And the fury in my community was just staggering. The young priests in the parish were behind the message. The older priests weren't necessarily, but they all followed the orders of the cardinal and read the letter. Every Sunday, 2,000 people came to mass at that parish. The following Sunday, the attendance dropped to 200, and never recovered.

I have one vivid memory of one of the days that the marches were taking place. We were in a Catholic, predominantly Polish and Lithuanian neighborhood. Chicago is a place where people define themselves by their parish and by their ethnicity.

When I tell people I was in the St. Justin Martyr parish, if they are native Chicagoans they know exactly where I was and what that was like. The Sunday before this particular march, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Cody, had required all of his pastors to read a letter in support of open housing and economic justice in every parish in the city.

Most people don't have the money to spend on advertising to create awareness among readers, nor do they have the contacts at newspapers or magazines to get their books reviewed.

People have less privacy and are crammed together in cities, but in the wide open spaces they secretly keep tabs on each other a lot more

Sometimes life seems so painful it hurts even to move my arms.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating