Excerpts from 'The Night of the Gun'

It was a Helen Keller hand-under-the-water moment. Lordy, I can finally see! Cold fusion, right here in the bathroom stall; it was the greatest thing ever. My endorphins leaped at this new opportunity, hugging it and feeling all its splendid corners. ... Every addict is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first hit.

The state of Minnesota paid for at least three treatments, gave me general assistance when I was in the booby hatch, and, when I got custody of my children, food stamps to feed them. A few years later, I got cancer, and it paid for all of that, too. ... Not a bad investment, in retrospect. Not only did the state not have to bear the burden of permanently placing the twins in foster care, but I had been a very good candidate to graduate from jail to prison, which is a very expensive proposition. As a citizen with the wheels glued back on, I have probably kicked back more than $300,000 in federal and state taxes. I'm hoping they drop a little of it on a loser like me.

I had no idea what I was doing, but children teach you how to parent them. Leave the house without an extra diaper, and they will have some brutal, smelly event at a McDonald's. Let them wheedle their way into your bed so you can get some rest, and you will be fighting them off every single night of their young lives. Gradually, slowly, the three of us developed a routine at bedtime, with baths, prayers and stories -- stuff I had been raised on or had seen on TV.

Even now, my past is a phantom limb, something I can feel the presence of but cannot touch. ... Memoir is a very personal form of creation myth. Whether it is in the form of a book or something told across the intimacy of first-date candlelight, the this-is-me, this-is-who-I-am story is a myth in the classic sense, a tale with personal gods and touchstone. It becomes more and more sacred as it is told. And perhaps less and less truthful. Going back over my personal history has been like crawling over broken glass in the dark.