Be a Good Boy: My Journey from Self-loathing to Self-love

Robert Finertie was only eight and a half years old when his mother passed away. Her last words to him, lying in her hospital bed, were clear: “Be a good boy, Bobby.”
He took this deathbed directive to heart—and in the ensuing years, it became a refrain that haunted him.

Little Bobby had already learned to “go away” when something bad happened to him; it was a skill he’d learned years earlier, first when he was subjected to the humiliation of enemas at four years old, then again when his uncl...