For the last few years, I have been writing a novel based on the true story of 2.5 years of my life as a teenage runaway. I chose to write it as a novel rather than a memoir for a variety of reasons, mainly because I think the story goes beyond my personal experience, and my memory isn’t always accurate enough to justify a memoir, especially when the story I’m telling incorporates details that may or many not have been true in “real life”.

The last third of the novel is set in a commune in southern Vermont, where I actually lived for six months or so before moving to another commune in northern Vermont where I eventually began to ‘grow up’. The time in the first commune was punctuated by a horrible fire that burned it to the ground and killed four young people in the process. In the aftermath of the fire, everyone who was left behind dispersed, and in my real life, I had not heard from anyone who was there since then.

Until…