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“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

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Last fall I sent my memoir to a man I had known slightly in prep school. He had gone on to become the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the most respected literary publishing houses in America. Our contact back then had been purely professional in the way school assigns people to each other — he was a proctor, I was a student, and that was the extent of it. But a connection is a connection, and I had a book, and he had a publishing house.

His rejection came back with two words doing all the work: too personal.

I have turned that phrase over for a long time. It was meant as a verdict, and I took it as one. But somewhere along the way I realized it was also a job description. Memoir is too personal. That is the whole assignment. A memoir that is not too personal is a résumé.

So let me concede the charge up front. Guilty. The book violates privacy — mine first, and then, unavoidably, the privacy of everyone who was in the room. I did it on purpose. I believed the truth of what happened in those rooms was worth more than the silence that had been protecting them. Not everyone agrees. This is about the people who don’t.

Across the road from me lives a retired poet, a man who spent years running a respected writing program before he withdrew from all of it. I put a copy of my book in his mailbox, hoping he would read it. Months of silence. When I finally asked him about it, he told me he hadn’t opened it — he wasn’t sure what I expected from him. I said I was just hoping he’d read it and tell me what he thought. He asked why. I said, well, you ran a writing program. He said, I was just an administrator.

Then he asked if I wanted the book back.

I said yes — if you’re not going to read it, give it back. I kept my voice even. But I understood something in that moment about what a memoir asks of a reader. It isn’t entertainment he was declining. Opening that book would have made him a witness. Witnesses get implicated. A man who has spent years perfecting his own privacy knows better than to look through someone else’s open window.

Then there is the other kind of reader.

At the small Montessori school where my life as a student began, there was a boy a year ahead of me who was, by common agreement, the best young writer in our class. Very creative. I admired his writing and said nothing, because he was reserved and withdrawn and I was whatever I was. We orbited the same classrooms without ever quite becoming friends.

He graduated and went off to one of the great New England boarding schools. A year later, by no design I can explain, I followed him there. I knew he was on that campus. He was on the opposite side of it, and in two years we never spoke. Then he went on to an Ivy League university in Philadelphia — and a year later, I followed him there too. The strange part is that I didn’t fully register the pattern until this week: three schools, the same boy always one year ahead of me, like a figure walking a ridgeline I kept climbing toward and never reached.

Sixty years of nothing.

Then he saw my book mentioned in an alumni bulletin, read the opening pages, and wrote to me. What he sent was partly admiration and partly something I never expected: an apology, albeit over half a century late. He had known I was arriving at that boarding school, he said, and if he had been a decent human being he would have called on me, welcomed me, helped me find my footing. Instead, in his own insecurities, he ignored me. And then at university, hearing I was there, he ignored me again. He had carried it since his mid-twenties — the realization that he had been remiss in extending a hand to a fellow human being.

He told me one more thing. At a class reunion decades ago, he had spotted a boy he’d liked when they were young — caught sight of him at registration, then again at the class photo — and the moment the shutter clicked, went looking for him. The man had already left. He wrote to him afterward and never heard back. What he wanted, he said, was for the man to tell him what the boy had been.

When he saw my book in the bulletin, he felt that same pull. So this time he didn’t wait for the reunion to end.

Think about what happened there. My book invaded my own privacy — laid out the family, the drugs, the road, all of it — and that invasion is precisely what gave him permission to open his own vault. Exposure begets exposure. Privacy volunteered in answer to privacy violated. That letter is the entire case for memoir in a single envelope.

And then there is my family.

After the book came out, one of my siblings broke off all contact. No explanation. No citation of chapter and verse. I have my suspicions — there is a scene in the book, a hard one, involving our father and our mother, and I have always assumed that was the unforgivable page. But the truth is I got silence, not a reason. I was left to guess which truth was the one that ended us.

Another sibling did contact me. He told me he didn’t feel he came from a broken family at all, and that he was familiar with my way of being creative with my writing. That’s just not the way I remember it, he said. It was the first time he had ever reached out to me about my work, and, as far as I could tell, the last. I wrote back: thank you for contacting me about my writing. Too bad your concerns were limited to making sure you weren’t going to be mentioned in it.

I’m not proud of the bitterness in that reply. But I’ll stand by its accuracy.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Every one of these people — the publisher, the poet, the siblings — recoiled from the same thing. Not from lies. Nobody has accused me of lying. They recoiled from telling. The offense was never the events themselves; the events were survivable, apparently, as long as they stayed in the vault. The offense was the key turning in the lock.

And I understand the vault. I honor what it protects. Privacy is a real thing, a sanctity, and a family’s silence is a kind of shelter that everyone inside it helps hold up. When one member starts describing the interior, the shelter is breached for all of them, whether they consented or not. That is the legitimate grievance against memoir, and I won’t pretend it away.

But I know what the vault costs, because I know what else is locked in there. My grandmother’s kitchen. A woman singing in an island wind. The good along with the terrible, all of it going quiet together, because the vault doesn’t sort. Silence protects everyone’s privacy and buries everyone’s truth, and then the people who held the silence die, and there is nothing.

My siblings chose the vault. The poet across the road chose the vault. The publisher chose it too, in his professional way — there are limits, his verdict said, to how much of a life anyone should have to look at.

I chose the book.

Though I wonder, some days, how much choosing I actually did. My father was a difficult, controlling man — that much is in the book, and it is the mildest thing in there. But he was also the one who insisted, all through my childhood, that an examined life was the only life worth having. He was wrong about nearly everything in the method. He was wrong about the timeline. He drove his children away from him one by one, insisting on a philosophy none of us could live inside. And then, fifty years later, one of us sat down and examined the life. In a weird way the old man set me up to write this book. It would not surprise me if he knew it.

Someone asked me recently what I considered the greatest achievement of my life. I’m a man who never had children, never built a family of my own — the usual answers weren’t available to me. I didn’t have to think long.

Writing this book, I said.

The book that ended what was left of the family. The book that is too personal. That one, yes. That’s the achievement.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

In 1240, a knight named André I de Saint-Phalle rode with the Barons’ Crusade under the Count of Champagne. He married a woman named Alpais de Cudot, and the family took her land in the Yonne as their own — a château, stone by stone, that would carry the name Cudot for the better part of a thousand years. The family coat of arms went on a shield: a gold field, a green anchored cross. The motto went under it in Latin: Cruce deo gladio jungor. My cross binds me to God, my sword to the King. Supposedly, an ancestor once saved a king’s life in battle, and the king cried out across the field: À moi, Saint-Phalle, c’est pour le roi. Help me, Saint-Phalle, it’s for the king.

