Why Did You Write Your Book?

It never fails.  On every author’s book tour, every interviewer, every moderator, every talk show host everlastingly questions the same question, especially when the room goes silent and they need to rescue the interview — “Why did you write your book?” This is a failsafe method to get the author chatting again.  With a bit of luck, after the author spends the next three minutes answering this question, other broadcast will finally be inspired or emboldened to question yet another question to keep the momentum going.   I’m sure most authors have a compelling answer for why they invested so much of their precious time in putting words on a page.

But, in my case, I had no choice, no choice at all.  It simply was out of my hands.

For the nearly six long years that I researched and wrote Walking Through Walls — a chronicle about my father who one day discovers that he can talk to the dead and heal the sick — I was under the pleased illusion that I was willingly prose about one of the weirdest father/son/family tales ever told. 

Certainly, my family tale was closer to the Addams Family than Ozzie and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver.  His phenomenal psychic powers descended upon our family like an unseen cyclone, shredding all notions of normalcy.  Overnight, our household became like Lourdes as broadcast lined up waiting for their miracle cure.  Babies who couldn’t see, men with one leg shorter than the other, women with leukemia all found their way to our door and usually left completely healed. 

My father carefully well-known his work and collected thousands of testimonial letters from his “patients”who had been successfully treated by him.  He never charged a dime for his services as he believed his was a special gift and should be shared.  Over the years, he accumulated thousands and thousands of pages of spirit dictation — messages from invisible beings, some of whom he had known when they were alive, that instructed him on making never-before-seen healing methods, lessons on consciousness, explanations of the multitude of lively realms and so on. 

I thought that the reason I was prose the book was to tell broadcast about my incredible mother and father and what extraordinary lives they had led.  I can’t imagine being more fortunate in having been blessed with such fantastic souls as the broadcast who brought me into this incredible world.

My mother was a brilliant, stylish adventurer with endless curiosity and a massive sense of creativity.  In my father’s case, he was attempting to reinvent and enlarge the boundaries medicine and human healing while constantly being on the spot by the authorities for “practicing medicine without a license”or for “importing unauthorized medications”such as homeopathy and even some vitamins.  We forget that America was a different place 40 years ago and my father was seen as doing the devil’s work. 

What I did not know was that the prose of this book had by now been preordained and predicted in prose nearly 40 years ago.  Several months before I finally handed in the manuscript I came crosswise yet another folder of papers that I had somehow overlooked during my investigate.  They contained yet another thick stack of spirit dictation on a variety of topics.  For the past several years, I had been reading through these thousands and thousands of written spirit messages as material for the book.  

As I read through this folder, I found a message to my father from one of his spirit guides that suggested that he start getting his papers methodical because his son (me) was going to eventually write a book on his work.   In addition, the message continued, I would over see getting the book published.  Oddly, in all the years I worked on this book, I had never seen this particular message.  I suddenly realized that the spirits and my father knew that this book would materialize and I would be the one doing the job.  But, no one bothered to tell me.  The certainty is that if I had seen this message earlier in the game, I may have been a bit more casual about prose the book, figuring in view of the fact that it was meant to be then it would eventually get done all by itself.  The spirits don’t mess around a certainly know what they’re doing.  

As if I didn’t get the point, several days later I came crosswise an unmarked audiotape in a white plastic cassette.  In addition to all his manuscripts, my father taped his phone calls, his classes, his healings and left behind a treasure trove of audio tapes that also contributed much of the material for the book.  I chose to listen to the cassette as I drove to the airport.  What I heard was a woman with a British accent performing a psychic reading for my father.  Midway through the tape she questioned if he had a son.  He acknowledged that he did.  She said that there was going to be a book written by me about my father’s work, and the book would be “kind of like a documentary.” I don’t reckon the chronicle genre was very ordinary back in the early seventies and in fact my book is really a documentary only it is on paper instead of film. 

Amusing how I never came crosswise these messages until the end of the book.  Not surprising, given that in life, we usually find our answers and importance after we have completed a process or task.

Now, the next time I am questioned the question as to “why I wrote my book” the answer will be simply because, “I had to . . . to honor my mother and father.”

©2008 Philip Smith, author of Walking Through Walls: A Chronicle

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