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This book started and stopped for thirty years before it found its shape.

The first version was about the fire. I thought the dormitory fire was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and for a long time that was the story I tried to tell. But the journal entries kept going further back — past the hospital, past the dorm room, past college, past the church, all the way back to a kitchen table in December when I was four years old. The fire wasn't the beginning. It was just the first time the outside world could see what had been burning for years.

I began writing letters. Not to a publisher, not to an audience — to someone. To the boy I was before the lessons started. And in the writing, things I had never been able to name began to arrange themselves. The anxiety. The silence. The behaviors I had carried for decades without understanding where they came from. Piece by piece, the story assembled itself the way a puzzle does when you finally find the corner pieces you've been missing.

The book broke me. It also healed me. I don't say that lightly, and I don't mean it was comfortable. I mean that the act of writing this story forced me to sit with things I had spent a lifetime learning how to leave the room on.

Dear Joseph is creative nonfiction. Every word of it is rooted in a life that was lived — my life. But I have altered certain details and reshaped some of the people in it, not to protect myself, but to keep the story focused on what matters. In some cases, the full truth of a person would have overwhelmed the page with a kind of darkness that served no one. This is not a book about settling scores. It is a book about finding your way back to yourself.

I have needed to tell this story for over thirty years. I hope you find something in it that you need too.