From time to time, the question is asked: What book changed your life?

In a public forum, my answer might be:

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind
• Allen Ginsberg’s Howl
• T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

But in private, my honest answer is: a little self-published book by a psychiatrist from Palo Alto whose name I forget (Gerald Hill, I Googled it), but the book was Divorced Father. It was published earlier in the year in which Warren’s mother left. At a time when I thought I might never see my son again, that I would have to give up my house and move somewhere, anywhere, else, that I would have to pick up the pieces and start my life over, this book convinced me that the most important thing for me to do was to commit to being father to my son. To suck it up, face the in-laws up and down the street, to hang on to the house and provide him a home, as much as it hurt, as difficult as it was, day by day.

It was the best decision I ever made, and that book helped me make it.