That was the family my grandfather carried onto a ship to New York in 1925, one of seven aristocratic brothers looking for a future the crash of 1929 hadn’t happened yet to warn them about. André Marie Fal de Saint-Phalle rebuilt what he could out of Wall Street stone — a brokerage house, a seat on the exchange, a firm with his own son’s name on the door by 1957. His motto — I heard him say it more than once — was leave no stone unturned. He turned over every one he could find. I think about what that cost the people closest to him. I think he left the place a mess.

My father was born in New York in 1929, the same year the market that would define his life fell apart. He grew up being told he was twelfth in line to a throne that no longer existed, wearing a signet ring with a lion and a cross on it, handed a version of nobility with the money already gone. They packed him off at seven — the New York Military Academy, then Choate, then a government degree at Harvard and a run at Columbia Law he didn’t finish. His motto was the American answer to my grandfather’s French one: you can achieve anything, if you want it badly enough. I understand why he believed it. I also flinch at the word badly. There’s a violence folded into that adverb — a permission slip for how far wanting is allowed to go.

I was born in New York too. Second generation. Same ring, same coat of arms, same Latin sentence I could recite before I understood what it meant. Grandfather’s stones, father’s will — nearly a thousand years of a belief system that had survived a revolution, an ocean, and a stock market crash, all pointed at me, waiting to see if I’d carry it another generation.

I didn’t.

Philadelphia. Irvine Auditorium. October 16, 1970. Bob Weir’s 23rd birthday. The Drexel Homecoming with the Grateful Dead.

Not sitting. Nobody sits. On my feet the whole night, swaying, moving, the crowd one animal breathing together. Somehow I end up at the front, ten feet from the stage, my head about level with their shins — Jerry to my left, Phil in the middle, Bob to my right. Close enough to see the sweat. Close enough that this is not a concert anymore. It’s a cathedral, and I am an altar boy kneeling in worship of a universe unfolding vastly beyond these mere mortal players.

Dark Star opens up. Not a song so much as a door. Jerry’s guitar wandering off the map, Phil’s bass moving underneath like something alive, and I am peaking, fully peaking, the kind of peak where the walls of Irvine’s old stone hall stop being walls.

No coat of arms in this room. No ring. No Latin. Just spontaneous notes organizing themselves into something that feels, for the first time in my life, like the actual gospel truth.

I lost my virginity that same night, to a friend’s girlfriend, in the reckless logic of being eighteen and freshly cracked open. It belongs in the ledger — that night undid more than one inheritance at once. My father had dreamed of me becoming a priest. A cardinal. The first American pope.

Here is what the first two mottos were built to protect: privilege, sanctity, nobility, duty, entitlement, ritual, honor, courage, sacrifice, fame, wealth, power, control.

Here is what found me instead, standing at the edge of that stage: equality, fraternity, joy, simplicity, sharing, loving, creating, accepting, embracing, nourishing.

I didn’t choose between those two lists that night. I just noticed that the second one was already true, and the first one had never quite fit — not the way the ring didn’t quite fit, not the way West Point was never going to fit, not the way a château in the Yonne I’d visited once as a schoolboy abroad was never going to be anything but a beautiful stone building full of somebody else’s ghosts.

Nine hundred years, the chain held. Crusade to château, château to Wall Street, Wall Street to a boy promised a signet ring he’d never teceive, reading the New York Times aloud in the car so his father wouldn’t have to. Then it reached me, and it didn’t break so much as it simply stopped pulling. I put my thumb out, having dropped my Halloween sword when I was seven.

We believe what we need to survive. My grandfather needed the stones. My father needed the wanting. I needed the road, and the music, and eventually a woman named Thea, who taught me that the only nobility worth keeping is the kind you build with your own hands and lose anyway. And then a woman named Veronica, who married me and stood by me through all of it — the successes, the adventures, and finally the wheels coming off. Nine seizures. Nearly a hundred pounds gone. Both of us ending up on the side of the road. A dirt road. Ten acres in Vermont.

For a while I thought I’d landed in a ditch. Nine hundred years of holding, and this is where the chain finally dumped me — off the road, no title, no fortune, a body that had started firing on its own. Then I looked up. No other house in sight. Just the green mountains spread out in front of me, glorious, and the whole quiet weight of the place settling in.

My father built his little empire at the end of a dirt road with no neighbors, and called it a kingdom. I fell all the way down to the same geography and found I was standing in one too — except there’s nothing out here to defend. No cross. No sword. Just the view, and Veronica, and the enormous work of learning, this late, how to stand still.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Not to edit it. Not to fix a paragraph or find a better word. I asked it to read everything — the essays, the memoir chapters, the drafts we’ve worked on together over the past 3 years — and tell me where my writing sits in the literary tradition. Which authors I’m actually close to. Which ones I only think I’m close to. Where I’ve gone further than my influences, and where they’ve still got me beat.

It's a strange thing to ask a machine. But I once let a desert tell me who I was. I've taken instruction from a highway, a storm, a stranger's dashboard at 3 a.m. Asking an AI to hold a mirror up to fifty years of writing doesn't feel that different.

Here’s what it found — and what I found, reading what it found.

The obvious comparison is Kerouac. It’s always Kerouac. On the Road, the open highway, the thumb out, the sense that the American continent is something you can read if you just stay on it long enough.

But Claude put its finger on something I’ve always sensed without being able to say it cleanly. Kerouac’s narrator doesn’t change. Sal Paradise is the same dreamy observer at the end as he was at the beginning. He witnesses. He catalogs. He rides the current. He goes home more or less the same person who left.

My André isn’t. Something happens to him out there. The road does something to him that he couldn’t have done to himself. That’s not a boast — it’s the whole point. The book isn’t about freedom. It’s about what happens to ego when you remove every prop that was holding it up.

I knew I’d read Kerouac. I didn’t know I’d written past him. That’s a useful thing to find out at seventy-four.

The comparison that surprised me more was Hemingway.

I wouldn’t have put myself there. Hemingway kept the interior life locked behind a door. The iceberg. What’s left out. I’ve never been interested in withholding. I’ve been interested in saying the thing directly, at the risk of saying too much.

But the sentence structure is there. Short declarative sentences. Subject. Verb. The world as a series of concrete facts that accumulate meaning without announcing it. I learned that somewhere. From him, probably, even when I thought I was just trying to be clear.

Where I break from him is exactly where memoir has to break from fiction. The interior has to be in the room. You can’t write a memoir with the iceberg theory. The whole point is that you go under the surface. That’s where the story is.

But here’s what the AI missed, or rather what I had to add myself.

The writers who shaped me most deeply weren’t the ones you find in American literature surveys. I came up on Dostoevsky and Kafka. Not as assignments — as obsessions. Dostoevsky taught me that the interior life isn’t decoration. It’s the drama. Everything that happens in the external world in his novels is just the pressure that forces the interior to reveal itself. Raskolnikov isn’t a murder story. It’s a confession that takes four hundred pages to happen.

