The year my father died, I read a sto­ry in school about a lit­tle boy who builds ships in the bot­toms of bot­tles. This lit­tle boy lived by the maxim that if you could ima­gine the worst thing that could ever hap­pen, you would never be sur­pri­sed when it did. Not kno­wing that this maxim was the very defi­ni­tion of anxie­ty, as given by Freud (“‘Anxiety’ des­cribes a par­ti­cu­lar state of expec­ting the dan­ger or pre­pa­ring for it, even though it may be an unk­nown one”), I set to work culti­va­ting it. Already an avid “jour­na­ler,” I star­ted pen­ning nar­ra­tives of hor­rible things in my school note­book. My first ins­tallment was a novel­la tit­led “Kidnapped” that fea­tu­red the abduc­tion and tor­ture of my best friend, Jeanne, and me by a deran­ged hus­band-wife team. I was proud of my talis­ma­nic opus, even drew an ornate cover page for it. Now Jeanne and I would never be kid­nap­ped and tor­tu­red without our having fore­seen it ! I thus felt confu­sed and sad­de­ned when my mother took me out for lunch “to talk about it.” She told me she was dis­tur­bed by what I had writ­ten, and so was my sixth-grade tea­cher. In a flash it became clear that my sto­ry was not some­thing to be proud of, as either lite­ra­ture or pro­phy­lac­tic.