The story starts in 1971, when my mother left my biological father and took me with her. There was no court, no order, and no signature from anyone, and within a few years my last name had been changed on every record I had: school files, doctor's charts, all of it. Today, the word for that is kidnapping. It doesn't sit easy next to the word mother, and I use it 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.

The pattern didn't break because I got wiser. It broke because at fifty, on the worst night of my life, every way I'd ever learned to hold myself together stopped working at once. What came after was work, and I didn't do it alone. I wrote my own life down: what happened, when it happened, who was there, all the way back to the beginning. Every week I sat across from someone and said things out loud that I'd never told anybody in fifty years. I read everything I could find about control, about why people stay, about what growing up in a house like mine does to a person, and my own life kept showing up on those pages. I'd spent my whole life paying attention to everyone except myself. Once I saw it, I couldn't pretend I hadn't.

A lot of that seeing happened in the Oregon woods. After the divorce I hiked almost every day, and somewhere out there I found the way I still explain all of it to people. Life is like a hike in the woods. You come to junctions, you choose left or right, and most of the time you have no way of knowing which way is yours. The junctions that matter most are people: who you love, who you stay with, who you let close. Then years later you notice you're not happy, and the only way out is backward. Walk the trail in reverse, find the junction where things went wrong, and be honest about why you chose the way you did. I did that work on my own trail, and every wrong turn led back to the same house. Finding that out is the whole story and the book is me handing it to whoever needs it next.

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 those years, someone whose job it was to listen 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 bring is fifty years of living it and what those years taught me, which turned out to be the thing I needed most and couldn't find anywhere. 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.