A Blacked-Out Space in My Life

My "author's statement for Stealing Fire: Memoir of a Boyhood in the Shadow of Atomic Espionage on Amazon:

"There had been a sort of large blank space in my life. I now sometimes imagine my life as a vast FBI file, and that would be a hefty section that had been blacked out. The problem was not that I could not remember things. I remembered plenty. But it all seemed arbitrary, beyond even the possibility of explanation. On learning definitively that my father had been a Soviet spy, I was initially appalled. Later I felt relief, because many circumstances of my life, such as the way my parents moved six times a year, gradually began to make sense. But there is more to this than just my story.

My book Stealing Fire tells of history much as I experienced it, mostly through the eyes of a child. But to write it was more difficult than I had ever anticipated. I had not only to deal with personal ordeals, but, as I eventually came to realize, with a vast number of highly stereotyped images that now pass for history, yet serve mostly to obscure experience. There are so many layers of hero-worship, demonization, nostalgia, inflated rhetoric, theater, and hype that the underlying reality seemed almost completely obscured. My book is a quest to uncover the human reality behind historical events, concealed as this is by inflated rhetoric, arbitrary censorship, and all sorts of half-articulate fears."

http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/09...