What is the date you began writing this memoir and the date when you completed the memoir? Seriously in 2018, finishing in 2020. However, I wrote another story before this, for a friend that has many of the same elements, and that took five years.
Where did you do most of your writing for this memoir? And please describe in detail. At my desk. However, the journals that are cited in the story have entries from all over the world. Most of my material comes from my journal.
What were your writing habits while writing this memoir- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I love to write so it is difficult for me not to write. I have no schedule, other than I try to balance when I am feeling more creative versus feeling more precise and businesslike and apply the appropriate mode to the work that needs to be done. I mostly write in my journal and then transcribe to my computer, where it gets edited and organized. I will take notes on pieces of paper, record thoughts while I am driving, in general make sure that I get the thoughts recorded in any manner when they come so that I can later organize them in digital form.
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Out of all the specific memories you write about in this memoir, which ONE MEMORY was the most emotional for you to write about? And can you share that specific excerpt with us here. The excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer, and please provide page numbers or Chapter number as references. Writing about my mom has been very difficult, because we were estranged for many years, and only recently very close. And, unlike my dad and many other characters from my memoir, she is still alive. I write around her more than about her.
P. 104, Ch. 21
“Charlie stands in the same place I had been a few months earlier when I watched the small frame of my mom step out of her car in the drive, this time wearing a red Chinese-style dress, high heels trying to navigate gravel, blond hair in curls. When Dad greets her, she says, arms straight and shaking at her side, “Nikki? This time you slept with Nikki? My friend?” I see her tears glint in the sun as she looks up at me, her goodbye, before she disappears in her grey sedan behind a cloud of dust through which grasshoppers jump in an arc.”
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Can you describe the emotional process of writing about this ONE MEMORY? Though I knew that relations between my mom and dad were strained, this is the final, definitive event of her leaving him, and me. I am about twelve, and this moment breaks my heart for many years. My mom and I spent very little time together for the next thirty years due to her shame and my pain. I could not understand why a mother could not be a part of her daughter’s life.
Their examples gave me the strength and power to change and be a better example, to the best of my abilities, as I knew that if I did not, it would continue to affect further generations. No matter how difficult, small, or personal, a troubled situation is, I am a champion for self-change for the big picture, as the implications become global, as our current geo-political climate attests to.
Writing this story helped give me compassion for her. In reviewing my journals and putting the events and personalities in perspective, I could see, firsthand, how impossible it was to live with my father, and as a mother myself, how horrifying it would be to have a young child on this boat with this particular man, as a ‘husband’ no less.
It was painful for me that my mom was not around for my later youth and teenage years, and it took writing this book to understand why she made the choice she did.
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