Kafka taught me something different and maybe more useful for a memoirist: that the surreal and the mundane are not opposites. That the most ordinary situation can carry the full weight of what it means to be alive and baffled by it. I saw UFOs over Bixby Bridge in 1973. I fasted in the canyons of Big Bend. I stood 15 feet from Jerry Garcia during Dark Star. Those things happened. Kafka gave me permission to put them in the same book as the chicken coop and the disinheritance and the broken-down van.

Hesse was the third of that European trinity for me. Siddhartha. Narcissus and Goldmund. Steppenwolf. Hesse understood something that American literature has always struggled with — that a journey is never just a journey. That the road out is always the road in. That you leave home to find out who you were before you knew who you were. The skeleton underneath all three volumes of The Spaces Between is pure Hesse. Leave. Be unmade. Return changed, or don’t return at all.

Emerson is in there too, deeper than I usually admit. The self-reliance. The idea that your own experience, if you look at it honestly enough, is a sufficient text. That you don’t need authority. You need attention.

Dickens gave me character. Not the Dickensian grotesque, but the belief that the people who pass through your life deserve to be rendered fully. The trucker who picks you up at midnight and talks about his daughter for two hundred miles. The girl in the commune. The man in the cowboy hat who says one sentence and disappears. Each one a novel you only got to read the first chapter of.

Baudelaire taught me that beauty and darkness aren’t in competition. That you can make something luminous out of the worst of it.

But if I’m being honest about where the actual sentence music comes from — the rhythm, the compression, the way a line lands — it isn’t any of those men.

It’s the lyricists.

Bob Dylan taught me more about writing than anyone who ever sat behind a desk. The way an image can carry more meaning than a paragraph of explanation. That’s not a technique. It’s a key turning in a lock. I was twenty-two years old with a thumb out and no direction home, and Dylan had already written the sentence.

Kris Kristofferson wrote Me and Bobby McGee. Janis recorded it. The Dead played it like a river. And that one line — freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose — is the sentence I’ve been trying to write in a hundred different ways for fifty years. I had nothing. Eighty “borrowed” dollars. An old guitar in a beat-up but bulletproof case. A thumb. That was the soil. And look what grew.

Robert Hunter wrote the words Jerry Garcia sang. Hunter understood something about the American road — the mythic version of it, the version that is also a spiritual condition — that no novelist has ever quite matched. When I put my thumb out on that on-ramp in 1973, I was inside a Hunter lyric. I knew it then. I know it more now.

Bruce Cockburn. Donovan. Poets who chose strings instead of pages. Cockburn especially — the moral seriousness underneath the melody, the refusal to look away from what’s hard, the way the natural world carries meaning without being asked to. That’s in my Vermont writing. That’s in everything I write about the Green Mountains.

What those lyricists gave me that the novelists couldn’t is this: the understanding that a single line, if it’s right, is enough. You don’t have to explain it. You don’t have to follow it with three sentences of context. You land it, you trust it, you move on.

There was a period when I thought about calling a band Dirtbag. A pun — the loser on the side of the road, but also the bag of soil, the fertilizer, the stuff things grow from. I never used it. But it’s probably the most accurate description of my literary influences I’ve ever come up with.

Dostoevsky. Kafka. Hesse. Emerson. Dickens. Baudelaire. Kerouac.

Dylan. Kristofferson. Hunter. Cockburn. Donovan.

That’s the dirt. I’m just what came up out of it.

I didn’t choose that soil. I grew in it. And at some point the roots went deep enough that I stopped being able to tell where they ended and I began.

That’s the ground the writing comes from. Everything else is just the bloom.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

It’s been rainy today and I’ve been watching David Lynch.

Not the films, this time. Just him, in a chair, that stiff gray hair, talking the way he talked. And he keeps circling one story.

He’s a young man in Philadelphia. A painting student. He’s working on a canvas — a garden at night, mostly black, a little green where the leaves come out of the dark. And he’s sitting there looking at it, and he hears a wind. From inside the painting. And the green starts to move.

Oh, he thinks. A moving painting.

That’s where all of it came from. Eraserhead, the Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, the whole strange body of work. A man looked at a still image and wanted it to move.

He said it different ways his whole life, but it always came down to the same thing. Everything starts with an idea. Or an image. Or a fragment. You don’t invent it. You catch it. He talked about it like fishing — go quiet, wait, feel the tug, pull up whatever’s down there in the dark. And the thing you catch tells you what it wants to be. Your only job is to not scare it off by deciding too early what it means.

I’ve been sitting here all afternoon trying to understand why I can’t stop listening to him. And then I realize — he’s not teaching me anything. He’s reminding me of something I already know. Something a man named Paul Czaja gave me when I was twelve years old.

***

Whitby School. Greenwich, Connecticut. 1965. A Montessori classroom, which meant we weren’t sitting in rows being lectured at. Paul was our teacher, and he had this exercise. He’d bring in photographs — carefully chosen, black and white, images that didn’t explain themselves. And he’d spread them on the table and say: pick one that speaks to you. Look at it. Really look. Then write whatever comes.

No grades. No judgment. No right answer. Just an image and the silence to receive it.

I don’t remember which photograph I picked the first time. What I remember is the feeling — that something opened. A door between seeing and saying that I didn’t know was there. The image didn’t tell me what to write. It waited, the way a patient animal waits, until I was quiet enough to hear what it was carrying. And then the words came, not from me exactly, but through me, as if the photograph had been holding them and I was just the hand that wrote them down.

Paul gave me that. The habit of looking. Of letting images generate words. Of trusting the spaces between seeing and saying. That exercise opened something in me that nothing since — not Exeter, not Penn, not New York, not over half a century of living — managed to close entirely.

I just didn’t know, sitting there at twelve, that he was teaching me how to fish.

***

I learned a different kind of fishing first.

There’s a scene early in my book Thumb Out. I’m twenty-one, walking down the mile-long dirt road away from the house I grew up in, leaving for good, a pack on my back and a guitar in my hand. And the sight of the old aqueduct toward Byram Lake brings my father back to me — taking us fishing when we were boys.

I see him hook a brown trout in the Mianus River Gorge. Big one. He’s yelling for the net. And the fish throws the hook and is gone in an instant — sun flashing on its impossible speckles, and then nothing. And my father turns and scowls and blames me for the loss.

That was the other fishing. Catching as winning. A fish in the water is a fish you’re owed, and a fish that gets away is somebody’s fault. My father had to win — at chess, at cards, at war games, at the inheritance, at fishing. He could not lose a trout without it being a wound, and he could not let the wound be his.

