Stories We Tell
Seven lives, told from the inside.
Giovanni, Chris, Anne, Mei and Mark, Barbara, Antonio, and Malcolm arrive from different directions and carry different burdens. A man whose drinking was the least interesting thing about his loneliness. Someone whose search for recovery kept running into rooms that had no category for them. A mother whose compulsion looked like devotion. A man who found what he was looking for in prison, of all places.
These stories are fictionalized. Nondual Recovery has no membership and no body of adherents, so there were no testimonials to collect. Rather than manufacture them or dress up my own experience as a chorus of voices, I wrote composites: invented people assembled to show how these principles might live in an actual human life. No story describes a particular person. Any resemblance to a real individual is unintended.
What fiction can do that argument cannot is show a principle under pressure. It is one thing to read that the craving self and the resisting self were never two. It is another to watch someone discover that at three in the morning with nobody awake to tell.