Why I Had to Write Echoes of a Season — And Why I Almost Didn't

There is a strange truth about life: it often takes nearly losing it to truly understand what mattered all along. Echoes of a Season began in a hospital corridor at three in the morning, with a notebook I had grabbed on instinct and a pen that barely worked.

I had spent forty years building companies, chasing deals, boarding aeroplanes before dawn. I had told myself, quite convincingly, that the writing would come later. Later, when things quietened. Later, when I had the time.

Later almost never came.

When I finally sat down to write, the memories arrived not in order but in colour — the green shutters of a small hotel outside Cadaqués, the smell of pine and diesel in a harbour at dusk, a woman's laugh in a bar I could no longer name. I understood, quite suddenly, that a memoir is not a record of what happened. It is a record of what refused to fade.

I almost did not write it. There were mornings I closed the notebook and told myself no one needed another book about a man remembering his summers. But the sentences kept returning, uninvited, the way certain songs do. In the end, I wrote it because I was afraid that if I did not, the season itself would begin to forget me.

That, in the end, is why any of us write. Not to be read. To be remembered by the years we lived.