About the Book

“I should confess,” I say whenever I meet new students, “I’m a chaplain because of Guns N’ Roses.” It’s the truth. 

For the last few years, I’ve been working on a book that tells the story of my unconventional path from being a child so fraught by the fear of failure that I gave up on school to being hired as the Manager for CPE Programs at UCLA Health. As an eighteen-year-old with a 1.2 high-school GPA, an inexplicable dread of hospitals, and a blue-collar job to which I was completely unsuited at my parents’ glass shop, I dreamed of a different life but had no idea how to get there. What drove me was a desire to make sense of my anxieties in a raw, honest way. Learning how to do so gave me the tools to help others do the same. It was a rocky process inspired in no small part by the heart-on-his-sleeve stylings of Axl Rose. 

As much as it’s a memoir, Stay with Me, I Want to Be Alone is also a funny and sometimes dark day-in-the-life illustration of what it’s really like to be a hospital chaplain. While the work of being with people on some of the worst days of their lives is often beautiful and profound, I also expose the gritty side of this world. One moment, I’m being thanked for the comfort I’ve brought to a dying man; in the next, I’m staggering down a hall looking for a toilet to vomit into after witnessing—and probably exacerbating—the trauma of a woman who was dumped off at the hospital by her captors after aging out of sex slavery. “Do you have a philosophy of evil?” I often ask my CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) students. “You’ll need one.”