Publish or Perish
I was coming home from jogging in Central Park when a nutty taxi driver came around a bend in the road and hit me. I flew 20 feet in the air, then came down and hit a pole hard. I lay on the road unconscious, in a coma, with seven broken bones. I was put in Intensive Care in the hospital, where no one thought I was going to live. They didn’t know me very well.
When I came out of the coma several days later, I remember thinking, ‘I’m very lucky to be here. I’ve really had a good life, done almost everything I wanted, had a good career as a psychotherapist, and a nice family and husband. I’ve traveled all over the world. But one thing I have not done that I’ve wanted to do all my life: I have not written. I’d had professional articles published, but I haven’t written the way I want to write. Full-time. Life hangs by a string. If I want to write, I better do it soon.”
So at the point when my life could have been cut short or compromised, I seized the moment to pursue an unrealized goal. I asked my wise son Zane, “Do you think I’d be crazy to give up a well-paying career for possibly a no-pay career? Zane answered, “I think you’d be crazy not to.” So at age 66, I guess you could say I had the courage to chance a new career and new venue. Two years later, after preparing my patients, I gave up a very prestigious, well-paying practice in Manhattan to take a chance on being a writer and not making a nickel. I came to Key West to a literary seminar and knew I wanted to stay. I loved to write, although I could paper a room with the rejections I’ve received. It’s exactly right for me. I want to write as long as I live.
Today, twenty-one books reflect the perseverance that combine my professional training as a psychoanalyst as well as my writing experience on the published page. My recent book, Marilyn Monroe: On the Couch was just published by Bancroft Press as part of my new “On the Couch” series where I dive into the psyche of famous pop culture icons. I particularly love this series because writing about icons is like living many lives. We are here for so short a time, and really know only a sliver of reality. My little fragment of existence gets a bit claustrophobic at times. Writing about people I admire and would like to be greatly expands my life. Next spring, Bancroft will publish Lady Macbeth: On the Couch.
Becoming a writer is the best decision I ever made in my life, and I don’t regret it for a moment. In fact, I should have done it earlier, but then I would have missed out on another very rich part of my life which helps me write.
We are a writing family. The widow of Rudy Bond, the acclaimed stage, screen, television actor, and author of “I Rode a Streetcar Named Desire”, I am also the mother of three children, Zane P. Bond, Jonathan H. Bond, and Janet Bond Brill, all of whom are published authors. I am the proud grandmother of eight, none of whom have published books… as of yet. As a wise friend said, “In Alma’s family, it is publish or perish.”
