Background to "Furies"

As some of you know, I have spent some ten years of my life as a rather feted convention speaker and marginal "celebrity" on the professional lecture circuit. I cannot claim that I was ever a bona fide "celebrity" commanding speaking fees as Jane Pauley may have earned, but I have had prime bookings at national and, three times, even international conventions. At the state level, not infrequently I have had higher billing than their respective senators.

As part of that life on the road, and as a supplemental source of income, I did stock up on previous titles of books and articles I had written, including my autobiography, The Furies and the Flame. I want to talk about that book today, because of all the things I have done, literarily-not counting my Coming Attraction, of course!-I feel proudest of this rather handsome hard cover, now simply nicknamed "Furies".

Furies is a very emotional, personal account of what it took for a young immigrant wife and mother to come to America out of a Third World country, trying to find help for her savagely handicapped child. I am talking about Erwin, of course, born 1959. I wrote this book in the early 1980s, in the wake of the breakup of my 20-year marriage, caused by the pain of having had to place that child, then 13, in a private institution. Furies is a tearful book-and, I believe, a "strictly women's" book, although the greatest compliment that was ever paid me for Furies came from an anchor journalist in the Northwest who, on a weekend, packed his tent to go on a hunting trip and took my book along.

He never got to hunt. To quote him verbatim the following week when he invited me to do his show: "That damn book kept me up half of the damn night!" This show was watched in some five states, and after that interview, my publisher's switch board was jammed.

Unlike The Wanderers, which I featured last month and which has strong historical content but (at least in my opinion) lacks stylistic finesse, Furies was written with my heart's blood and edited by a spectacularly grammatically sensitive lady, then editor of Arena Press which published the title in 1984, and it reads very smoothly. Ernst commented some time ago that he thought the cover is too stark-what with the lightning against an abysmally gray sky!-but I love that book for personal reasons, and I believe it will always be felt by me to be one of my "crowning achievements." (P.S. The cover has since been re-designed by Ernst and now features an elegant dust jacket. . . )

The book ends with a chapter that to this day still makes me cry. It describes my feelings as I had to relinquish Erwin because my emotional reserves simply gave out on me, and I chose to take hold of my own life since I could not live through my child's limitations. This book has a very sad ending, but many things have happened since that day.

When I finished "Furies" and put it on the market, it turned out that it was a good decision to free myself of what was, in effect, a stranglehold on my emotions and my intellect. Now, Erwin, too, lives on his own, and I am free to do what I was meant to do. We are both much, much happier. But for years, I have carried two households on a freelance income, which has been much, much harder than many people know. And to this day, I pay for keeping him safe - more money than I use for myself.

In coming issues, I will talk about Erwin, off and on, because he happens to be still a part of me-and who knows what will happen to me! The road I have chosen as an activist for our kin and our cause is not exactly easy. It could well be , one merry day, when, thanks to the "Zundelsite" and "Lebensraum!" and other projects yet to come, the enemy will "take me out"-though, trust me, not without a struggle!

Those of us who have chosen visibility now stand within the firing line, and the struggle is getting more serious. We know that in our bones. We also know that we will win this one - regardless of what happens to the soldiers!

If that should happen-for whatever reason-I would hope that there will be people out there within my own circle of friends who will help to keep Erwin safe in where he is living now: in a private home affording him both safety and mobility to the extent that he can handle it.

That is, in part, why I am featuring "Furies" today-as a title that tells about me.

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