By Harvey Mudd
Leaving My Self Behind
Memoir
Harvey Mudd, born into a distinguished Los Angeles family, started life with every advantage. Behind the façade of wealth, however, there was a psychologically abusive mother whose unconscious agendas might have done lasting harm had he not resisted. In these pages, he describes that childhood and the Los Angeles of his youth.
Mudd set out to find new ways of thinking and new places to live. The resulting life, a somewhat “disheveled improvisation,” included, after intensive psychotherapy and the Army, twenty years in Northern New Mexico where he had a farm and, for ten years, was the co-director of an environmental organization. The latter experience included encounters with the mafia.
Author
Harvey Mudd
Harvey Mudd is an American poet, writer, and painter who, disillusioned with American politics and culture, lives in France.
His memoir, Leaving My Self Behind, recounts the events and influences—from a prestigious family with ancestry that goes back to the first generation of American settlers in 1630 to the modern day—that formed the values and historical reference that led to his self-imposed exile.
It is also an experiment in “lean” autobiography, a “life” stripped of the romantic entanglements, but which includes an examination of a severely dysfunctional birth family and the resulting personal trials that shaped his character.
Other Books by Harvey Mudd
There Was a Peacock
An eccentric collection with commentary of the provocative, irreligious, and often dark drawings by the Mexican journalist and illustrator, Juan Ezekiel Fontana.
Spinoza’s Dog
A third of this collection represents the poetic sensibility of Harvey Mudd’s previous books of poetry with the rest written in the last ten years that he has lived in France.
A European Education
This a book-length poem is based on diaries author and poet Harvey Mudd kept during a six-month exploration of the places of the Holocaust in the winter of 1979-80.
