Memoirs — Written and To Be Written
I just finished two amazing memoirs and one biography. They are: Sushi Tuesdays (Maya); Women We Buried, Women We Burned (Snyder) and LeBron (Benedict). Yes, these are vastly different books. But, at some level, they all share two essential themes: lost love and lasting love. Perhaps those are related concepts, flip sides of the same coin. We love and then we lose our love. Families — good and bad — are at each book’s core. So are mothers.
To be sure, despite the themes of these three books, some folks have never loved, at least not profoundly. Some think they have loved, only to be surprised later to realize what they felt was lust or like or stability or security. Folks realize (or others realize for them) that what they wanted in another was money or power, not love.
I was struck by a line in Snyder’s book about her mother’s death from cancer when she (the mother) was only 35. It is the line that came to her when she was a sophomore in college and stayed with her into adulthood: “So, you want to know what it’s like when your mother dies….”
Ponder that sentence and fill in whatever feels right to you at the end: So, you want to know what it’s like when …….. The line has stayed with me. I wonder if I could share what it’s like to be unhappily married for decades, to love one’s child as if one had a second heart beating inside oneself (to steal a line from the amazing poem Head First), to learn about deeper love and understanding of oneself and another late in life when tempus fugit.
All three books provide happy endings. All three books are about personal struggles and the adaptations that life necessitates. All three books are about trust and loyalty and growth and mistakes. All three books are about navigation — as in navigating through life’s inevitable storms. Perhaps that’s why I live on the ocean with water on three sides; I am still navigating.
Eventually, all three protagonists find a safe harbor, a place where they can be themselves and be understood. The protagonists find some understanding — recognizing where they have been and where they are going. That’s hopeful, something essential to moving forward.
Several friends of mine have asked me if I will write a memoir. I am quick to respond “NO,” a word I have trouble saying in other contexts. But, as I reflect on my writing — all my writing — I recognize that I have written and continue to write a memoir of sorts, although these writings aren’t called that for sure. I write about what matters to me, what I understand and what I struggle to understand. And, writing is where I find answers I didn’t even know I had. Often I reread my own pieces, pondering what I said and meant as if the words were written by others.
Let me be clear: My published pieces and books (both adult and children’s books) aren’t about me per se. But, I remember a child in a classroom asking me after our group reading one of my children’s books, a book titled Lady Lucy’s Quest. whether I was Lady Lucy. One smart kid.
So, as I read the memoirs of others, all touching, all real, all deeply affecting, I am moved yet again to reflect on my own journey. It is a journey I have not traveled alone. But it is my journey and I hope it continues. And perhaps, as my life’s end is closer than the beginning, that end being decades from now I hope, I can reread what I written for decades and find a memoir within those prose. Some of it may be hidden; other aspects may be very close, perilously close, to the surface.
What I’m saying I guess is that there’s a possible future book in the interstices of my writings. And if I find that memoir hidden or buried and/or even skidding along the surface, I hope it has the power and poignancy of the three books I just finished and referenced above. Would that I will be able to share my story as well as the authors of these three stories did. That would be fortunate. And valuable. And moving. Time will tell, as it always does.
