I've been doing a fair amount of guest speaking lately. Since
it's mostly for The Orchard, the art of memoir writing comes up again and
again. I meet people who are
working on their memoirs, and one thing I like to share is how surprised I was
to find that through writing about my own life I came to a much deeper
understanding of things I thought I understood through and through. I think the
biggest surprise was finding out how much my father's abandonment impacted me,
my mother, and my older brother.
At the time, we all put on a brave face. We weren't crybabies.
We didn't feel sorry for ourselves. Good riddance, you jerk. Don't let the door hit you in the ass
on the way out. You are dead to us. You aren't worthy of us.
But until I
wrote the memoir, I didn't understand how my father's actions turned all of us
into different people. Forever.
I can now see how that single action rerouted the course of
our lives in a damaging way. We'd been strong rivers, moving in a solid
direction toward the ocean. Now we were trickling streams, trying to find our
way across a desert that led nowhere.
His leaving forever changed us. Changed who we were. Changed our core
and changed our hearts, making us bitter, jaded children. And once he left, the
very act of his bold and crazy move made him bigger than life to me; made him
some strange folk hero.
With his leaving, the focus of our lives shifted. Before, it
had been about school, home, family. Now it was about absence, rejection,
abandonment, and the daily struggles of extreme poverty.
His absence sculpted us. My mother, my older brother, and
me. Cutting away clay to create these new people who looked at the world with
bitter, wounded eyes. This is what
I didn't realize until I wrote my second memoir.
When I was working on The Man Who Left, I sent the typical
proposal to my agent. Three chapters and a synopsis. She liked the material, but
she thought it needed a stronger story arc. We were in agreement about that, and I'd been struggling to
find a solid theme. She saw two possible choices that would help make the book
feel bigger. One was for me to move to Florida to care for my father, and the
other choice was to work in an Alzheimer's care facility. I understood where she was coming from,
but I had no interest in doing either. I finished the book, but she never read
it and it wasn't submitted anywhere. Instead, I published it under Belfry Press. I've been surprised by the positive reader response even
though the story still feels a bit incomplete to me. And many people have asked me to write a third memoir, but I
don't know about that. Maybe
someday, but right now I'm anxious to get back into fiction.
And just because I love this photo...
