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It has almost been a year since I started this project. I started this last year as an attempt to understand sociopaths. Having had an extremely upsetting experience with someone I now to believe a sociopath, I knew it was dangerous for me to interact with him further. I cut off our two year relationship and set about finding ways to heal. I got a personal trainer, I went to therapy and I read as many books as I could on people like him. But still, there was a need to understand sociopathy further---in a way that cannot be garnered from merely reading a book or discussing it with a therapist--so I came up with the idea to write to fairly well-known, but incarcerated sociopaths. While I have a billion questions that I want to ask my own sociopath, I know it is not safe for me to interact with him. Further, I know that they tend to lie compulsively anyway, so talking to him would only harm me further.

I figured that because all of the prisoners I write to are in for life (one is on Death Row), I could safely interact with them.

Now that a year of doing so has gone by, I'm not sure what conclusions, if any, I have come to. I was hoping for some resolution--some sort of epiphany. But none has come. I see much of my sociopath in many of the inmates I write to. They are very charming and intelligent. They are well-read and have senses of humor similar to my own. There is an attractiveness to each one and it is hard not to get drawn in by them. But then again, that is the nature of the sociopath. They are extremely seductive.

I am not a doctor, nor have I studied sociopathy at an advanced level. I am just a person trying very hard to gain some closure and understanding into what happened to me.

More and more, I realize that my own story is far more compelling than the letters. I had hoped the letters could stand on their own and that Letters from the Inside would become a non-fiction book--a curation of letters from five or six of the US's most interesting sociopathic inmates.

I have enough material now, for a book, but nothing I find compelling enough to make it something that would sell. I have tried very hard not to editorialize. I wanted the letters to speak for themselves. They have, but I fear, not loudly enough.

So instead of being a writer who had begun to write a bestseller, I am just a weird woman who has stacks upon stacks of letters from prisoners. What I had hoped would be a compelling and enlightening art project is nothing more than the equivalent of a woman who has 25 cats and hoards old newspapers.