#1 / Love is Reckless
Some books have to be written. Some stories have to be told. If they aren’t written, if they aren’t told, they transform into gates on the road, the latches stiffened with rust. You know the road I’m talking about. The road of our lives, the road we are blessed to travel on. If we don’t walk or run or dance forward, if we slump down at the gate and only look back, then our journey is done.
Reckless is that kind of book: a story that had to be told. But make no mistake, Reckless is a novel, not a memoir. Yes, my own experience inspired the story, but other people’s stories informed it too. Above all, the characters had their say. They shaped the novel into an arc, and I told it, best as I could.
About that ‘inspiration’ I mentioned. In my journal entries, I’ll call my beloved son ‘Hale.’ Hale wasn’t his given name. It was a name he used, when he was pretending he wasn’t ill. Pretending he wasn’t tortured by his persecutor: schizophrenia.
Hale was brave. He fought the tormentor all his adult life.
Once, trying to help my son, trying to create a future for him (I was always ‘trying to help’) I asked him what he wanted to do with his life. He left a scrap of paper for me to see. On it were written six short words, seven acute syllables: “I just want to be normal.” Even now, thirteen years after Hale’s death at 38, those words break my heart.
There are in existence a few—painfully few— books written by people who struggle with schizophrenia. Two remarkable and beautiful memoirs are: “The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays” by Esmé Weijun Wang; and “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness” by Elyn R. Saks. And there are accounts written by parents about their children: Ron Powers’ “No One Cares About Crazy People” is a tour-de-force and a labor of love. “Every Thing Is Fine” by Vince Granata is a finely-crafted memoir of the author’s life with his brother.
But for my part, I’m a mystery writer. The story I was inspired to tell would be told through fiction. Fiction gives me my voice. There was no question about it—a novel was the only way.
I’d written three novels during the course of my son’s illness. Looking back, I see that my work was a refuge. It helped me endure. Because those who love a person with severe mental illness do suffer, to be sure. Their experiences are painful, they are all too real, and they deserve to be known.
But we must never forget that their suffering is only a shadow of the suffering the loved one undergoes.
“Reckless Words” is a journal about a journey. Week by week, step by step, I’ll tell you how I wrote the novel Reckless, about the dilemmas I faced and the decisions I made along the way.
Shall we begin at the beginning? The title of the novel comes from a quote by the great 13th Century Sufi poet, Rumi:
Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong,
consuming herself, unabashed.
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