Cai asked Mikel Jollett:

How did you decide to write a memoir versus fictionalizing it? Was it partly about catharsis, therapeutic process, a dedication to honesty? Other?

Mikel Jollett It never occurred to me to fictionalize it. The question that started the memoir was, “Why am I so sad?” After my dad died, I knew what I wanted to write about. Why did his death hit me so hard? He was sick for a lot of years, we knew he was going to only last so long. He actually lived longer than we thought he would because he kept doing his regimen. I thought I was going to write a much shorter book. I think I set out to write something like a 30,000-word memoir.

I had just finished 'Between the World and Me,' a brilliant book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, where the device was a letter to his son about race. When I read that I thought, “I want to do something similar but maybe a letter to my father.” It’s going to be about addiction, mental illness, and I wanted to get into that. So, I started to write a book about my dad, and the more I got into it, I realized I needed to give the kid a voice.

The artist part of my head doesn’t care about the personhood. Whether I’m writing a book or writing a song, I don’t even think about how I’m going to feel about singing it or having it be in the world. For years it didn’t even cross my mind. Then when the book was done, before I even signed on with Celadon Books, it occurred to me that it was really personal. I then started having the fear of exposure. But it didn’t cross my mind when I was writing it. My focus was really just capturing the story perfectly; I didn’t care how I felt about it.

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