A mille grazie to everyone who’s posted book reviews on Amazon. A thousand thanks.
Left of the Dial is my story–I had no other story to tell.
I had long wanted to talk about other things in an SZ book–not dwell on symptoms and hell. I’m confident that it’s possible to have a hard life that is also a great life.
Plenty of bloggers talk over and over about what it’s like to be bombarded with pain. At HealthCentral years ago when I was the Health Guide there I wrote in detail about symptoms and treatment options.
A former therapist told me: “Suffering for the sake of suffering is bullshit.”
My perpetual point exactly is that getting the right help right away can halt the progression of illness–it can halt disability.
And my other point was to see the person in each of us first and to write characters that were original–not cardboard; not described in terms of their lack or deficits.
On the inside I will always be a rocker chic kind of girl and I wanted this passion to shine through in the memoir.
Elyn Saks was the first person with SZ to talk in her book about a career–she’s a law professor who joked that her department should have endowed her with a couch not a Chair.
I did not and would not and could not write what in the publishing industry is termed a “misery memoir.” I call these “hell-and-heartache” books.
There is often going to be some kind of hell at some point in our lives. The point is to understand how we can use that hell to transform our lives into something better.
Each day that we wake up that God has given us is the chance to do whatever we can to make our lives better.
I’ll end here by telling readers what I wrote at HealthCentral years ago:
Give yourself what I call a “lifeline” in which to achieve your goals not a deadline.
Recovery is the gift of a lifetime that we give ourselves in which to achieve self-growth.
Left of the Dial 