Two men. Two kinds of instruction. Paul said: look at the image, be quiet, let it come. My father said: grab it, net it, and if it gets away, someone’s going to answer for it.

I’ve spent most of my life in the spaces between those two instructions.

***

When I was seventeen — 1969 — I made a Super 8mm film I called “463-4357.” A boy in a glass phone booth having a nervous breakdown, trying to call God. The title was the phone number you'd get if you dialed the words “GOD-HELP.” I got my effect by spinning the camera around the booth — all that glass turning, reflections swirling like mirages, the boy multiplying and fracturing inside the box.

I didn’t design that. The image arrived — a boy in glass, spinning, dialing a number that couldn’t connect — and I trusted it and shot it. Paul’s exercise, without my knowing it. Pick the image that speaks to you. Let whatever comes, come. It won the Ralph Bradley prize that year. I was seventeen and I’d caught something and I didn’t know what.

A few years later I landed at the University of Pennsylvania — the same city, it turns out, where Lynch’s painting moved. I didn’t want to be there. Ended up there anyway, against all odds and most of my wishes, but it gave me the Grateful Dead and it gave me a film course taught by a man named Rudy Burckhardt. I didn’t know who he was at the time. Turned out he was the real article — came out of New York in the thirties, ran with the painters and poets, made quiet watchful little films about the city.

We never shot anything in that class. We just talked. And while I was in it, I started writing a script. I called it Sasha. It was about a girl who could talk to trees — really talk to them, hear what they were thinking. I never finished it. Dropped out. The script went in a drawer the way most things go in a drawer.

***

Five years after making “463-4357” I stuck out my thumb and hitchhiked from New York to California and back. Seven thousand miles. That trip became Thumb Out, which is finished and out in the world, so I won’t retell it here. But I need to put some things side by side, because putting things side by side is what a memoir writer does. It’s the prerogative — the creative braiding of real fragments into something truer than chronology.

Here’s what happened— I spent days alone in a redwood grove along the Eel River during the summer of 1973. Swam in water so cold it erased everything but now. Slept on pine needles. Sat with my back against bark older than Christ and let the silence work on me until the forest started to breathe.

I took peyote among two-thousand-year-old trees.

At a vineyard party in Healdsburg a week earlier, I met a girl named Stephanie Sugars. We talked, we laughed, we kissed. I was twenty-one and taken with her. She wrote her address in the notebook I carried, and before that, sitting there, I drew her. Her face, her long hair, her wide-open smile. Out of seven thousand miles and every face I met, she’s the only person I drew. And under the drawing I started writing her a song: such sweet energy, such gentle heartbeats.

I tried to find her afterward and couldn’t. Never saw her again.

And three years earlier at Penn, the unfinished script — Sasha, the girl who talked to trees.

Four fragments. Four separate catches from different waters. A script, a girl, a grove, and the medicine. None of them happened together. They lived in different pockets of the trip, different pockets of my life.

When I sat down to write the chapter called “Sasha Among the Giants” fifty years later, I braided them into one scene. The fictional girl and the real girl became one character. The grove and the medicine became the setting where she appeared. The unfinished script became the recognition — I know you, I wrote you before I met you. The memoir fused what life had kept apart, the way Paul Czaja’s exercise let a photograph generate a story that wasn’t literally in the image but was truer than the image alone.

And I gave the scene a line that has become the truest thing I think I’ve ever written:

She was never meant to be possessed. Just witnessed.

That’s the patient kind of fishing, set down in plain words. You don’t grab. You don’t net. You witness, and you let go, and the letting go is not the loss — it’s the form the keeping takes.

***

In 2023, starting to work on my 1973 hitchhiking memoir, I went looking for the real Stephanie. And here is where the still drawing began to move.

She was gone — died in 2016, in Sonoma County, sixty years old, at home, surrounded by the friends she called her Circle of Care. A quiet, potent lesbian activist. A writer. She’d lived with breast cancer since 1990 — twenty-six years — and the people who loved her said she defied all odds, and she did.

And she talked to trees.

Not as a figure of speech. Docent work at a nature preserve. Her last years on a small farm in Kenwood. Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy — a way of moving through the world that treats nature and spirit as kin. In her own writing she said it flat out: nature, ideas, art, beauty, the dead, the divine and spirit were her friends. She’d spent her whole life learning to belong to the land instead of owning it.

I invented Sasha in 1970. I drew Stephanie in 1973. I braided them into one character in 2025 and gave that character a philosophy of witnessing instead of possessing. And only afterward did I find out that the real woman had been living that exact philosophy the whole time, out on a farm in Kenwood, until the year cancer finally took her.

I wrote the truth about her before I knew it was true.

I wrote to her niece. Told her the story, sent the drawing. She never wrote back. And that’s the right ending, the honest one — no tidy circle, no reunion. The thumb stays out and that particular car doesn’t stop. Just the drawing, the obituary, and the unanswered letter, sitting next to each other on the table.

***

Nine years after Paul Czaja taught me the photograph exercise, he became headmaster at Whitby and hired me as a teaching assistant. I found myself standing in his old classroom with his old photographs spread on the table, saying the words he’d said to me: pick one that speaks to you.

A boy held up a picture of an empty rowboat on a misty lake. “I don’t know what to write,” he said.

“What do you see?”

“A boat.”

“What else?”

He studied the image. “Maybe someone just left? Or maybe they’re about to come back?”

“Write about that,” I told him. “Write about the person who isn’t there.”

I didn’t understand then what I was teaching him. I do now.

Write about the person who isn’t there. That’s Stephanie Sugars. That’s a girl I drew in a notebook and lost for fifty years. That’s a woman who died on a farm in Kenwood three years before I finally went looking for her. That’s an empty rowboat on a misty lake — someone just left, or maybe they’re about to come back. Every chapter I’ve ever written has been about the person who isn’t there. And Paul Czaja handed me that instruction when I was twelve years old, standing in a classroom in Greenwich, Connecticut, looking at a photograph and waiting for the words to come.

***

Here’s what I keep turning over.

My father hooked a brown trout and yelled for the net and lost it and it was gone forever, because the only way he knew to keep a thing was to take it.

I drew a girl in a notebook and didn’t even have her phone number and let her go entirely — and fifty years later she came back to me whole. Came back as a whole life I got to witness, the way you witness a painting that’s started, finally, to move.

Two kinds of fishing. The kind you’re taught and the kind you have to learn. The netted fish lost forever; the released girl returned entire. My father couldn’t have caught Stephanie. He’d have grabbed, and she’d have thrown the hook. I caught her by not trying to.

