WHO YOU WERE, BEFORE offers a journey through an imaginary world in which human life is stripped bare and reduced to its essentials, an Eden that was never a Paradise — like a half-formed memory that we all know that we share. It is a book to take slowly, to reflect upon and to keep returning to — a collection of absorbing, enigmatic and thought-provoking stories and drawings that probe the archetypal contrasts of being human: innocence and experience, folly and wisdom, love and cruelty, desire and disillusion, domination and submission, erotic bonding and existential isolation.... The twenty-eight stories are minimalist, modeled on folk or fairy tales, poetic and suggestive, often harsh and sometimes shocking. The thirty-three black and white drawings are condensed and dreamlike, starkly evocative, unlocking often deeply buried associations. Both stories and drawings open upon the unconscious mind, that aspect of our being which all too often we mistake for fate, for that is so much easier than confronting it — but as Jung said, enlightenment only comes from making the darkness conscious. And both drawings and stories invite the reader-viewer to participate, to 'complete' their meaning in the way that koans do.