From the Preface by Joey Truman:

I started writing this book two weeks after I nished Postal Child. I don’t know why. I had always planned on writing it when I was too old to care and everybody in the book was dead. But I wrote it. I wrote it pretty quick. I now realize why. I used to have a friend named Gandalf, god bless his fucking soul, when he was alive he never showered regularly, but when he did he called it a purging, he would just build up all the gross and terrible things that human beings collect for weeks on end, and then when he couldn’t take it anymore he would hop in the shower and purge. And then, just like that, he would be back to normal, clean as a fucking whistle.

Killing The Math is a purge of sorts. Whatever horrible and wretched things I had collected on my body and my soul while writing Postal Child came sloughing off because of writing this book. And because of this, Killing The Math wouldn’t exist without Postal Child.

But I am lucky, I have somebody in my life that is willing to listen to this rhetoric and nd it interesting enough to use the resources they have and put these thoughts out into the berth. By somebody I mean Whiskey Tit, and more speci cally The Publisher.

And because of this luck we can look at these two books side to side, one guy goes up, and the other guy goes down.

When I wrote both of these books the viewpoint was very simple.I had no trouble imagining myself as a thirteen year old boy getting the shit kicked out of himself while being resilient just the same,and I had no trouble imagining myself as a sixteen year old boy growing up in Wyoming, because that is what I did.One mentally and one physically.

But there is a cross-over so I will finally get to my point:

Postal Child is a work of pure fiction.The only truth to it is that I did indeed see a homeless man pushing a mail cart around with bags of trash in it while wearing a postal service uniform.

Killing The Math, however, is a farce, the people exist, that is true, and the places exists, and most of the actions exists, but what really happened, I don’t know. I have a horrible memory, but I also have an acute memory. I can remember the smell you make when you shift on a chair, but I won’t remember the twenty minute conversation we have afterwards.

What I mean is, don’t take any of this personally, it’s just the story of a boy growing up in a horrible place wishing for something more. I would change the names, but what’s the point, you’re the only one who knows who that person is.

I didn’t write this story, the story wrote itself. Blame the story, not me.

—Joey Truman