I’m writing Book Two now. Sahara Dust — the windsurfing years, the Caribbean, the woman I loved and the way it ended. And it does end. The book moves toward a death I can’t fish my way around, the biggest fish in the water, the one everything in me wants to net and hold and refuse to lose.

I know which kind of fishing my father gave me. I can feel it pulling, the old urge to grab the ending and win it.

But I’ve been watching David Lynch talk on a rainy afternoon. And I’ve got a drawing on my desk that took fifty years to move. And I’ve got Paul Czaja’s voice in my ear, quiet as it ever was, saying: look at it, really look, and write whatever comes.

She was never meant to be possessed. Just witnessed.

I think I finally know who taught me that. Both of them. It only took me a lifetime to hear it.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

The box arrived this morning. I knew what was in it. I’d been waiting for it for over a week — longer than that, really. I’d been waiting for it for fifty three years.

I opened it and there it was. Thumb Out. Volume One of The Spaces Between. 330 pages. Hardcover. As thick as a slab of 5 quarter inch pine. I picked it up and just held it. The thing has weight. Real weight. After years of staring at screens — at PDFs and ePubs and cover files and margin settings — here was something I could actually hold in my hand.

What I felt was a sense of accomplishment and finality. Pride in persistence, in effort, in determination finally paying off. And I’ll admit — pride that I opened it to a dozen random pages and didn’t find a single mistake.

Let me try to explain what went into it.

I’m 74. Learning Kindle Direct Publishing’s cover designer. Learning via Claude what recto and verso mean. Learning about gutters and bleeds and leading and why a chapter should always start on a recto page. Watching Claude build Python build scripts to typeset a 330-page interior with the right proportions that suited my style and preferences. Learning ePub structure. Learning all of it, in my seventies, because the book demanded it.

Three years. From the first draft of what was then called Surfing the Interstates to the book I’m holding today. It wasn’t a straight line. The book started as one thing, became another, got published, got unpublished, got expanded, got combined with a companion volume, got rebuilt from the ground up.

Surfing the Interstates turned out to be Act Two of the final book — the road itself, 7,000 miles hitchhiking in the summer of 1973. Then I wrote Boomerang — four chapters of backstory before the road, eight chapters of aftermath after it. Then I realized they weren’t two books. They were one. Thumb Out is the sandwich: Boomerang as the bread, Surfing the Interstates as the meat. Twenty-eight chapters. Three acts. The complete story of a young man in motion — what launched him, what the road gave him, and what it finally cost him to stop.

Now about that cover.

The image is a DALL-E generation, shaped over many iterations with Claude’s help. What I wanted was something that felt like a memory — and somehow we got there.

Look at the compositional line: it runs diagonally from the guitar hanging at the hitchhiker’s side, up through the outstretched thumb, right into the oncoming headlights. Your eye follows that line before you know you’re following it. And off to the left, almost hidden in the warm haze — the old farmhouse, and beside it a weeping willow.

There was a giant weeping willow over a pond in front of our house at Ledge Acres. My mother loved that tree. There’s something bittersweet about a willow that weeps. I didn’t ask for it specifically. It arrived in the image via AI magic and I recognized it immediately.

The road itself carries the quality of Byram Lake Road — the paved road at the foot of the dirt road we lived on — the one I crossed when I stuck out my thumb in the summer of 1973. The mountains in the background blend the Rockies, the Sierras, and the coastal ranges of California, all at once. The whole trip in one frame.

And the colors. That warm golden amber against the deep blue of the sky. The thumb right in the headlights, dead center. I’ve stared at this cover for weeks and it still pleases me every time.

The main thing I feel, holding this book, is a sense of having come full circle.

At twenty-one I stuck out my thumb with eighty borrowed dollars and no plan. Scared but certain that if I just kept moving, something would open up. It did.

At seventy-four I sat down to relive it, wrestle with it, understand it — and discovered I had to learn an entirely new set of skills just to get the book into print. Different road. Same principle. Keep moving. Something will open up. It did.

Even if I never sell a single copy, opening that box this morning was my payoff.

The point was never the destination. The point was the journey. The road teaches you that at twenty-one and you spend the rest of your life remembering it.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Someone asked me recently what the payoff was for a reader who buys my memoir, Thumb Out. It was a fair question. I thought about it seriously and gave a serious answer.

But the more honest answer is the one I gave after that.

The payoff that matters most from this book has already been collected. I collected it in the writing. Everything else — sales, reviews, readers, whatever praise or indifference the world decides to offer — is gravy.

I want to explain what I mean, because I think it matters to anyone who has ever considered writing something true about their own life and talked themselves out of it.

Writing Thumb Out was a deep dive into understanding my life. Not performing my life for an audience. Not crafting a narrative designed to make a reader like me or feel comfortable with me or come away with a tidy lesson. Just looking at the thing honestly and writing down what I saw.

What I saw was not always flattering. I was a young man of considerable privilege who took a very long time to do anything with it. I drifted. I chased a film career across three thousand miles and six years and learned, finally, that what I was chasing was hollow. I lost a guitar to a theft I partly enabled. I walked away from things I should have said something about. I spent years in rooms that were wrong for me, doing work that had nothing to do with who I was, and called it searching.

Writing all of that down — not to excuse it, not to dramatize it, but simply to see it clearly — was worth more than I can calculate. Not because confession is therapeutic, though maybe it is. Because understanding your own life is one of the rarest things a person can do, and most people never do it at all.

The book cost me something to write. There are scenes in it that required me to implicate myself, to resist the comfortable version of events, to let the people I loved be complicated rather than heroic or villainous. That is hard work. It is also the only work that produces anything true.

I am not going to pretend I have no interest in whether people read it. I do. I think it is a good book. I think the readers who find it will get something real from it — permission, maybe, to look at their own drifting years without shame, or recognition of the particular pain of a father who could have shown up and didn’t. Those are not small things to offer a stranger.

But I refused to write the book a market might have asked for. I am who I am. I cannot twist myself into a pretzel chasing acceptance. The book that gets written in pursuit of approval is never as good as the book that gets written in pursuit of truth, and I have read enough of both to know the difference from the inside.

So here is what I will tell you about Thumb Out.

It is the first volume of a memoir called The Spaces Between. It covers my years before the road, on the road hitchhiking across America in 1973, and the decade that followed — New York, California, Hollywood, and finally the return east that ended with a paintbrush in my hand and a golden retriever named Brer riding shotgun in my Datsun. It is written in a voice I have spent fifty years developing and did not compromise to make anyone comfortable.

The payoff for you, if you read it, is something I cannot fully promise in advance. That is the nature of honest books. They give you what they give you, and it is different for every reader.

