And Other Mostly True Stories
Memoir
Date Published: June 12, 2026
Publisher: MindStir Media
What makes a life worth remembering? Is it danger—or joy?
Triumph—or deception? Sometimes it’s all of them, tangled together
in moments that refuse to fade.
The Hero of Pamplona and Other Mostly True Stories is a memoir told through
twenty-two vividly rendered short stories drawn from the extraordinary life of
Len Wechsler. Spanning decades and continents, these deeply personal
reflections move effortlessly from New York to Los Angeles, Paris to Pamplona,
Lisbon to Tangiers—each place leaving its mark, each moment carrying
emotional weight.
With the voice of a philosopher, the instincts of a filmmaker, and the honesty
of someone who has lived fully, Wechsler explores friendship and betrayal,
risk and reinvention, longing and belonging. These are stories shaped by
youthful bravado, artistic pursuit, cultural collision, and the quiet
reckonings that come with time.
Sometimes humorous, sometimes haunting, and always human, this memoir invites
readers into a life lived on the edge of experience—where truth and
memory blur, and where the author believes one simple thing: if a story
touches him, it may touch you too.
Whether you read it as travel memoir, coming-of-age reflection, or a
meditation on identity and chance, The Hero of Pamplona and Other Mostly True
Stories is a journey worth taking.
EXCERPT
Preface
In Paris, adoring fans yelled “allez le trieze.” Go number 13. I was number 13. When I was fourteen, my ninth-grade teacher said I made her vomit. At twenty-one, I was the hero of Pamplona. I was almost raped in Tangiers, Morocco. I hated my name, except when Flossie said it. Twenty-one years ago, I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Believe the diagnosis, never the prognosis.
The first time I thought about writing stories was over
twenty-five years ago when I was living in Portugal. I wrote the stories in my head while sitting in a café in Lisbon’s Rossio Square drinking an espresso as I watched dawn touch the tops of 400-year-old blue, yellow, and pink buildings. And that was the problem. Once I had the stories in my head, the excitement was gone and the motivation to put the story on paper was lost.
When I returned home to Los Angeles, a storyteller friend suggested I submit a story to a venue called Spark Off Rose. On April 4, 2011, I read “The Hero of Pamplona” aloud to an audience of one hundred people at a theater in Venice, California. That was it. I was hooked on storytelling.
In the end, I gathered these stories for two reasons. The first is that doing so made me smile, and as I wrote, I was reminded once again to never take the good times for granted. The second reason is because of a line in a letter my father sent to me a few years before he died. “The spoken voice is wonderful, but the written word has a special permanence.”
Perhaps one of these stories will bring a smile to the face of someone I know, or even to the face of someone I don’t know. Maybe a story will resonate with a reader and encourage that reader to write his or her own story.
The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote about people who are “but a series of marginal notes in the book of life.” Are the people in this book “marginal notes in the book of life?” Not if you know them—and that’s the point. Everyone has a story. The key is to take the time to listen.
About the Author
Len Wechsler is a writer, filmmaker, and lifelong storyteller whose work
spans continents, cultures, and creative disciplines. Raised in New York City
and educated in the Midwest, Wechsler studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in
Paris before earning a master’s degree from New York University. His
early adult years were marked by adventure and movement—from playing
professional basketball in France and Italy to traveling across Europe and
around the Mediterranean.
In the United States, Wechsler taught in both New York and California before
launching a filmmaking career in the mid-1970s. He was among the earliest
filmmakers to capture the raw beauty, risk, and exhilaration of surfing and
skateboarding on film, later transitioning into screenwriting for feature
films. His creative life continued overseas when he lived and worked in
Portugal for thirteen years as a teacher and theater director.
More recently, Wechsler co-wrote a stage play exploring the underbelly of Los
Angeles, which debuted in New York City. A member of the Writers Guild of
America West, he now lives in California, where he continues to
write—and still plays basketball when he can, even if the three-pointer
no longer falls as easily.
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