Preface

I remember clearly when I received the news that Random House wanted to publish this book. It was 2001, and I was at my desk at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where I worked as an editor. Before that, I had worked at Encyclopedia Britannica, in Chicago. And before that, as an editor in Berkeley, California. I was a film school graduate with big dreams, and time was flying as I kept taking off and landing, unsure of which branch would hold.

I was elated that my book had found a home. Buoyed by the sale, and with romantic visions of authorhood, I took flight again, returning to the Bay Area where many of the events in these pages take place. Memoirs were gaining popularity then, as well as notoriety. A handful of authors had been condemned for exaggerating or inventing elements of their stories, intensifying the legal spotlight publishers put on nonfiction works like mine.

During my book’s legal vetting, I answered a range of questions. Some probed the definitive accuracy of certain statements. If I had written that someone was drunk, for instance, the lawyer asked if I could prove it. If I couldn’t, I removed or changed the passage. I presented records that backed up where I had lived and when, where I had worked and when, and the reality of certain key relationships depicted in the book. Beyond that, I took advantage of a memoirist’s leeway to composite and disguise real people, and to recreate dialogue and scenes that honestly communicated my subjective experience.

These techniques are vehicles to truth, but not in themselves the end. There are the facts of a story, and then there is what we make of them. The curved lens of memory adds its angles, shaping every setting, stretch of dialogue, and scene. But the aim of memoir—to transcend personal experience—is a corrective to that lens. In the end, the truth is what the author has gleaned, with honest motivations. Over time, my family gamely adapted to the challenges of being written about. And while I hope for similar equanimity from the others herein, I realize that the perils of perspective are significant. Nevertheless, my goal here is not to expose other people, but rather, in my depictions, introspections, and discoveries, to make sense of my experience, to yield larger meaning, and to transform lived events into the most hopeful of outcomes, which is wisdom.