What I can promise is that I did not hold anything back.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

A 50-year memoir spanning 1973 to 2023 chronicles one man’s journey from compulsive wanderer to reluctant settler—from hitchhiking across America during the last wild summer of the 1970s to finding hard-won wisdom in learning to stay put. This three-book memoir series explores the evolution from thumb-out freedom to the inevitable truth that you can’t outrun what travels in your bones.

What if everything you've been taught about freedom was wrong? What if the answer isn't in the leaving but in the staying? What if paradise isn't a place you find but what remains after everything else fails?"

Volume One: "Thumb Out”

Published April 22, 2026

Summer 1973. A 21-year-old disinherited French aristocrat's son “borrows” $80 and hitchhikes 7,000 miles across Nixon's crumbling America. Jerry Garcia blesses his guitar. UFOs read the Pacific's memory. A paranoid friend ends up in a police shootout. In a Big Bend canyon, fasting and alone, he receives a vision of water and a woman who moves with the wind. The road teaches him he needs the ocean.

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Volume Two: "Sahara Dust"

Currently being written

1982-1987, Antigua, West Indies. Building a sandcastle dream on a massive pristine beach with Thea, the woman from the prophecy. The woman born with cystic fibrosis who ignored her life expectancy, choosing to instead live “zestfully.” Paradise manifests—turquoise water, perfect wind, teaching tourists to fly. Success, international fame. Suddenly a small plane drops out of the sky before their eyes, 50 yards off the beach, hitting the water like a meteor, killing six young men instantly. Record Sahara dust storms arrive soon after. Thea’s battered lungs start failing. She dies at 37 in a NYC hospital surrounded by loved ones. Sandcastles and ashes return to the ocean, gently sprinkled from a schooner off Pemaquid Lighthouse in Maine. Hearts try to process the infinity of the loss.

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Volume Three: "Green Mountain Flash"

To be written after completion of book two

Vermont, 1997- 2023. Buio, his one year old golden retriever, attracts Veronica’s attention on the dirt road in front of his house. Together, they build a photography business—a self-directed and creative life. After the 2008 financial crisis they are forced into retirement. But the wanderer's ghost won't rest. 2019 he spends everything he has left on an overlanding rig that never leaves the county. Eleven seizures at 4 AM over 12 months force the stillness he could never choose. The body succeeds where the will failed. Freedom ultimately means learning to live within your limits.

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This Isn't Just A Memoir—It's American Mythology In The Making

From the servant's quarters of a Westchester estate to Big Sur's rainbow buses. From Caribbean trade winds to Vermont's brutal winters. From prep school damage to boarding school ghosts. From noble French bloodlines to picking Santa Rosa plums. This is the story of America's promise and betrayal, told through one man's body.

Every Paradise Contains Its Own Ending

Watch a man build and lose three different versions of heaven. Learn why the vibrant nightclub singer who gifted him the ability fly over water had to die. Understand why the dairy farmer’s daughter who had the heart to stay had to be different. Discover how nine electrical storms in the brain can be grace, not tragedy.

The Pattern Hidden In Plain Sight

Military jets violate every sacred space—F-4 Phantoms through Big Bend, A-6 Intruders over the Caribbean island of Vieques, F-35s above Vermont. The war follows him because the war is inside. Steve Ferry's paranoia wasn't paranoid. The kindness of strangers is real, but so is the cruelty of fate. Some wounds don't heal—they teach you to understand life differently.

Why Follow The Full Journey?

Because this isn't just one man's story. It's about the last generation that could truly disappear, the first generation that couldn't. It's about what happened to the counterculture's children. It's about privilege that doesn't protect you, movement that doesn't free you, and love that arrives only after you stop running from it.

The Wandering Was The Point. Until It Wasn’t.

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“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Bear Pond Books has been a Vermont institution for decades — the kind of independent bookstore that reminds you why independent bookstores matter. Seeing these covers on their shelf feels like the clearest marker yet that this project has become real.

And the writing continues —

I’m currently writing Sahara Dust, Book Two of The Spaces Between, which I’m hoping to publish later this year. Green Mountain Flash — the Vermont book — will close out the trilogy after that.

If you’re anywhere near Stowe on or after May 23, stop in, pick up a copy, and tell Bear Pond you heard about it here. Supporting an independent bookstore and a Vermont writer in the same transaction — that’s the kind of wave worth catching.

More soon.

— AJ

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Yesterday was my 74th birthday. The vernal equinox. For the first time ever, none of my five siblings reached out. Much like a Christmas card, a birthday wish has always been an expected sign of connection, however faint.

I’m not sure when I stopped expecting them to. It wasn’t sudden. It happened the way families come apart — slowly, then all at once, then a long silence that hardens into its own kind of architecture. You stop noticing the absence the way you stop noticing a wall. It’s just there.

My mother’s dying wish was that we would all get along. She said it knowing we wouldn’t. She’d spent twenty years holding us together through sheer will and chain-smoked Kents, and when she was gone, the centripetal force went with her. We scattered like shrapnel from an explosion that had actually happened decades earlier.

I wrote a memoir. Surfing the Interstates — a book about hitchhiking across America in 1973, the summer my parents’ marriage finally detonated. The book only briefly touches the family. But it touches them at the point of fracture. And in that brief touching, I mentioned something none of my siblings had ever heard: I saw our father backhand our mother in the laundry room.

I think that was the fatal blow — not to any of them, but to whatever threadbare connection still held us in orbit around each other. I named a thing they’d rather not know. Some of them probably think I made it up. I didn’t.

What I’ve learned since, researching our father’s family, is that the violence didn’t start with him. His mother Jacqueline — the woman we called “Goms” because we couldn’t pronounce “grandmère,” the devout, prim ice queen who took me to Schrafft’s for lunch and gave me sweaters from Bloomingdale’s I never wore — was, according to my aunt Niki’s autobiography, violent with her children. She beat the younger ones. She abandoned Niki to a governess in France for two years while she and her husband tried to rebuild their finances in New York after the Crash. My father was the eldest of five. After him came Niki, who would be hospitalized, given electroshock, and eventually flee into art. Then Claire, the composed middle child. Then Liz and Richard, who would both die by suicide.

Look at them. My father and his sister. Two small children in white on what looks like a summer afternoon in France, before any of it happened. Before the violence, the breakdowns, the electroshock, the suicides, before he married a poor Irish orphan girl and raised six children.

The chain is clear if you’re willing to look at it. Most of my siblings aren’t. They’ve chosen the comfortable version — the one where our father was difficult but not violent, where the divorce was just a divorce, where the family simply drifted apart the way families do. I wrote the uncomfortable version. The one that actually happened. And the cost of writing it was the last of those ties.

Which brings me to Jean Biès.

