Just Great

The much-anticipated meeting with memoir mentor Nancy Reddy here at the Murphy Writing School in Florida took place yesterday. I had previously supplied Nancy with the requisite 1000-word memoir draft excerpts for her review to make the most of our brief time together.

We had an animated discussion about the genesis of those childhood “scenes” and what they said about how I got here (to adulthood) from there (that childhood). She then articulated a challenge I hadn’t fully grasped that I have. “You actually have too much material to draw from,” Nancy intoned. “You will need to decide and get clear on your focus and throughline and a theme for your book.”

“It could be fractious and conflicted mother-daughter relationships. It could be the limited availability of helping options in toxic mid-century WASP North America after World War Two. Whatever else, you should choose to focus on the transformational aspect of your story. How you developed skills that helped you survive what otherwise might have been unsurvivable.”

Great… just great.

I grant you, an unstable childhood riddled with physical violence, sexual molestations, alcoholism, sex addiction, neglect, prescription pill addiction, my mother’s serious suicide attempt when I was 11, and, eventually, a jagged divorce between my parents that was never really final is a lot of material to wade through. And a lot of material to choose from. Hell, it was a lot to live through!

Nancy advised me to make essential choices to get organized and clear about where to focus my story’s stories. The dutiful student that I am, I hied me to a stationery store and loaded up my cart with index cards (white and colored), highlighters (multi-colored), looseleaf paper, and a binder to hold it all together. Holding it all together has been another repetitive throughline in my story. I have embarked on the book organization path before but with less gravitas and focus. Now, this truth must out.

I expect the book to be a shout-out of encouragement to other “identified” black sheep family members. The hope is that other survivors will read and resonate with what I went through and how I managed to survive. They may be emboldened to tackle and break down intransigent and seemingly immutable patterns of intergenerational trauma in their own families as I have tried to do in mine. No mean feat I assure you.

But explore it I shall with all the heart and humor and love and discipline I can muster. I could just walk away, of course, and coast happily to my grave. No one would notice or care. Author, Joanne Fedler wryly argues, “So, you want to write? Steal time. Make time. Sneak time. Take time. No one gives it to you. Or just don’t write. The only person you will make miserable is you.”

I sigh in resignation and remind myself again that I chose this path. With cause.