The writing in your memoir flows so effortlessly. As you age in the book your writing becomes more distinct and self reflective. Was this writing style a choice or something that seem to happen organically?

Mikel Jollett I started in the child’s voice, and about halfway through writing the book I realized that I wanted to write in four different voices, one for each section of the book. At that point I’d already written an ending, so I deleted that — about 60,000 words — and re-wrote the second half of the book. So, it felt exciting. Philip Roth had this thing of searching for the sentence with the most life. He’d spend months just writing, and he might be a hundred pages in before he gets to a paragraph that he thinks has real life to it, and he’d delete the first hundred pages and start the story there. I didn’t do a hundred pages, but what I did was similar.

I spent around six months gathering the world of the book — writing about places, sights, sounds, smells, memories, and doing interviews with people from Synanon, my brother, my mom and others. During that time, I had all these different voices. One of them was the elegiac “I’m 40 years old and here’s how I’m reflecting on my life” voice, which is how I think most memoirs are, which works. But I thought I should try just writing from the perspective of the day I left Synanon, just put the reader in this room. Then I wrote it and set it aside, and went back and read it a few weeks later. When I read it I said “I want to read that book.” It was Toni Morrison’s thing, where you write the book you want to read. But then I immediately said “I have no idea how to write this.” I could have written an essay, an article or fiction. But I didn’t know what to do. It became this project of how to create the voice so that when I’m writing, I don’t have to think about all the things that go into the voice. I can just write. So, all of that effortlessness took a crazy amount of effort.

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