In Skin Game, I write about my history as a “cutter." It has been estimated that, in the U.S. alone, as many as two to three million people engage in self-injury--deliberately cutting, burning, or otherwise injuring themselves for the relief of overwhelming psychological distress. For two decades, I was one of them.

For most people, it's hard to imagine what would drive a person to self-injury. In a spate of recent books and movies, self-injury seems to have become a kind of short-hand for indicating "character around the bend." So people ask me why, after keeping my history of self-injury a secret, I turned around and chose to reveal it in such a very public way, through a book published in my own name.

There isn’t one specific answer to that question. In part, I wanted to write the book because there is a great deal of misunderstanding about self-injury, about what it is and what it isn’t. I wanted readers to understand that even apparently ‘normal’ people might be self-injurers—that it could be your sister, your best friend, your child. I wanted to try to dispel some myths and misconceptions: that self-injury constitutes a suicidal gesture; that self-injurers are by definition severely emotionally disturbed; that they are necessarily the product of terrible, abusive environments; that they are, by the verdict of too many in the counseling/therapeutic community, ‘incurable.’

I also wrote the book because I was really intrigued by questions about identity, about how you define your ‘self,’ how you become that person you call your self, whether you can even ever say who is the true self, given that we all play different roles in different contexts. Also, I am interested in the way that even those closest to us have secret, inner lives we know nothing about. What do we reveal, what do we conceal, and how do those choices about revealing and concealing shape our lives?

When the book first came out, I was terribly apprehensive about what the response would be among friends, people I worked with, my relatives—none of whom had known about my history of self-injury. I rather expected people to edge away from me uncomfortably and hem and haw and not know quite what to say. You read the book, after all, and you get a detailed picture of my inner life that you might not really want to think about when you run into me at the grocery store or the high-school reunion. And I'll admit, it's not necessarily the first thing I'll bring up when people ask me, "So what have you written?"

Yet I was surprised and relieved to find that so many people responded very positively. Many have told me that the emotional struggles I write about resonated deeply with their own experiences. Beyond the specifics of my particular circumstances, Skin Game is really a coming-of-age story, and in that context I think it covers often painfully familiar ground for many readers.

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Date updated: 11.22.04

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