The Accidental Memoirist
In which I explain how I came to write a memoir
Some writers would say that if you know exactly what you are going to write when you sit down to write, that that’s not writing. It’s merely transcribing or typing. Discovery of story, voice, form, structure, rhythm happen on the page while writing, as well as in the revising lab. For some writers, that’s the whole point of creative writing - the creation part, the magic of discovery.
Of course, it’s not magic. It’s hard work, sitting down every day, battling insecurities, staving off the negative Nellie voices in one’s head and imposter syndrome. How do you adequately gauge your successes? Declaring a piece of writing as “good” through self-validation doesn’t mean it will read well or be received well by others. Overweaning hubris is a fool’s game.
So how did I come to write a memoir? Why should my story be told? Why should my story be traditionally published?
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This newsletter is about my quest for traditional publication, though it’s much more than that as well.
I’ve written a memoir, My Own Private Waste Land, about being thrown off my life’s path partly due to family mental illness, which put me on watch for potential problems, and the mental illnesses and resulting toxic relationships of those around me. Combine my life experiences with a metaphorical application of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a work I had studied extensively and professionally, and you have the makings of high literary drama - a train wreck of a story wrapped in golden robes.
I’ve often dabbled in personal essays partly because of the crazy stories in my life. I thought of myself as a short story writer or nonfiction essayists or novelist though I spent my years teaching, which robbed me of the time to pursue writing.
Whenever I told people tales from my life, they were riveted by the stories. Inevitably someone would say, “You should write those stories down.”
During the next to last semester of my teaching career, Fall 2018, I had a hostile student, at a university 20 miles from Sandy Hook, the site of one of the most horrific school shootings in United States history. My student, a veteran, had just gone off the rails for the third day in a row. I put a desk between me and her. She was jawing with me face to face, angry, an excessive response for being asked if she was turning in a draft of her assignment. She could have had PTSD. Her friends tried pulling her away. Other students took video of the encounter. After reporting the incident to the proper authorites in the Office of Student Conduct, she was removed from class for a day. The next week, a Dean reinstated her, approving her return to class because “she had paid for it,” no matter my own work-place safety issues or the fact she’d been disruptive to the class and other people’s learning through the entire semester thus far. I would work out my contract, one more semester and quit. After almost 25 years in the classroom, I wasn’t willing to risk my life for teaching for an administration that didn’t have my back.
On a cold Halloween evening in the Northeast, not far from Salem, Mass., site of the famous witch trials, I found refuge in a darkened cigar bar and began writing. It’s as if my life had built to this point.
I wrote about my brother, hippie turned evangelical preacher to the deaf who founded churches for the deaf through the Pacific Northwest - Seattle, Spokane, Portland - before becoming suicidal and diagnosed with major depressive disorder, an illness that he fought for 13 years before finally, one late summer night, jumping from the Fremont Bridge in Portland, Oregon. He left behind a wife and four children, as well as the birth family who loved him - parents, an aunt, two sisters, and me his brother. My brother was 51 when he died. I am 10 years younger.
His suicide was followed some years later - 8 years later but a year apart -by the suicides of his two middle children. They were 31 and 29 years old.
What’s remarkable in this story is that for my entire life, I was mistaken for my brother. Despite our 10 year age gap, we were almost identical copies physically, and temperamentally we were quite similar as well, prone to shyness and loneliness and introversion and intense study of whatever topic interested us. For him it was church, the Bible, and God; for me it as literature and all my hobbies.
So once my brother got sick, I started looking over my shoulder….
At my back I always hear
Time’s wingéd chariot …
I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust.
When was my turn?
When you look back, it’s difficult to look forward or see what’s going on around you. And thus, my story is one of altered perceptions, which led to a series of toxic relationships, my involvement with two women with serious mental illness problems, both destructive in different ways. There were other mitigating circumstances. The point is, I was caught in the crossfire.
I am fortunate to be here.
