House of Pain: New and Selected Essays

Preface

P R E FA C E When I was a child I was fascinated by my father’s daring.He had come miraculously through the war, and now all his life seemed blessed with a magical quality, both rich and impervious, and he launched himself into it,laughing all the way.He married the beauty queen and had seven strapping sons. He became a respected professor and turned out hundreds of doctors and dentists from his student body at Northwestern University. It was something of a fairy tale, and I was part of it. Yet all along I felt that to be a real part of it, I had to be annealed in the fires as he had been. I felt that I needed some stamp of authenticity to participate fully in this life. In a sense, my career as a writer has been a long quest for that authenticity. And these essays are a product of that quest. They eventually led me down the road to writing another book, Deep Survival. I folded all these experiences into that book and explored the question that had always taunted me: who lives, who dies, and why? Along the way, I learned that the quest for authenticity always involves risk and does not always end happily. These essays represent my own formative years as a writer and have formed the basis of all my work that came afterward.They represent my attempt to face down danger and prove myself. And they later went on to become the foundation of my quest to understand what happens in that earthly bargain and why it happens the way it does. ix HOUSE OF PAIN ...