I am truly grateful to Penguin Random House for allowing me to share my writing with you, as I recognise that the message offered from my story is so important to anyone who has felt trounced in life. I love that. I love that I can connect with people in this way. That thought takes away so much of the pain and hurt done to me.
I have some wonderful friends in this life. My grandmother used to tell me as a child that if I showed her who my friends were, then she could tell me who I was. I love to remember those words as I have found myself surrounded with really remarkable and soulfully open people. The many people I have befriended after they found me on Facebook or Twitter are much the same. They saw the film The Fear of 13 or they read this book and they went out of their way to write to me and say hello – I really appreciate that.
My mother, Jayne, passed away in 2011. My father, Michael, is still going at eighty-two years of age as I write this. My parents were together through fifty-six years of marriage. The remarkable ability they both had for love-filled endurance is deeply within me now, and so this book is dedicated to them.