About me

 

My name is Peter McWilliams. I have been writing about my passions since 1967. In that year, I became passionate about what most seventeen-year-olds are passionate about—love—and wrote Come Love With Me & Be My Life. This began a series of poetry books that sold nearly four million copies.

Along with love, of course, comes loss, so I became passionate about emotional survival. In 1971 I wrote Surviving the Loss of a Love, which was expanded in 1976 and again in 1991 (with co-authors Melba Colgrove, Ph.D., and Harold Bloomfield, M.D.) into How to Survive the Loss of a Love. It has sold more than two million copies. 

I also became interested in meditation, and a book I wrote on meditation was a New York Times bestseller, knocking the impregnable Joy of Sex off the #1 spot. As one newspaper headline proclaimed, MEDITATION MORE POPULAR THAN SEX AT THE NEW YORK TIMES.

My passion for computers (or more accurately, for what computers could do) led to The Personal Computer Book, which Time proclaimed "a beacon of simplicity, sanity and humor," and the Wall Street Journal called "genuinely funny." (Now, really, how many people has the Wall Street Journal called "genuinely funny"?)

My passion for personal growth continues in the ongoing LIFE 101 Series. Thus far, the books in this series include: 

LIFE 101: Everything We Wish We Had Learned About Life In School—But Didn't (a New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and paperback); 

DO IT! Let's Get Off Our Buts (a #1 New York Times hardcover bestseller);

You Can't Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought: A Book for People with Any Life-Threatening Illness--Including Life 

LOVE 101: To Love Oneself Is the Beginning of a Lifelong Romance

My passion for visual beauty  led me to publish in 1992 my first book of photography, PORTRAITS, a twenty-two-year anthology (mostly of men) of my photographic work. Available from Amazon.com

Personal freedom, individual expression, and the right to live one's own life as long as one does not harm the person or property of another, have long been my passions. Here I attacked the prejudices (mostly religious) that became laws against gays, drug users, prostitutes, gamblers, and others in the 1993 book (revised in 1996) Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country.

 In 1994, after successfully being treated for depression, I wrote with Harold Bloomfield, M.D., How to Heal Depression. This was followed by their Hypericum (St. John's Wort) and Depression, all about treating depression with a natural herb. 

All of the above-mentioned books were self-published and are still in print. The highlighted (linked) titles are online for free.

In mid-March 1996 I was diagnosed with AIDS and cancer on the same day. (Beware the Ides of March, Indeed.) I was shocked by the effectiveness of medical marijuana to keep down my nausea-producing prescription medications and to treat the pain of chemotherapy and radiation. The cancer is now in remission. I wrote a book about it (unfinished, but what is completed is online) A Question of Compassion, published How to Grow Medical Marijuana by Todd McCormick, and placed myself in front of the out-of-control juggernaut known as the War on Drugs (see petertrial.com).

I live is Los Angeles, but my heart is in New York.

My main webpage is www.mcwilliams.com