Article published 10/27/2020
After writing a novel, I thought writing a memoir was going to be less challenging. Not easy, but I couldn’t imagine how a story that I already knew could possibly be more difficult to tell than the one I had made up. After all, I understood the inciting incident, I knew the scenes, characters, and sequence of events, and I knew how it ended.
But I was wrong. Writing my memoir, The Strongbox, took four times longer to finish, and it presented more emotional challenges than my fiction writing ever had. Nevertheless, in both the novel and the memoir, I kept a firm grasp on the practice of showing up for the words. The memoir nearly put me into therapy a couple of times, but I kept writing. Holding the emotional gravity of my story while remaining a steadfast companion to my husband, going to my day job, and marching around like a solid citizen: minding my manners, paying my bills, and honoring the rules of the road, was, at times, a herculean task.
There was a brief period of time, early on, when I wondered if I should fictionalize my life’s story, change the details enough to hide the fact that I was writing a memoir. Those musings fizzled because life is crazier than fiction, and if I wrote what had actually happened as fiction, readers would scoff, “Oh, come on.”
Deciding to go for the truth was more frightening than invigorating. That was probably the most perilous time for getting the book written. It was tempting to turn away from what I wanted to say, just give up, put the whole subject into a boarded and padlocked cell never to be visited again.
Funny that. The I-can’t-do-this phase is surely universal. Even when I was questioning if and how I was going to approach another big writing project, I had a sense that my logic-laced pushback was just a part of the gig. It’s something writers go through.
Telling myself that I didn’t have enough time, that nobody would want to read it, or that I didn’t have enough material were all ways that I tried to sabotage a story that insisted on being told. Books get written because authors know they have to plow through that first hurdle of self-doubt.
The driving questions in my memoir are Who was my father? And Why wasn’t he in my life?
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Silence Did Not Stop Me