What is the taste of life as we really live it rather than the way we imagine it in others What does it feel like to become aware of the hand of cards weve been dealt to play them as well as we can to understand what has happened to us and to try to control the future Journey to the Middle of the Forest answers these questions in a way that celebrity memoirs where events seem so much more intense than happenings in our own lives because of our perspective and the writers fame cannot.In Journey to the Middle of the Forest Bruce Fleming considers the slippages between presupposition and reality in a life begun and continued in Maryland with intervals in precivil war Rwanda the walledin city of West Berlin and the central European Freiburg im Breisgau once Austrian then part of the Duchy of Baden now part of Germany. Like all lives it has its crisesmore it may be than an average life a childhood marked by an alcoholic and abusive father a marriage gone horribly awry an autistic child and a bipolar stepchild a draggedout divorce the death of a brother to AIDS and the retooling of hopes to meet the new givens of the world. And then remarriage two little boys and the threat of childhood leukemia.