To anyone who believes they were born wrong.
To anyone who feels inadequate.
To anyone who is adrift.
This novel is, in part, autobiographical.
And now that I have written it, I’m a little ashamed.
I’m ashamed because I don’t think I deserve such attention. Mine isn’t an extraordinary life. I have done nothing special, nor have I experienced any big tragedy. It embodies sheer ordinariness. I’m an ordinary man with an all-in-all ordinary life.
And yet, I know, maybe that’s the point:
Why does it hurt so much sometimes?
If you know to be lucky and therefore belittle your discontent,
hush your feelings of inadequacy, sometimes even of uselessness...
then why don’t you know how you came here,
and find yourself without direction,
and don’t understand how to live better, in serenity?
Why have you stopped trying
and let yourself drift, at the mercy of the currents?
In a word, why do you feel so weak and consider yourself ungrateful?
You don’t know.
So you look around. And you notice that many ordinary people, just like you, with all-in-all ordinary lives and, therefore, as fortunate as you are,
are in pain.
Then I invite you to simplicity.
Simplify.
Leave out the autobiographical details of my story.
They don’t matter.
Let it all go and rather, between the lines,
look for the essence.
This book is not the story of a failed writer, nor is it the story of a man who failed to keep his family together. In other words, it’s not the story of how he failed to achieve his greatest dreams.
This book is here to tell you that you can have it all,
but that if you think you don’t deserve it, that you don’t measure up,
that you are somehow and to some extent wrong,
you will be left with nothing.
What I would like is that at the end of the story,
both you and I would live our respective lives better, in serenity.
I don’t think I’m up to the task, but I have to try.
If I succeed, I’m sure the world will benefit from it.
It will, from you and from me.
