For over forty years I was very good at looking fine.

I was the person everyone believed had it together. The credentials were real. The career was real. The performance was exceptional. What was happening underneath was something else entirely — and it took a very long time, and a total system failure, for the honest accounting to begin.

The memoir I am completing is the forensic audit that took forty years of evidence to make possible. It begins on the Jersey Shore, where my curriculum started. It moves through the corporate boardrooms of my high-performance era and the reckoning that followed. It finds its way to a psychiatric facility in Florida, a rain-soaked temple in Tokyo, and a quiet New England kitchen bathed in pale sunlight. And it ends, as honest accountings tend to, somewhere unexpected.

It is about the specific cost of high-functioning excellence — what it takes from you psychologically, relationally, and humanly when the performance becomes the whole of what you are. It is about the particular way the mental health system fails the high-functioning — when competence becomes the mask that nobody thinks to look behind. It is about three generations of a family that absorbed its losses quietly and kept the surface undisturbed. And it is about what you find on the other side of the wreckage, which turns out to be more than you expected.

It is sharp. It is honest. It is occasionally funny in the way that only completely true things can be funny.

It is for the tough kids.

The ones who learned too young to go to sleep anyway. The ones who have been fine for so long that fine stopped feeling like a lie.