I Wrote the Book I Was Born to Write

Fifty years is a long time to prepare for a single sentence. I did not know I was preparing. I thought I was living, which I was, and writing, which I was, and teaching, which I was, and publishing, which I was. I thought the Fractional Fiction novels and the EleMenTs trilogy and the Prairie Voice reporting and the Human Meme episodes and the dramatic literature and the ASL linguistics and the cultural criticism were separate projects, separate impulses, separate rooms in the interior country I have been building since I was old enough to read. They were not separate. They were all rehearsals for this.

Abandoned in Place is out. It is the first book-length work of nonfiction cultural criticism I have published under my own name, and it is the book that every other book I have written was circling without my knowing it.

The book began with a number. Five. The number of days a judge ordered my father to remain in the home after my birth before he could return to the woman he had chosen over my mother and me. On the sixth day, he left. I have carried that number for more than five decades, not as a wound on display but as a lens ground by the wound, and the lens has shown me things about the world that I do not believe I would have seen without it. The book is what the lens reveals.

I am not going to summarize twelve chapters here. The book does its own work, and it does not need me standing outside it waving my arms. What I want to do instead is tell you what it felt like to write it, because the writing was unlike anything I have done before, and the difference matters, and the difference is the reason I am calling this a celebration rather than an announcement.

Every book I have written has been, at some level, a performance. The novels perform narrative. The plays perform conflict. The criticism performs analysis. The podcast performs inquiry. Performance is what I do. It is what I was trained to do at Columbia University. It is what Mike Nichols, in a conversation I recount in the book, told me all theatre people do: we arrive on stage not hoping to heal what is broken but to get the approval of our parents. I have been performing for approval since I walked through my first stage door as a teenager escaping a home that was not safe, and the performing has produced a body of work I am proud of, and the pride is real, and the pride is also, I now understand, a form of the avoidant attachment style described in Chapter 2: the construction of an interior country so richly furnished that the absence of the thing the country was built to replace becomes, if not invisible, then at least manageable.

This book is not a performance. This book is the thing the performances were built to manage. It is the direct statement, in the active voice, of what happened and who did it and how the grammar of every institution I have encountered since birth was designed to ensure that the statement would never be made. The statement is: I was abandoned. The abandonment was not my fault. The people who administered it had names. The institutions that administered it had addresses. The narrative that explained it as inevitable was a lie. And I am still here.

That is what the book says. It says it across twelve chapters, through four parts, using attachment theory and social contract philosophy and the specific histories of churches and schools and factories and governments that walked out of the room while leaving the building standing. It says it with cold, precise anger, because cold precision is what I have and hot outrage is what the grammar wants, and I will not give the grammar what it wants.

The cover is an erasure. The word “ABANDONED” sits in heavy black type, fully present and immovable. The words “IN PLACE” dissolve from left to right, the letters breaking apart into scattered particles, as if the grammar of leaving is operating on the cover in real time. My last name dissolves too, because the name on the cover is not the name I was born with. It is the name of a man from a marriage that lasted eighteen months and ended badly, assigned to me by small-town convention and carried forward by bureaucratic inertia for half a century. The brand is real. The identity behind it is the nothing in-between. The cover says so.

I have published more than thirty books through David Boles Books. Novels, short fiction, tragedy, nonfiction, ASL linguistics, the Fractional Fiction series that maps the territory between the novella and the novel. Each one took something from me and gave something back. This one took everything. It took the protected mother and made me tell the truth about her. It took the shielded childhood and made me describe the car wash in church clothes and the Saturday gifts I remember when I cannot remember the man who gave them and the phone call at 4:31 in the afternoon from a father I had not spoken to in thirty years who could not answer the one question I asked him. It took the interior country I have spent fifty years fortifying and opened the gates and let the reader walk in and see the architecture for what it is: a survival strategy that works, and that costs, and that the book refuses to pretend is anything other than both.

What it gave back is the sentence. The book arrives, in its final chapter, at a single sentence that I believe is true and that I believe I have earned the right to say, and the earning took twelve chapters and seventy thousand words and five decades of preparation that I did not know was preparation. I will not put the sentence here. The sentence needs the book to land. But I will tell you that the sentence is about seeing clearly, and refusing to pretend, and the specific form of honesty available to a person who was abandoned by every institution that was supposed to hold him together and who is still standing in the place where the function departed.

The book is available now. The Kindle edition and the paperback are at Amazon. The complete PDF is available as a free download at BolesBooks.com, because this book was written to be read, not to be sold, and the people who need it most are the people the grammar has spent the longest time ensuring would never find it.

I wrote this book for the people who were left and who stayed and who were told to move on and who did not move on and who were told the leaving was nobody’s fault and who knew, from the first day, that it was somebody’s fault, and who have been waiting, perhaps without knowing they were waiting, for someone to say so in the active voice with the actor restored to the sentence.

Here it is. The actor is restored. The sentence is rebuilt. The ground holds.

Abandoned in Place is published by David Boles Books Writing & Publishing, New York City. Available at Amazon (Kindle and paperback) and as a free PDF at BolesBooks.com.

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