Self-interested silence

From the same reader as the previous post:

Just finished your book. It's astonishing how self-aware and candid you are, without the denial and self-deception that's characteristic of sociopaths. Seems like you put an incredible amount of work both into self-awareness, manipulating people and fitting in. Can't imagine how hard it must be - and if it's easy, even less so.

In the Epilogue you address a lot of things I wondered about throughout the book, especially how risky it must have been to publish it. There must have been people at work or old lovers who read it and figured out it was you, it was them. What was their reaction?

M.E.:

A lot of people had a lot of different reactions. I actually have only heard from a couple of people who were sort of victims. One of them (I was really surprised to hear) was just really relieved to find out that was what had been going on and now sort of insists that I update her periodically with what's going on with my life in a very friendly way. I think most of them would rather (1) believe that I'm talking about someone else and not them (if the story is general enough) or (2) recognize themselves but feel like it would be beneath them to confront me about it. This is also partly because at least for a couple of characters, I combined stories and characteristics from multiple people into one to deal with fewer "characters" and to further disguise real events.