His Side of the Story

摘要

I've always been given to remembrance and remembering-more when I was younger even than when I was President. When I was a young man, I thought about my childhood all the time. It's a Southern thing; we're all obsessed with the past. I was very blessed that both my mother and I saved virtually everything from my childhood. I was always a pack rat. I never had writer's block once I started. But I did have periods when I had to just get up and drop it-it was just too hot. I have that pretty gripping scene in the early part of the book where my stepfather was drunk and he had the gun in his hand and he shot it off, and my mother and I were standing in the hall and the bullet goes in the wall between us. I felt it all over again. It was frightening. I learned some things or at least learned how to describe some things from my life. For example, this whole idea about having a life that required me to be a secret-keeper and how if you have a whole part of your life you can't talk about, then you wind up living parallel lives.