Author Interview

Q. Do you think your father’s illness brought you and your mother closer together, or did it actually allow you to separate yourself from your family?

My mother and I were always close. I think that my father’s illness made us even closer because we had a shared problem that we had to solve together. I took it over initially and at the end of his life, but she filled in for years in between. We both had to make sacrifices together. We often used black humor to get us through the rough parts. When one of us was at a low, the other would crack a macabre joke so we could go on. I had to deal with my father’s anger, which she found too hard to bear. She, however, sold her beloved collection of Niagara Falls lithographs in order to make the money for me to get away to college and then England. We both did what we could to help the other.

In answer to your question, which I noticed I haven’t answered, I don’t think my father’s illness per se helped me separate from my family, but his illness put me on the fast track to adulthood. There is no room for adolescent rebellion when the family is in the midst of trauma.

Q. You vividly describe how shame “becomes part of you” (p. 26). You say that “for the rest of your life . . . the forked tongue of shame is there.” Do you still feel the residual shame or after effects of the “Donny Donnybrook” to this day?

I had misbehaved in my childhood on many occasions and my father had called me to task. He had always used his intellectual faculties to correct me while remaining dispassionate. However, on the Donnybrook occasion he used full throttle rage. If a parent has never once been angry with you in your whole life, when he finally blows up—you listen.

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Author Interview

1.) How does a clinical psychologist suddenly become a bestselling author? Tell us about this metamorphosis.

I was a psychologist in private practice for 25 years until one day when I was at a dinner party, someone said that they were saddened that their 16-year-old daughter was getting a job for the summer and would have to face the work world. I sort of ‘sounded off’, saying that I’d worked since I was four years old and there was nothing wrong with working at sixteen! Then I regaled people about working with the black delivery car driver named Roy and how I worked delivering narcotics around the Niagara Frontier for my father’s drug store. Someone at the party suggested I write up an incident from my childhood years with Roy. I wrote it as a short piece and sent it to a publisher. I went alphabetically through the phonebook under publishers and sent it out on a Friday. On the following Monday I got an advance check couriered to me with a yellow post on it that said ‘Finish it.’ –so I did. Since I didn’t want to give back the check, a writer was born.

2.) Do you intend on continuing your private practice or do you write full time now? 

I write full time.

3.) Do you feel that your professional life as a psychologist has helped you in any way become a better writer? 

It has helped me enormously. I feel that I understand a lot more about human nature than I would have otherwise. Also in terms of memoir writing– it has freed me up to write ‘the truth’ (whatever that is) about myself. I have seen thousands of patients. I know that what people show the world is only the tip of the psychological iceberg. I know that no matter how strange my thoughts felt to me, they were no weirder than I heard daily in my office. One thing I learned while in private practice: we are all very much alike–especially in what our basic wants and needs are. The differences in most human natures are superficial.

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