But I’m very glad to have it out there, finally. I have no idea what people will make of it. And it has a literary quality that I think is sometimes quirky and downright silly, and sometimes actually very serious. So putting that out there is somehow frightening, but I also have the confidence that it will help some people to learn from my own failures, which is why I put these stories in the book. It is the story of my life - up to my life-changing dream around my 25th birthday - but there are moments of great vulnerability and honesty in it that I might easily have skipped over, but didn’t. It is essentially impossible to describe. It feels entirely different than anything I have ever felt with a book. What does it feel like to have this book in the world? It was a theophanic paradigm-shifting miracle that I knew was the impossible answer to my desperate longing for meaning in the universe, the answer I was sure did not exist, or even if it did, that I no one could ever find.

The rest of the dream was a once-in-a-lifetime mind-blowing experience from which I have never looked back, and I’m not even slightly exaggerating. Without spoiling things for the reader, I can certainly say that the dream was my inspiration - and not only for the book, but for the rest of my life ever since. In the dream I was ice-fishing on Candlewood Lake in Danbury, Connecticut, when a fish poked its snout out of the hole in the ice. What was your inspiration for Fish Out of Water?

Fish out of water by eric metaxas