“You Will Die” Release, History, and Thank You

Yesterday the Feral House version of You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos was released in both paperback and e-edition. The Feral House version is revised, updated, and has a new concluding chapter on the taboo of death. My illustrations from the self-published versions (Suburra Publishing) were removed and I begrudgingly admit this gives it a more professional appearance.

For those people who have supported me through this journey, I would like to thank you and share a little bit about the odyssey. I began writing this book about ten years ago when I was living in an abandoned schoolhouse in south central Pennsylvania after graduating from NYU Law. It was about five years later that I began self-publishing the first version. It was initially hand-bound. I used thin black cardboard from Ollie’s Bargain Outlet for the cover. For the second edition, I graduated to binding the book with covers made from cereal boxes.

An early fan of my book was a woman from Toronto. After e-mail correspondence and one short visit, I moved in with her on the corner of Bloor and Concord. I lived a bohemian existence there for about a year. Toronto is a wonderfully open-minded city. Evidence of this is that I received no complaints for the early promotional materials I posted in our window facing Bloor traffic.

Seekers Books in Toronto’s Annex was the first bookstore to carry You Will Die and one of its employees was the first person to request my autograph. Below is an old picture of a cereal-box You Will Die sitting for sale at Seekers.

I never expected much out of You Will Die. I thought it would be a short experiment. As I wrote in the introduction to my self-published version back in 2006, “If this book is a failure, I will try to conform to society, find a wife, get a real job, and settle down.”* The problem was that every time I was about to label it a failure and move on, I would catch a break. Some of the bigger breaks included winning the Montaigne Medal, having some blog posts/cartoons go viral, finding an agent (Jon Sternfeld), and finally finding a publisher.

Due to its nature, few people will be open-minded enough to read my writing, much less appreciate it. For those who have done both, I give my heartfelt thanks. You Will Die will probably never be a financial success, but one of the reasons I do not regret devoting such a large portion of my life to it is because of the fascinating people with whom it has brought me contact. In the “Death” chapter I wrote:

Life is absurd. No meaning is provided for you. It is marvelously bizarre, random, and comedic. You are brought here to wander and coexist for a brief moment, and then you are gone just as inexplicably and suddenly as you arrived. Many people never ponder death and merely accept the beliefs of those around them. They get pulled into the temporal concerns of the ego and the routine of robotic conformity.**

We will both die, so thanks for pondering life with me while we are here. If you are ever in DC and want to meet for a beverage containing the drug of either caffeine or alcohol, shoot me an e-mail.

Some You Will Die trivia: