Do yourself a favor and read this scintillating interview at Too Beautiful with my friend, fellow writer, Anne Mini, with whom I once spent four hours in a tiny Montana airport (along with true crime writer Anne Rule) when our flight out of Kalispell was delayed by weather. We've been buddies ever since. Her memoir, "A Family Darkly: Love, Loss and the Final Passions of Philip K. Dick" won the Pacific Northwest Writers Association's Zola Award for Best Nonfiction Book/Memoir in 2004 and is due out this year from Carroll & Graf.


Here's a teaser for you--

"Being totally honest -- on paper or elsewhere -- is hard. There were times in the process where I was HUGELY tempted to turn away from the darker aspects of the comedy I had lived. Throughout the writing process, I was very afraid of how people would react -- not Philip’s fans, who I knew from experience tend to be very smart and possessed of wonderfully offbeat senses of humor, but of those closest to me and to Philip. I was terrified of what my mother would think, for instance.

"Here again, the lawsuit threats have been most clarifying, at a very fundamental level. It’s one thing to face down your creeping insecurities when you are not sure that they will actually manifest; it’s quite another when your fears show up with their own lawyer. So much of my writing process in the intervening months has been about making very, very sure that I was saying what I wanted to say -- and make very sure that I was depicting others exactly as I saw them at various points in my life, without prevarication..."