Backstory

John Elder Robison's Backstory

I’m often asked how I came to write “Look Me in the Eye.”  This is the story.

As my readers know, I’ve had an unusual life.  It began with a crazy home environment, which I left behind at age sixteen when I joined a local band.  Within a few years, I found myself on the road with the biggest tour of the decade – KISS.  Having reached the top of the world in music, I quit to work as an engineer in a toy company.  But a few years later, I left that behind, too, when I quit electronics to repair cars in my driveway. And over the next decade I built that business into the largest independent Land Rover, Rolls Royce and Bentley specialty shop in New England.  In the midst of that, I discovered photography, with my photos landing in galleries, museums, on record jackets and on billboards.  And to top it all off, I began writing articles for car magazines.

With all those things going on, there wasn’t much time for book writing.  And what would I write about, anyway?  I’d become a husband, a father, a businessman, a restorer of classic cars, a conservative figure in a small New England town.  What could be more ordinary?

Sure, my earlier life was unusual, but to tell the truth, I was ashamed of it. Being a high school dropout, and doing all those weird things . . . what would people think of me if they knew?

So I went on, restoring cars, leaving my past safely buried. 

And then my brother wrote a book.  He called it Running With Scissors.

Being a loyal brother, I put his book on the counter at Robison Service. Customers would come in and say, “What’s that book doing there?”  “It’s by my brother,” I answered.  After a moment’s hesitation, I continued with, “It’s about our childhood.”

I was proud of my brother, but I cringed every time someone bought his book.  They’ll never speak to me again, when they find out what we’re really like, I thought.  But the opposite happened.  “I can’t believe you’ve done so well after what you went through,” people said.  Far from being horrified, readers were inspired.  I began to see that my story was not shameful at all.  I started speaking to groups of troubled young people, at Brightside, and the jail, and in halfway houses.

With the success of my brother’s book and people’s response to our youth, my shame and fear of my past slipped away.

Meanwhile, my brother continued to write one bestseller after another.  I’d go with him to book signings, and to our surprise, I remained the one constant topic of questions from the audience.  “You should write your own story,” he’d say, and I began to believe he was right.

Then my father got sick.

Somehow, I knew he was going to die.  And I was angry, because I did not have a single happy memory of my childhood with him.  I drove to the hospital, determined to confront him.

“Can you tell me about any fun times we had when I was little?”  I was afraid to ask.  What if the answer was, “No.”  What would I do then?

But it wasn’t “no.” He was full of memories, and as he talked, the memories began coming back to me, too.  Flying a kite at Valley Forge park.  Seeing the Old Faithful geyser.  Camping among the redwood forest.  Seeing the glaciers, and playing in the snow.  I remembered it all.

After my father died, I wrote an essay.  I showed it to my brother, and he put it on his web site.  It’s still there, at www.augusten.com > special projects > essay by my brother.  To our surprise, it became the most downloaded content on the site.  Book editors and reporters began calling his agent.  I resolved to write a book, and I knew – from the questions at my brother’s appearances – that it had to talk about Asperger’s and how it’s affected me.

“How will I do that?”  I asked my brother.  “I’m not a shrink.  What do I know?” 

“It’s easy,” he said.  “Just write your bizarre stories like you told them to me when I was small. Everyone will see what’s wrong with you.  It will be obvious.”  And that’s what I did.

The result astounded me.  The biggest publishers in the world wanted to produce my book, and when I chose the Crown imprint of Random House, they put the best people in the business on my project.  The book was acclaimed by advance reviewers, and it became an instant NY Times bestseller.  A few days later, it went on sale in Australia , and it was an instant hit there, too.  Two months after my debut, Look Me in the Eye has been reprinted eight times on two continents, with 150,000 copies in print.

Today, my book is on display in the Random House lobby.  It’s any writer’s dream come true.  There it is, next to the fall bestsellers from Bill Clinton, Nicholas Sparks, John Grisham, Jonathan Kellerman, Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Alan Alda, and Cesar Millan

The response to my book is just amazing.  I thought I’d written a book that showed how different Aspergians are.  But thousands of letters from readers told the opposite story.  They said Look Me in the Eye shows how, deep down, people are all the same. However people see it, I’m proud to have written my story, and I’m hard at work on the sequel.

And that is the story behind the story.

Learn more about John Elder Robison's work by visiting his website.

Kim Reid's Backstory

When I began No Place Safe: A Family Memoir, I didn’t expect it to be a memoir at all. It was going to be me telling my mother’s story of being a cop on a 1980s serial murder investigation. New to nonfiction, I wasn’t sure if it should be a biography or a true crime story. Interviewing my mother helped me figure out exactly what story I was going to be telling. I also spent time looking through a box of files, notes and pictures she kept about the case, expecting someone eventually would write about it. She had hoped it would be me, but I resisted for years because I was a novelist, though I hadn’t yet sold a novel.

That fact set me thinking about the case and the stories that might come of it. I’d been hell-bent on writing what I didn’t know and so far, it hadn’t helped me write a novel anyone wanted to read. Here was a story I knew well because I lived it, and had a perspective I hadn’t found in other books written about the case. The thing that made me finally act was reading an excerpt from a fictionalized account of the investigation. It portrayed cops on the case as not especially concerned with solving the murders, and suggested a cover-up. That portrayal was so far from what I knew, I felt compelled to tell my version.

