In writing memoir, it is useful to have a tool to help you plot out the course of your life. It doesn’t mean everything that happened in your life will go into your book. Heaven forfend. But it is like taking a sentimental refresher to remind you where you were, what happened, and how it affected you.

Memoir is not an autobiography. Frankly, most of us don’t rate a fully-researched, detailed book that combs through every age and stage of our lives. That is reserved for global movers and shakers like presidents and Nobel prize winners. Most of us wouldn’t want that type of scrutiny anyway. I sure know I wouldn’t. What I do know is that there were key incidents in my life that shaped me. That mantra I had in the 80s about women “having it all” ruled my life for years. Turns out it wasn’t fully true.

Only in retrospect can I see what a bill of goods we women were sold. As we are just living our lives and trying to make ends meet, it is hard to see the significance of the events happening around you at the time. The power of hindsight is 20/20, so we can look back and see more clearly how a particular thing happening led to what happened next. And so on and so on until you die.

So at the suggestion of author Joanne Fedler, I am setting out to create a graph of my life from birth to the present day. Fedler advises us to create a spreadsheet starting with the year of your birth, your age in each year, significant events that occurred in your life, and also what occurred in the world at large. I remember how significant Woodstock was to me in 1969, mostly as a war story reported by those who had actually attended. I was dazzled by their coolness. Looking back now, I see it was a significant cultural event for a whole generation and marked an era of widespread social change. The music of Woodstock was just the tip of the iceberg.

I find it fascinating to reminisce with old friends about how we were and what we lived through. We had all the perfunctory life milestones to go through at the same time as big things happened in the wider world: marriage, babies, career-building, loss of parents, then friends. The predictable trajectory was often marked by outliers such as random tragic deaths close to us, a random financial windfall or reversal, or stupefying betrayals that shook our belief systems to the core. No matter how charmed, few of us get through life completely unscathed.

So I suppress my intense hatred of MS Excel to capture the signposts I need to guide me on my memoir journey. Signposts and goalposts. That is what comes next. By when will this book actually be written, revised, and published? Those goalposts keep changing.

I started this blog with the goal to have my own book in my hands within a year. I might not need that much time. The truth is I have been writing this book all my life. I filled countless journals as I struggled to make sense of the family craziness going on around me. I sent so many emails to friends that I’m convinced that by printing them all out and doing a deep edit, the book’s salient plot points would emerge. I have signed up for a couple of online challenges with the expectation that I’ll have a working first draft in a few weeks, not months. We’ll see about that.

I already know the theme of the book. Surviving the unsurvivable. Gratitude for life in spite of it all. Looking at brokenness with compassion and empathy – for myself and for others. There is so much out there about the value of forgiveness and to me, it’s pretty easy-peasy. You forgive your enemies not for their sake but for your own. I don’t want the damaging people in my life to take up any valuable real estate in my head any longer. I won’t likely have coffee with them, but I have forgiven them.

Effectively it has been a series of choices to get better instead of bitter. The only bitters I enjoy are Angostura in a glass of tonic water and ice with a generous slice of lemon. That is a beverage I fully plan to enjoy at each milestone that this book-writing process occasions. Chin-chin.