As A Memoirist, I Strive For Veracity.

When I Got Sober, I Thought Giving Up Was Saying Goodbye To All The Fun And All The Sparkle, And It Turned Out To Be Just The Opposite. That's When The Sparkle Started For Me.

It Turned Out To Be Impossible For Me To 'run Away' In The Sense Other American Teenagers Did. Any Movement At All Was Taken For Progress In My Family.

It Strikes Me That Whatever Advantages There Are To Being A Boy--getting To Stay Out Late And Having Other People Wash Your Clothes And Bring You Plates Of Stuff--get Undercut By Having To Play Football.

When People Suffer, Their Relationships Usually Suffer As Well. Period. And We All Suffer Because, As The Buddha Says, That's The Nature Of Being Human And Wanting Stuff We Don't Always Get.

I Kept The Fingers Of My Left Hand Crossed All The Time, While On My Right-hand Fingers I Counted Anything At All—steps To The Refrigerator, Seconds On The Clock, Words In A Sentence—to Keep My Head Occupied. The Counting Felt Like Something To Hang On To, As If Finding The Right Numbers Might Somehow Crack The Code On Whatever System Ran The Slippery Universe We Were Moving Through.