Marilee Strong A Bright Red Scream

In 1998 I published the first book that explored and explained the complex psychological issues involved in what I believed was a very widespread practice of cutting for a non-technical audience. The book was based on years of research and scores of interviews with people across the country and around the world who shared with me their stories. (I began researching back in 1992 preparing for what became the first magazine cover story on cutting, published by San Francisco Focus magazine in 1993.) As I promised all the people I interviewed, their identities and names were changed and cloaked to preserve the privacy everyone needs when revealing their own intimate and painful truths. The book caused quite a stir--was featured in a major story in Time magazine--and helped bring public attention to something that was still almost completely unknown to the general public. Because A Bright Red Scream has become something of a classic and is also now published in the U.K. and in Italy, I am n