At 76, Mary Metzger sat down to write her autobiography. To be sure, she had lived a remarkable life: she grew up in the hills of Pennsylvania with her grandmother and grandfather and spoke no English yet went on to become a college professor. At the age of fourteen she was a second chef. In her forties, she began a wholesale health food business that she ran for fifteen years. She had been married twice, once to a union carpenter and the second time to a hospital administrator, and had three daughters, five grandchildren, and two great grandchildren. She traveled to over 35 countries in Europe, South America, and Africa. At the age of sixty-two, she went to live in Moscow and stayed there for sixteen years. There she met the great love of her life. The ending of this last relationship caused her to examine her existence with greater clarity. She realized that she was not only the wonderful and exciting person she claimed to be, but was in her hidden self, a psychopath. She found that she took great pleasure in inflicting cruelty on others: on her children, her husbands, her lovers, her students, in fact, on everyone in order to feel superior to them. She cared nothing about the feelings of others, but only of herself. It was Mary herself who contributed to the development of her disease. She was responsible for the way she was. Despite her outward arrogance, inside, she felt inferior to others. She came to realize that her behavior stigmatized her and that there was nothing she could do about it.
