I Didn't Decide to Write It. I Decided Not to Delete It.

When I started two years ago, I made myself an outline. I wanted to know which chapters were ahead of me and in what order they would come. I will write about how I organised the writing some other time — right now something else matters.

Today I opened that outline, and it bears no resemblance to what is in the book.

There is not one line in it about my childhood. Nothing about what actually got me to a hundred and fifty kilos. And nothing about drugs.

When I sat down to the first sentence, I had no idea those things would be in the book.

How it got in there

The first manuscript was a few pages long. Literally a few. I gave it to my mentor to read, and his reaction was clear: you have to write far more about what came before.

In that version I dealt with my entire childhood in two sentences. I thought of it as an introduction. Something to mention before moving on to what mattered.

The first chapter is now 7,946 words and 37,734 characters without spaces.

That is the whole difference between what I meant to write and what I wrote.

How the writing went

Badly.

I have nothing to add to that, except that I sat there and kept writing. Several times my eyes flooded so much that I could no longer see the screen. I waited and kept writing.

The whole time I did not know whether I would ever let it out. I was not writing it because I had decided to be open. I was writing it because once I had started, I did not want to lie — and leaving it out would have been the same as writing that nothing had happened.

But I was nowhere near at peace with it.

When I accepted it

Only when the second manuscript was finished did I read the whole thing from beginning to end.

Then again some time later. And then once more.

It was on that third reading that something shifted. I stopped sitting over the text as the man it had happened to and started reading it as text. Only then did I accept that it could go out. Only then could I step outside myself.

I do not know whether it works this way for everyone. For me it was three readings and some time in between.

What is in the book

I am laying myself bare. My childhood is in there, and it was not a pretty one. Adolescence is in there. Crystal meth is in there. And there are things I will not give away here, because that is what the book is for.

I decided none of it in advance.

I decided not to delete it. That is everything that can truthfully be said about this decision.