C.A. Gilchrist hopes to inspire with new memoir, ‘The Truth About Demons’

After finding sanctuary among library shelves as an unhoused child and penning a best-selling memoir, “The Truth About Demons,” writer C.A. Gilchrist hopes to inspire others to share their own stories.

Gilchrist will appear at Warwick’s in La Jolla on Sunday, Oct. 12, for a book signing and discussion as part of the bookstore’s “Weekends with Locals” series.

His memoir, which spent several weeks in the top ten of Amazon’s survival stories and memoirs category, offers a gripping account of his early life, marked by trauma, addiction, and eventual recovery.

Gilchrist grew up in suburban Philadelphia, dealing with a mother who was hearing voices and being pulled into a cult, along with his father’s death, homelessness, and more. However, through his hardships, he found sanctuary at the public library. 

“Libraries, for me, always, will always be a safe place,” Gilchrist said. “They’ll always be a sanctuary. They’ll always feel like a church, and I always feel comforted, and I feel engaged and excited.”

Gilchrist has worked in several roles throughout his life, including running an art gallery, an entertainment company, a video production company, and pursuing solution engineering.

Now living in San Diego, he credits libraries and books with enabling him to share everything he’s experienced.

Additionally, his memoir gave him a broader understanding of his own life.

“Writing the memoir was a cathartic experience, and it sort of put an exclamation point on my understanding of what I went through,” Gilchrist said.

“As I gained distance from the earlier events that created me, so to speak, from all the joys and the pains, I started to feel a desire to express it and to share it,” he said, adding that he “primarily wanted to share it for the benefit of people who might be going through some of the things that I went through.”

Gilchrist said that he approached his life story almost like a researcher, allowing for emotional distance as he revisited painful events.

“I analyzed my life as if I were researching someone else,” he said. “I assembled stories from different parts of my journey to tell an overarching theme, in an entertaining, engaging and hopefully inspiring way.”

While Gilchrist’s book is serious, he also used dark humor to tell his story.

“There’s joy and humor even in the darkest times, and one can find humor even when you’re at your lowest level,” Gilchrist said.

The memoir covers the period from 8 to approximately 28 years old. He says he went through a series of dramatic changes as he grew from a child into a teen and eventually faced still more turmoil as a young adult.

The writing process gave him a new way of looking at the people around him too, he said – particularly his parents.

“It gave me deeper insight into them as human beings… (and) deeper insight into a lot of the souls that I met through that journey.”

For others walking down the same or a similar path, he says, “Find resources and find the courage to rebuild a life, and whether those resources are books, mentors, friends, family, don’t suffer alone.”