I began writing my memoir of my ashram childhood more than twenty years ago, while I was still living it: sometimes on paper, sometimes only in my mind:

And then Ratsy grabbed my vitamin C in his whiskery mouth and escaped under the sofa! "Oh, no!" shouted Daddy. (Really he said a bad word but I can't say those.) "Oh, Baba!" shouted Mommy. (Mommy always shouts " Baba!") "Ha ha ha!" I laughed. (I was seven.)

Turning back and smirking as he clutched the steering wheel, the dwarf began driving the Jeep up the mountain, I thought. No, wait. Turning back and leering as he clutched the steering wheel, the dwarf began driving the Jeep up the perilous, twisting, mountain road. (I was eleven.)

But after I left the ashram, I kept my stories to myself. I was well into my twenties before I could face explaining that I had grown up in an ashram in India because my parents had moved there to worship Meher Baba, a deceased holy man who was most famous for having been Pete Townshend's guru and for not speaking for forty years, or that my mother was still there, worshipping away. I was afraid that if people knew this, they would think I was weird and would not want to date me.

Unfortunately, this strategy tended to backfire.

My date: "So where did you live when you were a kid?"

Me: "Uh...India."

My date: "Wow! How fascinating! That must have been great!"

Me: " Uh...Not really."

My date: " Really? Why not?"

Me: " Uh...Well...I was the only foreign kid in the town."

My date: " How come?"

Me: " Uh..." And so forth.

My dates invariably thought I was weird and never called me again. Then one date I tried an experiment:

My date: " So where did you live when you were a kid?"

Me: "My insane hippie parents raised me in a bizarre ashram in this cobra-infested middle-of-nowhere town in India. They were followers of this guru named Meher Baba, who they thought was God. I don't believe in the guy, myself. We moved there was I was seven, and I left when I was twelve."

Long silence.

Me: " So where did you grow up?"

He called me back.

After that I started telling people the truth as a matter of course. It turned out that while trying to hide my childhood made me constantly brood over it, being open about it made it seem less of a hideous secret and more of an unusual and juicy story to tell.

When I realized that, I wrote this book.