Memoir: The Anniversary Edition
In which I celebrate my achievement and recognize the centenary of "The Waste Land"
On October 31, 2018, I started writing about my brother, who committed suicide in 2004.
Lynn was 10 years older than me but practically my twin. He was a long-haired hippie (moved to the garage, put tapestries on the wall and a poster that read “War is Not Healthy For Children and Other Living Things,” drove a VW bug, hitchhiked up and down the west coast with his red kerchiefed golden retriever. He learned sign-language and interpreted in churches and became religious. Not one to ever do things half way, he became an ordained reverend and found churches for the deaf throughout the pacific Northwest, in Seattle, in Spokane, in Portland, Oregon. Then he became suicidal, spent 13 years with major depressive disorder, in and out of institutions, until finally, one night in 2004, he jumped from the Fremont Bridge in Portland.
His death marked the beginning of my own life spiraling out of control, a decade of dysfunction marked by 4 major suicides, two job losses, the death of my parents and estrangement from the rest of my family, a hidden diagnosis of borderline personality disorder that led to a divorce and my involvement with a master manipulator that left me broken and alone.
My life was subject to the sucking vortex of personality disorders and had become a waste land of dysfunction. It would take the power of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land” with its catechism - Give, Sympathize, Control - and a bdsm hook pull, a pain ritual, to help me break the destructive cycle of dysfunction that had come to define my life.
About a year into writing about my brother, I made the connection to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem I had studied in detail, taking several “waste land literature” courses with Professor Louis Owens, my mentor and inspiration to become a writer and scholar, a Native American novelist and Steinbeck scholar who was one of those who committed suicide. Eliot’s poem fit so closely with my own life, down to very phrases, that it was a natural to join it to my own writing efforts.
I realized then that I wasn’t writing about my brother as much as I was writing about my own life. And thus, my memoir was born.
Today is the 4 year anniversary of the day I started writing what would become my memoir: My Own Private Waste Land.
Today I begin the last period of editing. The draft topped out at 203,000 words. The draft I finished in May 2022 is 98,000 words with 6,000 words of notes, similar to the notes in Eliot’s poem. My goal is to cut another 20,000 words or so to bring it to about 75,000 words.
This has been a long journey and I continue to query agents to seek traditional publication. I appreciate your support of my writing efforts by subscribing to my substack to help me build an audience, or subscribe for a modest fee (about the cost of one cup of coffee a month) so I can keep writing. Either one - subscribing for free or a fee - will be greatly appreciated.
October 2022 is also the 100th anniversary of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. All year long has been a celebration of this most important poem of the 20th century. It has no equal. It is Eliot’s crowning achievement, a poem that keeps giving, even 100 years later.
In the past week, there have been many articles about Eliot’s poem. I’m listing them here. This is but a handful that have been published this past week. It’s a good entry point to The Waste Land.
As much as I owe a debt of gratitude to Eliot for his poem for the sake of my memoir and my life’s work, the world owes Eliot thanks for this masterwork of literature.
Enjoy these readings:
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land
Michelle Taylor, “The Secret History of T. S. Eliot’s Muse” The New Yorker (Dec. 5 2020)
Anthony Lane, “The Shock and Aftershocks of ‘The Waste Land’” The New Yorker (Oct 3, 2022)
Kenan Malik, “TS Eliot’s Waste Land was a barren place. But at least a spirit of optimism still prevailed” The Guardian (Oct 30, 2022)
Jude Rogers, “TS Eliot’s women: the unsung female voices of The Waste Land” The Guardian (Oct 30, 2022)
Alok A. Khorana, “How Modern is The Waste Land After All?” Lit Hub (Oct 24, 2022)
David Barnes, “How T. S. Eliot’s Therapeutic Practice Produced The Waste Land” Lit Hub (Oct 24, 2022)
Lit Hub, “The Most Important Poem of the 20th Century: On T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ at 100” A conversation with 4 writers and academics: Beci Carver, Jahan Ramazani, Robert Crawford, and David Barnes.
Happy Halloween. Thank you for reading. As summer gives way to fall and winter, I hope rain nourishes your life and heals the cracks of The Waste Land in the earth.
As for me, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!
Please share, comment, and subscribe.