Jean Biès was a French philosopher, writer, and poet born in Bordeaux in 1933. He spent much of his youth in Algiers, where early exposure to North African culture and Sufism oriented him toward Eastern spiritual traditions. He studied Classics at the University of Algiers and later at the Sorbonne, eventually becoming a professor of Greek literature at the University of Pau. His work placed him squarely in the Traditionalist and perennialist current, drawing on René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon while seeking a synthesis of Eastern and Western wisdom. He wrote across genres — essays, poetry, travel writing, spiritual testimony — exploring Hindu thought, Christian mysticism, Sufism, and the symbolism of nature and alchemy. He is best known in English for Returning to the Essential: The Selected Writings of Jean Biès.

Biès received the High Prize of the Society of French Poets and was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1997. Catholic philosopher Jean Borella regarded him as one of the most authentic poets of his time. He retired in 1993 to devote himself fully to writing at his home near the Pyrénées. After the death of his wife, the Jungian analyst Rolande Biès, in 2012, he died by suicide in January 2014, leaving behind a large body of essays, poems, and spiritual reflections.

He wrote this:

“The hermit keeps a window open onto the sky, without which the world would perish from suffocation, ugliness and boredom.

He is the only one, along with the poet, who still speaks the language of the beyond, who makes existence sacred, who gives life this verticality without which humanity is buffeted about beneath itself.

He is a rampart against the assaults of mediocrity, nastiness, hatred that is intolerant of its opposite…

For men turned toward secondary things, his presence recalls the existence of the essential things: the order of the world, knowledge, the priority of salvation and the adoration of the Supreme, by imitating the sunflower whose heliotropism has much to teach us, who never turns away from the trisolar brightness.

A living reminder of the transcendence, the hermit teaches this world that he is of other values, those of truths other than the world’s.

Seeming to live the opposite of a normal life, he is, in fact, emancipated from physical and psychological mechanicalness. Immobile in a consecrated place, he exorcises space and turns it into infinity.

A world without vision is condemned to losing its outlook.

Hermits and anchorites are the salt of the earth who keep the earth from completely rotting.

They are the ones who, in spite of their small number and anonymity—or thanks to it—can still to a certain degree, weaken or neutralize the poisons fabricated by society in its politico-social activities (even those that have a humanitarian mask) and by all of humanity in its psycho-mental activities.

Today, these men are the last and the only ones able to stop the generalized dissolution process, to avoid the definitive crumbling of everything.

The spiritual master who has naturally renounced his name, his possessions, his ties and his ego has thus gained in inner richness; the Spirit has taken him over, has extended him to its size, has made him a being of the here and now, of everywhere and always.”

— Jean Biès

Biès writes about a man who chose solitude and gained the world from it. My situation is less elegant than that. I didn’t renounce my ties — they were severed, slowly, by decades of silence and one act of truth-telling. The hermit in Biès’s vision “has naturally renounced his name, his possessions, his ties.” I just wrote down what I saw in the laundry room.

But there’s something in this passage that resonates beyond the philosophy. Biès writes about people “turned toward secondary things” — and I think that’s what the comfortable family story is. A secondary thing. A version of events that lets everyone sleep at night. The primary thing is harder. It’s the backhand. It’s the chain of violence running from Jacqueline through my father and into the rooms where we grew up. It’s Niki’s electroshock. It’s Richard’s champagne and Tylenol. It’s Liz going upstairs at Claire’s house in Providence and never coming back down.

My mother wanted us to get along. She wanted it so badly she said it as she was dying. But getting along required not looking, and I looked. And then I wrote it down.

By any external measure, the book failed. A boarding school acquaintance who went on to become chairman of the board at Farrar, Straus and Giroux read the manuscript and told me it had no commercial appeal — too personal. He suggested I print copies privately for family distribution. The family, of course, being the very people who won’t read it. I mailed twelve author copies to siblings, old friends, people I thought might care. Not one person responded. My Substack has maybe ten subscribers. The phone didn’t ring on my birthday.

So there’s a version of this story where I wasted two years of my life writing a book nobody wanted, published it myself into a void, and alienated what remained of my family in the process. That version isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just incomplete. It measures the wrong things.

My father — the boy in that photograph, being held by his little sister Niki as they rode a bicycle together on a summer afternoon before any of it happened — that man spent my entire youth insisting I figure out what things mean. He wouldn’t let me major in film. He said I had nothing to say yet. He assigned me books. He corrected my writing. He pushed me toward philosophy, toward the examined life, toward some reckoning with the essential questions that I wanted no part of at twenty-one. I wanted to make movies. He wanted me to understand why.

I hated him for it. For decades, I carried that obstruction as the defining wound — the father who blocked his son’s artistic life. But here I am at seventy-four, and the book I just finished isn’t a film. It’s a written excavation of my own life that required exactly the tools he spent my childhood trying to give me. The depth. The discipline of looking. The insistence that surface isn’t enough. No philosophy major at Penn could have taught me what writing this memoir taught me. It took the full fifty years — the hitchhiking, the windsurfing, the relationships, the losses, the seizures, the dead ends — to arrive at the understanding he was pointing toward. He just didn’t know it would take a lifetime. Neither did I.

This is the complicated inheritance. Not the noble name. Not money — he left us nothing. Two of my sisters married into enormous wealth and sit now in multimillion-dollar homes, their husbands incapacitated by illness, unable to do much of anything. I sit in a simple home in northern Vermont with two dogs and a guitar and ten Substack subscribers and a clarity I have never had before in my life. I changed the way I eat — went carnivore, stripped everything back — and my body responded. Clearer head. More energy. Less noise. The physical transformation mirrored what the writing had already started: a shedding of skins, of fears, of the need for anyone’s approval or recognition.

I emerged from the process of writing Book One shell-shocked. The world outside isn’t reassuring — it tilts toward war, toward fracture, toward dissolution. My family has completed its own dissolution, the one that started in that laundry room in 1973. My mother’s dying wish — that we would all get along — sits unanswered, the way those twelve mailed copies sit unopened. But standing in the debris of all that, I feel more centered and confident than I have at any point in seventy-four years. Not triumphant. Lucid. The skins are off. The voice is mine. And the mission my father planted — find out what it all means — turns out to be the richest inheritance I could have possibly received: richer than any money, property or gold signet ring.

So I’m going to write the next two books. Sahara Dust — the Antigua years, Thea’s death, the paradise I built while everything I loved was dying. And Green Mountain Flash — what happens when a lifelong wanderer finally stops. The hermit at his window doesn’t open it because the view is pleasant. He opens it because the alternative is suffocation. The writing is the window. I’m not done opening it.

