When a cache of seven notebooks is found at a remote site in the northwest high desert by a geology student, its anonymous author is finally discovered to be an autistic genius who disappeared many years earlier. The student’s mentor, upon retirement, seeks the source of the find and puts together this book.

The notebooks are the diary of the last member of a family whose handed-down wealth allows him to circle the country for 18 years, living on trains, in stations, and camping in the surrounding wilds. Prior to this, the diarist lives in his family’s mansion, cloistered in the in-house library, and his publications in science journals earn him an invitation to join a university. Then things fall apart. His father commits suicide, his mother is likely murdered, and at her funeral our subject is whisked away by a random female mourner we never get to know. That’s where this diary—his journey—begins.

The Man I Never Was asks: What defines identity – places, persons, events? And can its roots and causes be identified, found through exploration?

Theodore Sjogren began his writing life while subsistence living on Florida’s Big Pine Key, fishing, gathering, embedded in and contending with existence in its most basic form. Living through and within spaces colors and directs his literary sense, first in an old Ford, then traveling nearly a million miles on motorcycles, going repeatedly across the country and down into Central America to Panama. Finally he “settles” on charter boats sailing around the Caribbean while raising a family on a houseboat on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. The Man I Never Was is the second volume of a trilogy following The Separated Woman—augmenting and redefining the form of existential expression in the modern novel.