How this book, this 'living document', is going to work...

I am Misi Blum. Well, that’s not entirely the truth. Misi Blum is my alias, and the only untruth I will tell you. To protect the people I love from the pain a brutally honest memoir can cause, I am forced to tell this one tiny lie. You see, if I wrote under my real name, I’d have to slant, veil and camouflage what really happened, and what I really think. The resulting story would have absolutely no importance at all – and that’s the very reason I am finally here, after so many abortive attempts at telling my story: my story is important because it has so much hope to offer. It can teach and help you in ways that a friend’s glib advice over coffee simply couldn’t.

Like rings upon rings in the heart of a tree, my story is like this: stories within stories, with no real beginning that I’ve been able to grasp and use as an anchor to start writing from. There must be almost a hundred crumpled up pages torn, in hurried shame, from almost as many notebooks… from ordinary lined school notebooks, to handmade paper journals covered in delicate, dust-pink remnants of sari. Yesterday I tore out and pushed to the bottom of my wastepaper bin my very last attempt on paper. After reading Louise de Salvo’s thesis on “Writing as a Way of Healing”, I realise the therapeutic importance of sharing my stories – for myself, and for you – and that’s why I am here, at last.