Like just about everything else in SA, it seems the book “wasn’t supposed to happen that way.” Here’s how what we now are calling our SA booklet came about and is still coming about. It was written piece by piece over time, each piece responding to or arising from some need in the fellowship.
The first draft of the Twenty Questions was written in December 1977, a year before SA meetings began in Hollywood. “Free at Last” was first written and tested in August of 1981 for the first Dear Abby inquirers. “Sexaholism—The Addictive Process and Personality” first came out in February of 1982. Part II, “How It Works—The Practical Reality” was started in 1982 and not completed until this year. And so on….
Before ever being put into their present form, the pieces were tested on the membership and others over time. The effort bears the marks of this feedback throughout.
This stack of loose pieces grew and grew and became quite unwieldy; each new batch of inquirers got more material than the previous one. I had no choice, and was looking ahead to the time when I could “write the book.” Who would have guessed that apparently it had, for the most part, already been written in this very evolutionary process? The idea of putting these various pieces together did not come from me; it came from the membership. It arose from members and groups using the pieces and their increasing demand for more literature. Some groups began compiling the pieces unknown to me and stapling the mess together. They even added a title page, calling it SEXAHOLICS ANONYMOUS. I resisted such attempts, still planning I’d soon be able to sit down and “do it right,” designing the book as it should be done—so I thought. I even outlined it and wrote a Foreword, putting off pleas from members by telling them it was in process.
This practice of the groups and insistent requests from key SA members forced me to start putting the pieces together also. That’s how the “blue folder” came about. The wide acceptance and need for this then forced me to go the next step and have the mess bound properly, even though it was still xeroxed; it was just getting to be too much work to compile individual booklets as demand increased. The garage operation here was then at the height of its paper-mill madness. (Imagine trying to collate an order for twenty books of a hundred or so pages apiece and you can visualize the piles of paper strewn all over the indoor-outdoor carpet lining the garage floor.) This forced me to then try and organize the various pieces into something resembling a unified whole (if such was possible!). At this point I asked in a newsletter to the general membership for careful feedback from all members. I got some very good and carefully thought out edits and comments that really helped. Four members did complete edits of the entire manuscript.
As I look back on this whole incredible process, at what came about in such an unorganized manner, I’m amazed at what semblance of order and continuity there is. And I’m absolutely taken aback and even embarrassed by the overwhelmingly positive response. It’s truly a humbling experience. And perhaps, if we think about it, this was the way it should have happened. So no one can really take the credit. It came from the need and inspiration of the fellowship as much as from my own experience. And it’s like it was suddenly there to fill the need, and all without that deliberate imposition of the rational of what it “should have been.” Time will tell.
