The story starts in 1971, when my mother left my biological father and took me with her. There was no court, no order, no signature on any piece of paper, and within a few years my last name had been changed on every document a boy accumulates. Today, the word for that is kidnapping. It's a hard word to set next to the word mother, and I hold it steady anyway, because it's the frame for everything that came after.

I was raised on a pig farm in Sonoma County by a stepfather whose control filled every room of the house. I learned early that love and fear could share the same address, and I carried that lesson into adulthood without knowing I had it. I built a career in the early days of the internet, launched a startup that did a million dollars in its first year, and looked, from the outside, like a man who had it together. Everybody said so. I believed them. I married three times, each time to a version of the same household I grew up inside, and each time I called it love.

It took the worst night of my life, at fifty, to finally see the pattern. Years later, I learned there was a name for the route I'd walked: the parent-to-partner pipeline. The home you survive becomes the love you recognize, and the cruelest part is that it feels like fate. I'd walked it three times before I understood I was on a road at all.

I didn't come to writing through a classroom. I came to it the long way, through fiction first, stories about witches and the dark that turned out to be a way of circling the truth without landing on it.

Somewhere in a long stretch of therapy, a therapist read an essay I'd written and told me something I've never been able to put down. Writing isn't just something that helps you, she said. It's who you are. When I finally turned that attention on my own life, writing stopped being a hobby and became the work: a way of giving language to things that had only ever lived in me without words.

I'm not a therapist, a doctor, or a lawyer, and I'll never pretend to be. What I have is what I lived and the words it cost me half a century to find. I write about coercive control and narcissistic abuse the way you'd talk about them at a kitchen table at one in the morning, for people who know something is wrong but haven't found the words for it yet.