This is my autobiography and all of it is meant to be read. Nothing in it is hidden and nothing is softened for comfort.
I spent the first nineteen years of my life somewhere I now call Crazytown, where nothing made sense, the rules changed depending on who was in the room, and the people who were supposed to protect you were frequently the ones you needed protection from.
Most people who grow up there become permanent residents. They learn to work the chaos and then rebuild it around themselves as adults, because it’s the only architecture they know.
This is a book about not doing that.
Where does the name My Life in Crazytown come from?
I invented it while writing the book. It isn’t what I called the place at the time.
What I called it at the time, in my head, was a loony bin.
The name arrived later because naming a thing requires standing outside it, and a child inside a house like that’s no outside to stand in. You don’t think this environment is dysfunctional. You think this is what a house is.
What makes a childhood home dysfunctional?
Constant fighting. Constant attacks. Constant carping. Covert attacks, the kind that leave nothing to point at afterward.
Both parents were mentally unwell in one way or another. I want to be careful here, because neither was ever diagnosed and I’m not a clinician. This is my reading of two people I lived with for nineteen years. Both, in my view, were narcissists, and later both went considerably further than that, though that happened after the events in this book.
What the book spends its time on is the architecture. A house where the rules moved without notice, where the same behavior got you praised on Tuesday and punished on Thursday, and where a child learns very early that the most important skill available is reading a room before entering it.
Why does a late ADHD diagnosis change a memoir?
Because it’s why the book exists.
I learned I was AuADHD at sixty-four. Sixty-four, after an entire career, after decades of wondering.
It changed everything from that point forward, and what it changed was my understanding of my own behavior. I’d carried a set of mysteries my whole life. Why do I act this way. Why do I think this way. Why do things keep turning out like this. Why can I hold one problem for fourteen hours and not hold another for four minutes.
Then the answer arrived and the mysteries stopped being mysteries.
The book came out of that. Not out of the childhood, which I’d already lived through and mostly stopped examining. Out of finally having a framework that explained what had happened inside my head while it was happening.
What did the traits do for you?
This is the part that reframes everything, and it’s the reason the subtitle is what it is.
Take hyperfocus, the one people know. When I’m in hyperfocus the background goes away entirely. I’m hard to interrupt. I’m busy, in a way that doesn’t leave room for anything else.
As a child, that meant the fighting disappeared.
I built model kits. I’d start one in the morning and work until it was finished, all day, one continuous piece of attention. All the craziness going on around me simply stopped existing while I was inside that. It was a door I could close from the inside, and it worked from a very young age.
Time blindness helped, because it made the time go faster. If you don’t have an accurate internal clock, a bad afternoon and a bad hour are closer together in the experiencing than they should be.
Face blindness helped in a way that took me much longer to understand. There were things I needed to forget. Some of them were bad enough that they needed burying, and one way to bury a thing is to erase the face attached to it. If you can’t see who did it, you can’t remember who did it.
I don’t say that outright anywhere in the book. It’s implied across the whole of it, and a reader paying attention will find it.
Those are three traits out of a list I could keep extending. Every one of them was pathologised by somebody. Every one of them was doing work.
Why is one chapter left whole with no sections?
Because it was one day.
The book is broken into small pieces almost everywhere. Chapter one alone has twelve subsections. Chapter ten has none, and it’s called The Day I Almost Died.
Christmas morning. Presents unwrapped, paper on the floor, and my mother deciding that my father and I should go for a hike and bond. Neither of us wanted to. Her tone left no room for it.
Down a creek off Route 18. Perhaps two hours. We’d toast and coffee and cereal, packed no lunch, and took no jackets, because it was a beautiful California morning and there was no reason to carry extra weight.
It lasted about twelve hours.
Vertical cliffs with no equipment. Iced streams walked through instead of around. Hypothermia setting in on both of us. It wasn’t a moment of danger, it was a continuous state of it, and it went on long enough that it stopped being an incident and became a condition.
Splitting that into subsections would have broken the thing that makes it work. It doesn’t stop.
What does hypervigilance look like in a child?
That my father had become a babbling idiot, and I mean that as a description instead of an insult.
His intentions were probably fine. I don’t think there was anything malicious in it. He was extremely withdrawn by then and I suspect my mother pushed him into the whole thing. He wanted to go on a Christmas hike with his kid, an ordinary thing for a father to want.
And then, decision by decision across twelve hours, he demonstrated that he wasn’t longer capable of making an ordinary judgment about anything. No jackets. No food. Down instead of back. Through the water instead of around it.
That’s why the chapter runs as long as it does. A single bad decision tells you somebody made a mistake. Twelve hours of them, in sequence, with the temperature dropping, tells you what has happened to a person.
Does a memoir have to end in forgiveness?
Because there’s nothing to forgive.
That’s a practical position instead of defiance or a wound talking. They were the way they were. You don’t forgive a narcissist in any sense that changes the narcissist, because forgiveness does nothing for them. The only person it could possibly help is you.
So forgiveness was never a question I was working on. What I was working on was subtraction. I removed them from my life and I spent a great deal of time in therapy on it, and what I was after was erasure from my mental state, in neither direction absolution.
That’s a different project from the one most memoirs in this category are running, and it’s why the sales page says outright that if you need the ending where everybody reconciles, this isn’t the book.
It’s also why the story you’re most reluctant to write is usually the one worth writing. The reluctance is a signal, and it’s rarely about the events.
Why do memoirs end with pages of acknowledgements?
The acknowledgements run for pages. My sister Belinda and her husband Ken. Steve Davis. John Shields. Jannah and Marjhani. Dr. Young, who taught History of Western Civilization. Bob, who taught me collecting. Don, whose phone call changed everything. David, who was my best friend as a child. My grandfather, who survived everything. Uncle Frank, who told the truth. Claudia.
That came out that way instead of by design, and when I saw what it was doing I left it.
These are people who were strong in my life and who were good motivations, and the section balances the rest of the book. Most of what precedes it’s an account of a bad environment. The acknowledgements say that I also had friends, and people I trusted, and people I admired, present the whole time alongside everything else.
Both things are true, and a memoir that only reports the first one isn’t accurate.
Who should read a memoir about a narcissistic family?
People who grew up somewhere the rules changed daily. People who have been told they’re too much or too little, generally the same person hearing two contradictory verdicts from two different rooms.
And specifically, people who suspect that what made them difficult is what makes them good, and have never had permission to say so.
I didn’t overcome any of it. That framing is wrong and I refuse it on the first page. The intensity my family spent years trying to suppress became the engine behind decades of work. The child who collected everything became an adult who saw patterns other people missed. The teenager who exploded when touched became a man who set boundaries and expected them held. The college dropout who couldn’t sit through a class became an executive who could hold a complex problem for hours.
I weaponized it.
This is a recognition story instead of a recovery one, and the recognition is the moment you work out that the thing everybody said was wrong with you is the most right thing about you.
It took me until sixty-four. It doesn’t have to take anybody else that long.