$16.95  Retail  $14.41 Online Price
ISBN 13: 978-1-931816-02-1
 218 main text, 240 total pages
(Quality paperback)

A Biographical Novel Based on Key Moments in the Life of Bill Wilson, the Alcoholics Anonymous Founder, and a Probing of His Mysterious 11-year Depression

After Bill Wilson's supreme achievement in founding Alcoholics Anonymous, why would he have suffered a serious depression that lasted more than a decade?

By attempting to throw light on this question, Paul Hourihan involves the reader in many other themes of vital relevance to everyone―not to those in recovery alone.

This in-depth psychological study of the AA founder is  generally based on the facts of Wilson's life, but not restricted to the literal truth: the prerogative of the novel. A number of biographical events in Wilson's history have been passed over in favor of an intensive, original recreation of its key moments, from childhood to early middle age, when the power of the depression was first felt.

Chiefly a work of the imagination as this is, it is able to probe more deeply into the hidden life of its subject than non-fiction can do. According to the author, Bill W.'s depression may have been his salvation, and saved him from a worse fate.

The story of AA and Bill W.'s own struggles, within and outside the movement, are seen throughout from his standpoint alone.

Written in the glowing, masterful style that is Paul Hourihan's hallmark, Bill W., A Strange Salvation will introduce new readers to Bill Wilson, one of the seminal voices of our age, and provide a fresh look for those already familiar with his story.

Interview with Paul Hourihan about Bill W. A Strange Salvation

Interviewer: Why did you write this book?

 PH: It is the search for the private life of Bill Wilson, the public life we know. But that wasn't the whole of it. There were many signs of conflicts in his life and even in the correspondence that we have there are suggestions that what we know about him, although true and genuine as far as it goes, is only half the story. So this will be an attempt to unlock his secret life―the private Bill Wilson. As a famous man we owe it to ourselves and to him to find out what the truth was about him that we may benefit not only by what he gave us publicly but privately too.

We find that individuals who generate these world-saving religious or spiritual movements out of their own life struggles always have periods of regressions and wanderings, backtrackings and conflicts. They never or hardly ever move forward on a straight line and so it would have been with Bill and still more because of his complex alcoholic nature as well.

Finally, this movement that he led was a spiritual recovery movement whose purpose was―as he said in his own words so often―to be led to God, to know God through helping others. And yet he, the founder, was excluded from this knowledge beyond what he could safely handle lest in becoming mystical and spiritual beyond the ordinary he would no longer be able to effectively serve as leader.