My son told me about a real life event that unfolded in the city where he lives, Austin, Texas - about a man who disappeared was wasn't found for months. He was a man of some means, came from a good family and had a job and family and all that. But he simply walked away from it, and that touched off a search that went on for months. Police couldn't find him (surprise, surprise), but a private detective finally did. The guy was living in an abandoned motel in a bad section of town, and he'd taken on the persona of a street person - new name, an invented history, and no memory at all of who he'd been before the disappearance.
"So where have you been?" My son asked the guy when he finally reappeared. "They call it dissociative fugue. I forgot who I was, just walked away and became somebody else," he said. Then he went on to tell about how the private detectives found him, about his therapy to recover his memory of his former life, his real life. This guy was fortunate to have had relatives who could afford to track him down.
Hearing that story set off all sorts in bells in my head. As a writer, I'm always looking for a good story, so I started doing research about dissociative fugue. It's a very real thing, and although rare, there are some interesting stories out there about people who've gone through it. Researchers don't know a lot about it, but they've put together some interesting facts. A victim of dissociative fugue often creates an elaborate history of the new character they assume. They don't remember a thing about their former lives, and once found and rehabilitated, they can't remember their fugue state. Stress is the most common cause for this disorder. A person can get so stressed, so unhappy with their existence, that they simply walk away from it. In other words, put a person under enough pressure, make them disenchanted enough, and dissociative fugue can take place.
I'd been going through a tough period when I heard this story. A major heart attack had put me in a hospital's ICU ward for a week. My hospital and doctor bills were enormous, and my high dollar health care insurance turned out to be bogus. They paid a fraction of the costs, then announced they'd pay no more. I hired a lawyer to sue them (that didn't work out), and then I hired another lawyer to get me out of the mess. Bill collectors were unrelenting, vicious, and I nearly folded under the pressure. I hated my life, got depressed . . . and then I got pissed off and fought back. And I won. But I never stopped thinking about what could've happened to me, and so I wrote about it. Writing that book was good therapy for me. It made me study the rotten health care system we have in this country, and it made me do a lot of research about how to deal with stressful situations.
The book ended up being called The Blue House on Sterling, and I called upon my down to earth, common sense voice Cletus Duhon to write it. I wanted to take all the highly technical and difficult to understand stuff and turn it over to someone who could break it down to where the average person could understand it. I wanted to point out the flaws in our health care system, and I wanted to show how to deal with them . . . and I think I did that. Is it easy reading? Not exactly, but it is factual and not difficult to understand. Is it interesting, engaging? Yes, I think it is because the book introduces some unusual characters. It is a story of discovery. It's about how a man was rescued from a dissociative fugue state and how he recovered.
I started the book in 2005 and am now in the final stages of proof reading it. Once that's done, it will be published. Although I never expect immediate success with a book, The Blue House on Sterling is perhaps my best work as an author and it will do well . . . when people start to discover it. If you like to read books that are different, filled with adventure in route to discovery, you'll like this one.
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