Confessions of a dangerous mind

Or almost as close. His professional life had become more and more linked to the marketability of his personal history, but he'd married a woman named Diane, a nonprofit program director who was neither impressed with his past nor appalled by it. "I think that's part of what made me fall in love with her -- she loved me, the man I am now. She never asked me a single question about the damned banks." But even with the Wellbutrin, he suffered bouts of depression and thoughts of suicide. Last year, when he and his wife decided to start trying to have a child, those bouts became worse. He spiraled downward and eventually checked himself into a mental hospital, where he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and put on more medications.

Today, he and Diane are happy. Ongoing therapy, the new medication and the example of close friends who are also parents have convinced him that he has what it takes to be a father. "Right now is a good time," he tells me. "But it's still an effort for me to try to be the kind of person I want to be. And I'm ferocious about that. I still work hard to keep the demons at bay; I work really hard to make sure the rage doesn't come back. So I can live a peaceful life."

It all sounds good. Too good, maybe, because once you've learned how to size people up, how to manipulate, how to seek out the worst in people and exploit it, can you ever drop that skill, that awareness? "Give me an example of working hard," I say, trying to keep the suspicion from my voice.

"I'll tell you, it takes vigilance. I'll give you an example right now," he says. "I got this half-assed review in Kirkus this week. Not even bad, just half-assed -- and, for a minute there, I wanted to find that guy and track him down."

He's not the first writer in America to wish bodily harm on the writer of an unfair review. If fantasies were real, Dale Peck's bullet-ridden, headless body would have been floating in the East River years ago, gift-wrapped in bloody typewriter ribbon. The Old Joe might have taken that fantasy to a new level, but the New Joe has a different strategy. "I take a step back and remember that every anger covers a wound," he says. "Something about the review has wounded me in some way, and so I think about that, and then the anger goes away."

Every anger disguises a wound: This is what he had learned about himself in solitary confinement, as he traced his thoughts and tried to hold onto his sanity by understanding where his emotions were coming from. He traced his rage back to old pains, old fears  and gradually began tearing down the facade he had built up. His new self-knowledge -- achieved on his own, without access to therapy or counseling -- led to a phone call to his father, one in which he brought up a particularly wretched episode from his boyhood, and asked, "Hey, Dad, why'd you beat the shit out of me?"

Faced with an honest question, Joe Loya Sr. gave his son an honest answer, and opened up about his own rage and helplessness in the face of his wife's illness and how it turned into rage toward his son. Over a prison phone, they talked about the violence and grief that had bound them. "I'd been gradually forgiving him along the way," he says now. "But now I understood that his rage came from missing my mother. It explains the mystery. My father and I shared the same wound, the loss of my mother, and this created a solidarity along the way."

Loya also confronted Lorelei, the woman who began molesting him when he was 12 years old. "I asked her what was going on for her back then," he says. "She was molested by a family member for many years when she was very young. That was about all she had to say about it. She said she felt horrible and I know she's felt horrible about it. I'm not mad at her."

Whether it was the therapy, his own personal vigilance or the softening of age, Loya's capacity for forgiveness (he and his father are now close) now extends beyond Lorelei and beyond his father. "I'm done with anger," he says. "I can identify it now. I've become a patient man."

Finally, perhaps thanks to the Tsingtao, I say what's been on my mind all evening. "I gotta tell you," I begin, referring to the chapters that describe his late adolescent devolution into, in his own words, a mooch and a fraud, "you really were an asshole."

He laughs. "That was the hardest part of the book to write, man. I was shady, and I know it."

"So why did you write it down in such squalid detail?"

"You know, I was writing this as much for my friends as anybody," he says. "The most important thing was to tell the truth, even if it was embarrassing, to tell the truth and tell it well. Sure, I want people to root for me, but I want them to be conflicted, not just think, 'Oh, he got treated greasy by his parents.' I want to feel that I've exhausted their ability to sympathize, because I have faith that by the end of the book, I'll have got you back. I have to have confidence that the story itself will keep you hooked, even if you don't like me when you're reading it."

This story has been corrected since it was first published.

• View blog reactions