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Apple Photos gathered these illustrations into a short film, and something unexpected happened — set to music, dissolving one into the next, they became more than a gallery. They became the feel of a life remembered. Not the facts of it, but the texture. The way one chapter bleeds into the next when you stop trying to hold the edges apart.

This is a different way into the story. No words, for once. Just the pictures.

My published memoir, Surfing the Interstates, covers the 1973 hitchhiking journey that started it all. The rest of the story — Antigua, Vermont, and everything between — lives here on this Substack.

I’ve lived three lives. Not metaphorically—three distinct lives, each with its own geography, its own cast, its own way of breaking me open and putting me back together wrong. When I finally sat down to write about them, I realized they weren’t three separate stories. They were a trilogy.

I called it “The Spaces Between.” The first volume, “Surfing the Interstates,” covers my summer of1973 hitchhiking journey across America, with a backpack and a 1943 Harmony Cremona guitar, sleeping under stars in the Rockies, tripping on peyote in the Redwoods, a vision quest in Santa Elena Canyon. The second, “Sahara Dust,” tells the story of paradise found and lost in Antigua—building a windsurfing school with a woman who was dying, watching five young men die in a plane crash at a birthday party, and leaving the Caribbean when the dust from the Sahara made it impossible for Thea to breathe. The third, “Green Mountain Flash,” follows the long slow landing in Vermont—marriage, entrepreneurial successes, bankruptcy, seizures, and the unexpected discovery that stillness could be its own kind of adventure.

Three lives. Three books. That was the plan.

Finding the Shape

Most memoirs bore me. I’ll say it plainly. The chronological yawn-fest—born here, went to school there, married this person, got that job—it’s a life reduced to a résumé. I didn’t want to write my résumé. I wanted to write the moments that cracked me open.

So I examined my seventy-plus years and asked a simple question: where are the stories? Not the facts, the stories. Where does the camera push in? Where does the soundtrack change? I’d spent years dreaming of being a filmmaker—winning awards at Exeter for a 45-minute 16mm film, working as a projectionist, editing television at Universal Studios—and even though that dream never materialized the way I’d imagined, the filmmaker’s eye never left me. I learned to see my life in scenes, not summaries.

Three narratives emerged. Each one had what any good film needs: a journey with real stakes, characters you couldn’t invent, and an ending that changed everything. The hitchhiking odyssey was a young man’s rebellion—eighty dollars stolen from my mother’s cupboard, a ringless twenty-first birthday, and the open road as an answer to my father’s suffocating expectations. The Antigua years were a love story disguised as an adventure—Thea’s opening line at a cocktail party was “Have you ever heard of Andre the seal?” and from that moment I was hers. The Vermont years were about what happens after the motion stops and you have to sit with who you actually are.

I wanted to write each one in first person, cinematic, present—recreating key moments so vividly that readers wouldn’t be reading about my life, they’d be inside it. Not telling. Showing. The way Paul Czaja, my mentor at Whitby School, taught me that art was civilization’s highest expression. The way the road taught me that expression meant nothing without experience.

What Book One Taught Me

“Surfing the Interstates” took everything I had. I wrote it, revised it, tore it apart and rebuilt it. I learned to select moments the way a director selects shots—what to include, what to leave on the cutting room floor, how to let silence do the heavy lifting. The book is available now on Substack, on Amazon Kindle, and as an audiobook, and I’m proud of what it became.

But here’s what I didn’t anticipate: Book One was relatively easy because so many of its characters were transient. The trucker who picked me up outside Boulder. The hippies in the communal house. The girl in the San Francisco café. They passed through my life like weather—vivid, transformative, and gone. I could write them fully because they existed only in that story. They wouldn’t read the book and call me to say I’d gotten it wrong. They wouldn’t sit across from me at Thanksgiving and wonder what I’d written about them.

Books Two and Three are a different animal entirely.

Why I Stopped

The characters in “Sahara Dust” and “Green Mountain Flash” persist. They’re not strangers on the highway—they’re people I know, people I love, people who are still alive. The Fullers, who gave us everything in Antigua. Veronica, who has shared my life for over two decades. My siblings, most of whom no longer speak to me since I began writing about our family. Writing about transient characters in a cinematic style is one thing. Doing the same with people who will read every word and measure it against their own memory of the same events—that’s something else entirely.

The cinematic approach I love—selecting key moments, recreating scenes, making choices about what’s in the frame and what isn’t—becomes an ethical minefield when your characters have phone numbers. Every scene you choose to include is a statement. Every scene you leave out is a different statement. And the people in those scenes have their own versions, their own truths, their own wounds. I found myself paralyzed not by writer’s block but by something worse: the knowledge that telling my truth would inevitably distort someone else’s.

That was the first reason I stopped. The second was simpler and harder to admit.

I did all this work—years of it—and there was no external validation. No agent knocking on the door. No reviews in the places that matter. No sales numbers that would make anyone nod approvingly. I’m not complaining; I’m being honest. The publishing world is what it is, and a seventy-four-year-old first-time memoirist with no platform and a famous aunt who overshadows him in every Google search is not exactly what the industry is looking for.

So I asked myself: if the only reason to keep writing is for my own growth, my own understanding, my own reckoning with the past—and it is—then what’s the best way to do that? Does it have to be two more books in a trilogy? Does it have to follow the same demanding, cinematic, scene-by-scene approach that nearly broke me the first time?

The answer, it turned out, was no.

What Comes Next

If you’ve been following this Substack, you’ll notice it’s organized into three sections: “Surfing the Interstates,” “Sahara Dust,” and “Green Mountain Flash.” The trilogy lives on—but not as books. Instead, these sections have become what I think of as a freeform canvas. Sketches and vignettes. Character studies. Moments that deserve their own space without the architecture of a full manuscript pressing down on them.

This isn’t retreat. It’s liberation.

A Substack post can be three hundred words about the color of Caribbean light at six in the morning. It can be a meditation on what it means to bury a dog on your own land in Vermont. It can be a portrait of Thea that doesn’t have to serve a narrative arc—it just has to be true. I can write about my father’s golden ring, the one he promised me for my twenty-first birthday and never delivered, without building an entire chapter around its absence. I can let the moment breathe.

The filmmaker in me hasn’t disappeared. I still think in scenes. I still believe that the best writing makes you see and hear and smell the world it describes. But I’ve stopped believing that those scenes need to be assembled into a feature film. Sometimes a short is more honest. Sometimes a single photograph says what an album can’t.

So here’s what this space is now: the place where three lives get told in whatever form they need. Some posts will be polished essays. Some will be raw sketches. Some will be fragments I’m still trying to understand. All of them will be true, as true as I can make them, written by a man who spent fifty years in motion and is finally learning what it means to sit still and remember.

The trilogy isn’t dead. It just learned to breathe differently.