About me
My name is Peter McWilliams. I have been writing about my passions since
1967. In that year, I became passionate about what most seventeen-year-olds
are passionate about—love—and wrote Come Love With Me & Be My Life.
This began a series of poetry books that sold nearly four million copies.
Along with love, of course, comes loss,
so I became passionate about emotional
survival. In 1971 I wrote Surviving the Loss of a Love, which was
expanded in 1976 and again in 1991 (with co-authors Melba Colgrove, Ph.D., and
Harold Bloomfield, M.D.) into How
to Survive the Loss of a Love. It has sold more than two million
copies.
I also became interested in meditation, and a book I wrote on meditation
was a New York Times bestseller, knocking the impregnable Joy of Sex
off the #1 spot. As one newspaper headline proclaimed, MEDITATION MORE POPULAR
THAN SEX AT THE NEW YORK TIMES.
My passion for computers (or more accurately, for what computers could do)
led to The Personal Computer Book, which Time proclaimed "a beacon
of simplicity, sanity and humor," and the Wall Street Journal called
"genuinely funny." (Now, really, how many people has the Wall Street
Journal called "genuinely funny"?)
My passion for personal growth continues in the ongoing LIFE 101 Series.
Thus far, the books in this series include:
My passion for visual beauty led me to publish in 1992 my first book
of photography, PORTRAITS, a twenty-two-year anthology (mostly of men)
of my photographic work. Available from Amazon.com
Personal freedom, individual expression, and the right to live one's own life
as long as one does not harm the person or property of another, have long been
my passions. Here I attacked the prejudices (mostly religious) that became
laws against gays, drug users, prostitutes, gamblers, and others in the 1993
book (revised in 1996) Ain't
Nobody's Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free
Country.
In 1994, after successfully being treated for depression, I wrote
with Harold Bloomfield, M.D., How
to Heal Depression. This was followed by their Hypericum
(St. John's Wort) and Depression, all about treating depression with a
natural herb.
All of the above-mentioned books were self-published and are still in
print. The highlighted (linked) titles are online for free.
In mid-March 1996 I was diagnosed with AIDS and cancer on the same day.
(Beware the Ides of March, Indeed.) I was shocked by the effectiveness of
medical marijuana to keep down my nausea-producing prescription medications
and to treat the pain of chemotherapy and radiation. The cancer is now in
remission. I wrote a book about it (unfinished, but what is completed is
online) A Question of
Compassion, published How
to Grow Medical Marijuana by Todd McCormick, and placed myself in
front of the out-of-control juggernaut known as the War on Drugs (see petertrial.com).
I live is Los Angeles, but my heart is in New York.