Nathan: Ok. Let's start here:
Please explain why you felt compelled to write this book in the first place. What was it that you hoped to communicate to the reader? What drove the creative process for you as you started out writing your first book?
Please explain why you felt compelled to write this book in the first place. What was it that you hoped to communicate to the reader? What drove the creative process for you as you started out writing your first book?
Jeremy: Well, compelled is the right word. But it's not strong enough, more like dominated, gripped by the iron fist of the story. The book is based on events from my own life. I call it a novel, because it's written and structured like a work of fiction, but in terms of content it's basically a memoir. I had a very unexpected and incredibly powerful relationship experience that dismantled my life; re-arranged, on a molecular level, my conceptions of life and reality. More specifically, it was an experience in the transformational power of love; of the incredible motive force within love, and its ability to fundamentally transform and heal. That was the origin point for the compulsion, this feeling of "My god, no one knows about this, I have to tell the world this story." It felt like an obligation, like a moral duty.
I think stories are very powerful. Like, why do we tell stories, why is that a facet of human existence? Because stories are how we order our lives, how we manifest order in the face of what is, essentially, the pure chaos of being alive. In the aftermath of my experience--the experience which forms the book--I became, for example, unable to sit through your basic romantic comedy; just deeply saddened, and angered, by all these stories which generated this incredibly shallow conception of love. Stories that rendered a conception of love that was sort of deeply untrue. My feeling is that these false stories are like a kind of poison. Like fast food: an attractive presentation that preys on a very deep drive and hunger within human nature, but is devoid of nutritional content and value. And so the book is written as a kind of antidote to all that, I mean that's one way of reading the title: "This is Love". And I think people want that, especially so now, given the materialist excess of modern life, and the sudden deluge of the Information Era; that there's a lot of confusion, and a deep hunger for truth out there.
So all that is what drove me to write this book. But on a more personal level, it was also just something I had to do. Holding the story inside was too much, it became like a separate entity almost, like a ghost in my body. Writing is a very physical act, a process of rendering the intangible into the tangible. For me, writing the book was also the process of taking that ghost out of my body; trapping it in those pages, and thereby transforming it into something else. It's a kind of ancient Eastern idea that I arrived at intuitively, but later came across in a number of different places and recognized as what I was, myself, engaged in; this idea of transference and transformation, of ghosts or demons, through specific process. It's something you see a lot in, for example, the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Princess Mononoke, Prince Ashitaka's quest to remove the mark left on his arm by the mad boar-god; or in Spirited Away, the little black slug-thing that Sen/Chihiro steps on in the boiler room, and then the little hand gestures she goes through with the boilerman to ward off any poisonous effect (it's a motif that's all over that movie, really).