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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank Holly Huckeba for her insightful comments and many close readings of this book. In the final days of pulling the manuscript through revision, I thought I was losing my mind. Each time that happened, Holly helped me find it again. What a great friend. I’d also like to thank Gary Presley, Grace Skibicki, Diane Diekman, Kathleen Purcell and the many other participants of the nonfiction group at The Internet Writing Workshop for their support, advice, and encouragement. This is a much better book as a result of their help.

After I got out of rehab this last time, I tried to work the Twelve Steps perfectly. I struggled with the idea of progress, not perfection. A friend of mine took me aside and said, “Each day you stay away from drugs and alcohol, you work one or more of the steps whether you know it or not.” What a relief. I’ve tried to make progress with the steps this same way for more than twenty years now. But some habits die hard, and while writing this book, I again tried to be perfect—getting each detail completely accurate. At one point, my son pointed out that one of the vehicles I had remembered as a truck was actually a compact car. In the spirit of progress, not perfection, I am standing by my own fuzzy memory and allowing some of these discrepancies to stand. For, as Tobias Wolff pointed out in This Boy’s Life, “memory has its own story to tell.”