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PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

I can scarcely believe that it is 33 years since Blessings was first published. At the time, I didn’t write it because I wanted to but because my then-publishers (it was my third book) insisted on it. My editor had read an article of mine which had made a considerable impact in various countries round the world; and he was convinced that the subject – coming to terms with suffering – would resonate with people here too. But though we believed that it would evoke some sort of genuine response neither he nor I had any idea that the book would generate quite so much enthusiasm. Amazingly, Blessings stayed in print for a remarkable 18 years, won the USA’s prestigious Christopher Award for 1979 – (‘Better to light a candle than curse the darkness’), and was translated into 14 languages, before sadly disappearing from view. It is an unbelievably great joy for me that 10 years later it is back in print again. From the many hundreds of letters I received I know that the book struck a powerful chord with people all over the world. This was the period before the era of so-called ‘misery memoirs’, and it was fairly unusual to find a frank and unself-pitying account of a painful experience. Perhaps because this was a story that was screaming in my head to be let out, it emerged like a force of nature, with raw emotion and coruscating honesty. It was this rawness that seems to have spoken so deeply to so many people. Among all the letters, I treasure one in particular which said: ‘You must have had a thousand reasons for writing Blessings, but for the one of them that was me, I wasn’t to say thank-you’. For yours now, new acquaintances have been telling me: ‘I’ve read your book’ and, although over the years I’ve written 15, I never need to ask which book they mean.

At the time when Blessings first appeared, my youngest son Nick was a mischievous 13 year-old Downs Syndrome boy. Today he is a blissfully contented (although occasionally stroppy), 48 year-old man who still lives with me, plays a major part in the running of the home, leads an active life outside it; makes me laugh, and without a doubt is still a ‘blessing’, perhaps the greatest blessing of my life. What would I have done without him? Yet on that bleak January day in 1965 when he was born, how could I have imagined that within a few months and for ever after I would be saying that and meaning it?