Lodico, and Enid Gruber; also David Knopf, Lisa Niver, Christine
McGill, Elizabeth Ozer, Marsha Parker, and Debra Skidmore.

Learning about the process of writing a book has been a chal-
lenging experience. Drs. Judy Wallerstein, Peter Kramer, Jean
Bolen, and Lenore Terr shared their knowledge about agents and
editors, and my cousin, Barbara Loos, guided me to the title and to
New York City. I would also like to thank Marie Claire Cloutier for
her careful reading of the initial chapters, and Katherine Olney-Bell
and Nell Bernstein for their comments. Many fellow child and ado-
lescent psychiatrists, including Drs. Richard Searles, John Dunne,
Alvin Rosenfeld, and Larry Brown, read early versions of the chap-
ters and were tirelessly willing to discuss clinical issues.

A mother of adolescents doesn't see patients, teach, and write
without skillful support at home -- a special thanks to Felicity Win-
terbach and to my support group of women psychiatrists, Drs.
Madeline Meyer, Ruth Noel, Lyn Gracie, Nancy Kaltreider, Mar-
lene Mills, and Barbara McDonald.

For me, writing this book was an example of positive risk-taking,
an effort supported by my teachers, especially Alan Skolnikoff, and,
much earlier, my brother Bill Ponton and my sister Patricia Ponton
Barratt, both of whom believed in the editor of The Ponton Paper.

I want to thank the adolescents and parents who lived these sto-
ries and later read and gave their blessings to my versions.

Finally, these are true stories, but I have had to make many
changes to protect the identities of the patients and their parents. I
have often made symbolically equivalent substitutes for aspects of a
patient's or parent's identity and life circumstances; occasionally I
have grafted parts of other patients' or parents' identities onto those
I have written about. Often dialogue is fictional, and my personal
reflections post hoc. If the disguises are penetrable, it is only by the
patients and parents themselves. Any readers who believe they rec-
ognize any of the patients or parents in this volume will, I am cer-
tain, be mistaken.

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