This is as good a view of emotional pain as I’ve ever read.
Mike’s writing is accessible, simple, straightforward, and clear. The honesty is breathtaking.
Mike’s language is vigorous and muscular. His writing is breathtaking and fresh. Coherent and strong. His “voice” is honest and unaffected. The world needs his voice.
Mike’s book is excellent—as moving and as honest as it gets. He has a gift! This is definitely a message that needs to be heard.
I am honored to be trusted to read this. It is a gift to be allowed to step into a world so intimate, so real, and so transparent.
The power of Mike’s despair and depression are an insight that others will benefit from, but not enjoy.
Pastoral and Humane. That’s what I have to say. I bow respectfully and with deepest appreciation.
Mike seems to be doing his own work as well as the work of so many other people who are unable to do it, either because of an inability to language it, or because of an unwillingness to dwell in the face of it.
It seems that Mike is unable to do otherwise, and the world, though perhaps not grateful and possibly even indifferent, will be blessed for it.
Those to whom this book “belongs” will come to it or it will be brought to them.
I’m devastated by Mike’s devastation. Reading entry after entry of free fall into the abyss, I want to express an archetypal, collective, “I’m sorry,” for all of us who went on with our lives as usual—or fell, to some extent—while Mike fell farther just beside us.
Reading Mike’s book was like watching a home video of a hurricane or tornado moving toward a person or place you love. It’s difficult to watch it happen yet so hard to turn away. I had to watch—had to read. I become fixated on the power of the emotion.
Those clichéd platitudes that Mike recalls people saying to him. Those are not the people who can write this book. Mike, however, could and did write this book. It will give words to people in the same situation—words they know intuitively but can’t come up with on their own.
Those who are suffering need people like Mike to help them articulate their experience. Not many people are brave enough to wrestle with God; we need more Jacobs to show us how.
Mike Sollom 