I sat down on that Halloween night to write about my brother.
What did he feel as he stood on that bridge?
Why that night?
What blackness in his soul forced his hand?
He was a believer, so was this the devil’s handiwork?
At the same time as he was contemplating his own mortality and climbing that bridge, I was on the other coasts, a continent away, standing around my father-in-law’s death bed, watching him die. As he lay dying, my brother was taking his own life. Both men were dead the next day.
After a month of traveling from coast-to-coast picking up the pieces of shattered lives, my ex- and I returned to our home in the middle of the country, in Kansas - far from the scene of both deaths as you can get. We buried our anesthetized and numb selves as far into the center of the country as one could.
When we got home to the unmown grass, now waist high in the late summer, to our large secluded house on a lake in a rural subdevelopment, the answering machine light blinked its red eye. A month away from home. Back now to the empty 3,000 room house, where our dream of children would die. Back now to our dogs, sitting on a sheep skin rug in front of pass-through fireplaces that didn’t work.
On that first night back, I heard a voice from the grave. Soft. Haunted. My brother and I were not in close contact during the last few years of his life, though we were not alienated. He used the majority of his energies just to keep going, to keep struggling.
On the night he died, he left a message on my answering machine: “Hello Lee. It’s me, Lynn. I was just calling to see how you’re doing. (sigh) Take care. Love you, brother.”
I wasn’t home. I was in Virginia, standing around a hospital bed, witnessing the final day of my father-in-law’s life.
What if I had been home to receive my brother’s call?
The road to hell is paved with “what if’s.”
My brother suffered for 13 years before killing himself. On the summer before he died, he piggybacked onto a vacation I took to see my parents. We had a family reunion. He even brought his youngest daughter down from Portland to visit as well, the first time I had met her. She was 12. My brother became suicidal at the same time as she was born. She had only known him when he was sick - not the man I knew at all.
On that summer, he came to say goodbye.
Oh, I have no doubt he planned his escape, his demise, his swan dive. For he left a note. And he left his loved ones gifts; for each of us, one of his beloved Frisbees.
I now live in the Pacific Northwest, the region where my brother spent his entire adult life. I have lived all over the United States - Southern California, New Mexico, Kansas, Connecticut, Coastal Central Calfornia, Atlanta, and now Seattle. Excluding Alaska and Hawaii, it’s the only region of the United States where I hadn’t previously lived. In some ways, it feels like coming home, from the east to the West Coast. In other ways, PNW feels like a homecoming. My brother’s spirit is with me.
While my brother died in 2004, my story continues on. I have a story to tell. It’s a story of survival. It’s a story of my own private waste land.
I started writing about my brother. But my brother’s story is intertwined with my own so tightly that I realized I was writing about my own life. Thus, a short biographical piece about my brother became a 4-year journey into writing a memoir focused on a decade of my life, a decade in which I saw my family decimated by mental illness and my own life turned upside down until I reached a breaking point.
Was I going to be mired in the moral drought, or was I going to forge my path out of the waste land?
I am here to tell the tale.
This week: Revamping my query for the new year.
This year: I’m pivoting to a full-time freelance writing and developmental book editing career. After a year of training, I’m ready to throw my hat into the editing ring.
This is my year to sell my book, and I need your help.
Thank you for reading. I’m writing to support my efforts to earn traditional publication for my memoir, My Own Private Waste Land. I am currently querying agents. I publish newsletter updates at 9:00 am on Mondays and Fridays.
Today, I’m running a little late as it’s a holiday - Martin Luther King Jr. Remembrance Day. Take a moment to think about the life and legacy of this great man.
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Please share this post and my newsletter with others. I write about:
writing and the writing life
writing process
memoir craft
mental illness - major depressive disorder, suicide, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder
sailing
alternative lifestyles - polyamory and kink
Have a great week! If you are celebrating MLK Jr. Day, enjoy your day off.
For me, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!