrong with us, when in fact nothing is more customary. No taboo appears to constrain the memorist - except the taboo on aspiration, for oneself or one's soceity. Self-improvement of the kind Thoreau undertook has become the province of self-help manuals, while impassioned complaints against our civilization.... are rarely placed in the context of a lived daily life."

He laments that "no one says what to do with recovered health, let alone uses his newfound sanity to reckon the personal cost - in guilt, dread, shame, or resentment - of a vicious political economy promising dividends in ecological catastophe. Charges of righteousness would quickly follow."

So what has his article got to do with me and why is it timely?

My Odyssey is intimately concerned with all of the issues he raises including a focus on the future. So it is additional evidence to me that my work is right on target. In this connection I fervently hope that the four prospective editors that may be at this very moment reading my proposal will have already or will in the near future take note the obvious relationship between his ideas and my own.

The ever mounting coincidences associated with my attempts to successfully publish and market MY ODYSSEY reinforce my conviction and motivation to have this work published and widely disseminated one way or the other.

Such is the state of affairs after the first week of waiting for a hoepefuly salutary response  from one or more publishers. On to week two.