Can you recreate yourself from nothing?
One of my favorite stories is "The Circular Ruins" by Jorge Luis Borges. In the story, a man on a quest seeks to dream another man, creating him during his dreams. He works day by day, creating a hand, a heart, a lung, until his creation is complete and alive. Through my fiction, looking back over the past thirty years, I see that I too have been seeking to create a new man, myself. Much of my fiction is autobiographical, especially the novels. In 1995, I had a complete meltdown, having never considered that I was mentally ill, although I had been seriously challenged since I was a child. No one ever said, "I think you are depressed" or indicated that something was wrong. It was not a possibility. I was just different, suffering long bouts of depression and bursts of mania. My mother was seriously mentally ill, bipolar like me, but she would never consider mental illness and chalked up her pain to the work of the devil. It wasn't until I was thirty-two, fresh ...