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Decreasing the Fear
You’re Going to Die But Not Me follows a psychologist as she draws on research, faith, philosophy, grief, and dark humor to transform her lifelong terror of nonexistence into an honest relationship with mortality. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Writing the book became a way for me to deal with my rumination. Seriously, I found myself thinking (read: dreading) about my mortality every day, several times every day.
How did your experience as a psychologist shape the way you investigated your own mortality anxiety?
I can say a couple of things about this. First of all, feelings want/need to be expressed. If we don’t find some way of expression, they rattle around in the container of our head, bouncing around with nowhere to go. There are several ways of expressing, and writing sure is one. Also, a general psychological concept is that when we avoid what we fear, the fear grows. The antidote to that is approach. So the decision to dive in with both feet was my way of not avoiding. Also, writing the book became what I see as a course of “exposure therapy” for me: safely, gently, and kindly exposing myself to the fearful stimuli (DEATH) with the hope and intent of decreasing the fear.
Which philosophy, religious tradition, or scientific theory most challenged your existing beliefs?
I would say I was more fascinated than challenged. For sure, my examination of the way various religions dealt with death and the afterlife was, well, too far-fetched and also sometimes too icky and scary. I did find that after researching the literature on near-death experiences, my skepticism ticked down a notch or two.
How did you decide when humor would illuminate the subject of death rather than diminish its seriousness?
I really don’t think there was much of a conscious decision involved in when to use humor. I do believe in the whole “spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down” theory in general. And humor just seems to spring out of me, often at inopportune times. So, it just seemed to happen organically.
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What makes the journey unforgettable is her own presence at its center: a candid, self-aware narrator wrestling with her fear of annihilation, punctuating deep research with stories that are as tender as they are illuminating. This is not just a meditation on mortality, it’s an enthralling quest for meaning, brimming with emotional honesty and intellectual daring. Scott’s voice is the rare guide who can make you laugh while asking you to face the abyss, and leave you strangely grateful for the view.
Survival of the Fittest
In Adventures of a Looney Scot, you share your childhood experiences in Glasgow and trace your life through class, landscape, and national identity through a comedic lens. What made you decide to tell your life story?
I am no ‘spring chicken’, hence I need to speak up now for my children’s sake, or forever hold my tongue. Note that Adventures of a Looney Scot follows the first part of our hero’s life (see video link) as described in Book 1 of the Quantum Leap Forward trilogy that sets the scene for Ewan MacLeod’s leap from Scotland to Hong Kong. (see Facebook). This is soon to be followed by Book 2 Epicentre: Hong Kong (Edition 2) when that city state experiences the shock of The Big One; then finally Book 3 The Making of Punta – our resort in the Philippines that presents the development of The Most Sustainable and Liveable Resort in the Philippines (see Punta Riviera Resort and also Facebook).
How did you decide what to include from such a wide-ranging life without losing that sense of spontaneity?
As described above, each stage is presented as a book in the trilogy. My life has, in fact, been discontinuous and very much shaped by movements from growing up in Scotland, then moving to Hong Kong, life and death in Hong Kong; then moving to the Philippines; each being very much moulded by the three women in my life who have kept us in shape, given us strong direction, and helped us keep our own and our families’ heads above water. When all else fails – exercise your sirtuin genes and – keep breathing! Ach well, that’s life!
Your family life is depicted with both chaos and loyalty. How do you see those dynamics now, looking back?
Keeping our heads above water includes that from tsunamis and flooding, for example, from two super typhoons in the latter part of 2025 and a 4-6m high tidal surge wave that smacked into our resort Punta Riviera Resort at Bolinao, Pangasinan. The stories throughout this trilogy are partly about picking ourselves up after each disaster and learning from them. Filipinos have specific words for this recovery, namely Kapwas or Bayanihan, where everyone gets up after a disaster, helps everyone else near them to do the same by seeing themselves in others, then all move forward in the same direction. In the West, we follow the philosophy of ‘Survival of the Fittest,’ which is a very weak alternative and not how civilizations have survived natural disasters over centuries. When Matt Gandi was asked by a reporter after visiting Churchill’s cabinet in London: ‘So what do you think about British Civilization?’ he is reported to have replied: ‘Oh, that would be nice.’
If readers take one thing from your story, what do you hope it is?
Readers may appreciate that in Scotland, our Ancient Ancestors from a previous civilization left us precious ancient cultural secrets that helped us keep the Roman Empire out by forcing them to build Hadrian’s Wall, the English wall-bangers at bay for many years, and this helped us maintain our unique national identity. This led to our unusual DNA and our use of intuition, invention, and creativity during and after the Age of Enlightenment and Industrialization. However, whilst these are important issues, my pride in being a Scot and maintaining a healthy sense of humour are the key ingredients in this soup.
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Adventures of a Looney Scot
Adventures of a Looney Scot is a memoir, but it doesn’t read like a careful march through dates and milestones. It reads like someone sitting across from you, pint in hand, telling you how a rough Glasgow childhood, a fierce family life, and an obsession with the outdoors slowly shaped him into a geologist with a taste for risk, argument, and reinvention. The book’s subtitle, From a Glasgow Urban Warrior to a Professional Geologist, turns out to be the clearest description of what it’s doing: tracing a life through class, landscape, work, and national identity, while keeping one foot in comedy the whole time.
What gives the book its real personality is the voice. McFeat-Smith writes in a way that’s unruly, funny, self-mocking, and deeply attached to Scottish speech and rhythm. A scene about midges lands because the punchline arrives with perfect local bluntness: “If the tourists knew about Scottish midges, they wouldnie come here tae enjoy themselves.” That line captures the book’s whole method. It doesn’t just describe Scotland. It performs Scotland as the author knows it: hard, absurd, affectionate, and never polished to the point of losing its bite.
The middle stretch is where the memoir really finds its shape. The childhood material has real grit, but the outdoor episodes turn that grit into momentum. Canoeing on Loch Lomond, hiking, cycling, close calls, family arguments, and reckless confidence all build the sense that this is a book about being formed by physical experience as much as by education. The book understands that a life story can be told through danger, embarrassment, and stubborn survival just as well as through achievement.
What I found most interesting is how the book gradually expands. It starts as a personal story, then grows into a broader portrait of Scottish culture, marriage, professional identity, food, ancestry, and politics. Jeanie isn’t treated as a side note but as part of the author’s development, and the later chapters move from memoir into a kind of argumentative cultural scrapbook, with sections on Scottish breakfast, self-determination, inventions, and odd laws. That shift makes the book feel true to its own ambitions. This isn’t just a record of one man’s youth. It’s a book that wants to place that youth inside a bigger Scottish story.
Adventures of a Looney Scot is a boisterous, big-hearted memoir about how a particular kind of Scottish boyhood becomes a professional life without ever quite losing its appetite for chaos. It’s at its best when memory, place, and voice are all firing at once, and even when it sprawls, the sprawl feels connected to the author’s personality. What stayed with me wasn’t just the sequence of events, but the sense of a mind trying to understand itself through weather, family, class, work, and country. That’s a rich mix, and the book leans into it with conviction.
Pages: 252 | ASIN : B0GVVPJ9KZ