The interviews with my mother and my preliminary research shaped how I’d write the story. Everything I heard and read took me back to being thirteen years old, and I couldn’t help synthesizing all the information through a thirteen-year-old’s perspective of that time. So it became my story, though my mother is certainly a lead character.

With my perspective and voice decided, I had to figure out where to begin and end. With memoir, you already know how things go, but unlike autobiography, not everything goes into it. It was more difficult than I expected to find the right starting point. I originally opened with a present-day conversation with my mother about her partner on the case, who has always been adamant that the wrong man was convicted, even today from his own prison cell. In recent years, he had been an Atlanta area sheriff, but is now serving a life sentence for having his newly-elected successor killed.

It was a scintillating lede, but it had nothing to do with me being thirteen and living through a two-year-long serial murder case in which the victims looked and lived like me – a black kid growing up in Atlanta. Plus, I was having a hard time reconciling the person I knew back then with the man he is today, and decided I only wanted to have him in the story the way I remembered him.

So I cut that and started where the story really began for me – the summer of 1979, just before I started high school, when the first two victims were found. I didn’t know it then, but it was the moment I left childhood behind. That’s the beauty of memoir, the way time lets you view your life through two lenses – the way you lived it then, and the way you understand it now.

Knowing where to end No Place Safe was just as difficult. I closed the story almost two years after it began, when Wayne Williams was arrested for one of the murders. I take only a brief look at the verdict. At book signings, people familiar with the investigation ask why I didn’t continue through to the trial and conviction, since the case was recently in the news as Williams’s defense team continues working to get DNA testing done that wasn’t available in 1982. Perhaps because CSI stories are so popular on TV, readers want to know more about the carpet fibers and dog hair that was part of the evidence used to convict Williams.

I could have written about the trial phase because my mother was not only assigned to the homicide task force during the murders, she was a crime investigator on the district attorney’s team that made the conviction. But like that original story beginning, the trial had little to do with the story I chose to tell, which is how a girl changes when her whole world does. My world changed during the time my mother helped search for a serial killer.

To find out more about Kim Reid, please visit her website.

Albert A. Dalia's Backstory

THE DRIFTING CLOUD NOVELIST

I suppose my mother's reading to me as a child could be logged as my first introduction to fiction. In-between my childhood delight with fiction and my fiction writing career, two masters and a Ph.D. in history happened. It was after my Ph.D. in 1985 that I returned to fiction. I guess I had exhausted my curiosity about the “truth.” Or, more accurately, I had exhausted my curiosity about formal historical study as a path to understanding “reality.”

Perhaps, it was the study of medieval Chinese history and religion that occupied all that academic work that led to the renewal of my interest in fiction. What were all those “strange tales” that I came across in Chinese Buddhist history based on? In order to learn Chinese and then medieval “classical Chinese,” I went to Taiwan to study. In my 14 years of wandering around Taiwan, I discovered many connections with a number of wonderful teachers. As a graduate student in medieval Chinese Buddhist history, I would cycle into the countryside around Taipei visiting monasteries. Part of my interest was to better understand the role of religion in Chinese society. With that understanding I might have a clearer insight to the medieval Buddhist texts and historical records I was studying.

Many of these visits led to amazing discoveries. There was a whole generation of senior Chinese Buddhist monks who had escaped the religious persecution across the Taiwan Strait to settle in the Taiwanese countryside. I learned and continue to learn much from their experience and wisdom. Once I finished my language and graduate studies, how could I possibly be satisfied with following the narrow strictures of historical research and inquiry – there was this great imaginative world out there!

So I returned to Taiwan, after receiving my doctorate and publishing some short stories in the US, and began to teach creative writing at a private university for a number of very happy years. All of this led, finally, to the publication in mid-April, 2007 of my first medieval Chinese historical fantasy, Dream of the Dragon Pool – A Daoist Quest, which is published by a NYC literary press, Pleasure Boat Studio.

Dennis Littrell, one of the four top Amazon.com reviewers who gave me five-star reviews, wrote:

“Wine and dreams are at the heart of this remarkable novel. Frankly I have never read anything like it. Dalia who is a Chinese scholar has recreated a style and a world view long gone from this realm, a style that interprets the world as dream and mystery, a style that celebrates Dao as an occult religion …

…Dalia's prose, like those of a fairy tale master, immerses the reader in the mists of the long ago, into a world in which ghosts and dragons, shamanesses and wondrous magicians, goddesses and monsters, exist in reality as they do in myth. He recalls a vision of this world in which there is no line drawn between the mysterious and the mundane, between the world of spirit and that of mortal flesh. The gods and the goddesses are real. Monkeys can catch ghosts and creatures such as the Albino Swordsman can enter your dreams and kill you while you lie sleeping. The dragon can assume horrific forms, terrible and awesome to the eyes. And mortals can mingle with immortals.”

Please drop into my website at the Dragon Gate Inn, www.aadalia.com, for the complete review and the other reviews, a first two chapters sample, a blog on the historical background of this type of literature in China, and more information and pictures about me and my travels than you would ever want to know about!