Why donate all the proceeds to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society?

Amy Engel was one of my closest friends. She understood me in a way that few people have, and I personally didn’t understand myself at the time I knew her. This book has taken on many forms since I started it in 2001. If I remember correctly, I actually started it before she passed away. It was more like a journal then. I just felt like my life was too fucked up not to write down. After she died I became obsessed with publishing the book. I wanted it in every hand of every human being on the planet. I was consumed by grief, and I was looking for some sort of ultimate truth or release from the pain. Some way to keep her living after she her body was dead.

In college I started to think of it as my opus. The one must do thing that would give my brief time on this earth meaning.

You might think I craved sympathy, but that’s not it, because sympathy was all I got at school and it made me sick.

I talk a lot about my depression and self-loathing in this book. And while I’m happy to say I’m out of the woods at the moment, I live in fear of mental illness and the role it will play in my future.

Amy had this incredible calm in the face of death. I will never forget it. When she was pronounced terminal, she requested that any useful parts of her body be donated to science. To the cause. To help other people avoid her fate. In some ways this book is the child of my stubborn pride and of Amy’s humility.

- Tom Feulner, December 2010, book release party