All Behind the Book essays

When we describe the premise of Identical Strangers, most people assume it’s a work of fiction. Separated twins reunited after 35 years? For sure, the story is the stuff of fairy tales. But in our case, fairy tales really do come true.

We met for the first time three-and-a-half years ago after discovering we were identical twins. Each of us had been adopted and raised by separate families who were never told we had a twin sister.

Immediately after our reunion, we began to jot down notes about our unusual situation and to compile endless lists of questions. What is it that makes each of us unique? Do we owe our personality traits largely to nature or nurture? Why were we separated? Would we be the same people we are today if we had been raised together? At the time, we didn’t realize that these initial scribblings would be the impetus behind Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited. What started out as an idea to write a personal essay about our reunion became a common project that would unite us for the next two years.

Spurred on by our curiosity, we teamed up and became twin Nancy Drews. As we investigated our biological family and explored the reasons for our separation, we unearthed some unpleasant facts about the adoption agency that placed us. We were troubled to discover that as infants, for a time, we were part of a secret research study involving separated twins. Not only did we have a personal story to tell, but now we had a mystery to solve. It was clear a book was emerging.

Our friends and family were amazed at how quickly after meeting we began to work on the book and we had our own doubts. At first, we feared that writing together would put too much stress on our new relationship. We barely knew each other and suddenly, we would be forced to bare our souls and commit ourselves to working with each other on a regular basis. Meeting to share ideas at cafes and in each other’s homes, we got to know each other over brainstorming sessions. We eventually found that creating a shared narrative allowed us to bridge the wide chasm that separated us as strangers.

Since our individual stories were so different, when it came time to determine the structure of the book, we knew that we couldn’t write in one unified voice. It seemed only natural that we would each write from our own perspective. We had no idea how our sections would piece together or if they would fit at all. We began by mapping out key events we would cover, then set off to write on our own. Exchanging chapters, we were often astounded that we chose the same words to describe things. Other times, we were surprised that we viewed the same situations quite differently. Still, without much editing, our individual sections effortlessly complemented each other.

When we drew up the initial chapter outline, there was no way of predicting how the story would end. Would we confront the psychiatrist responsible for the study? Would we track down our birth mother? Because we wrote the book as the events were unfolding, our emotions were still incredibly raw. Overwhelmed by the pressure to compensate for so many lost years, during one particularly grueling writing session at a local coffee shop, we broke down in tears. Later we joked that writing together was saving us thousands of dollars on therapy. In truth, working within the constraints of a narrative forced us to put into words the puzzling emotions we were experiencing. By writing in the present tense, we also hoped to convey a sense of immediacy. We would thrust the reader into our absurd situation and force them to imagine what it would be like to encounter the double they never knew they had. Still, we were wary that chronicling the experience while it was happening might alter the course of events. We came to realize that writing a memoir requires some distance and we began to see ourselves as characters. Vowing to remain faithful to our characters, we didn’t want to do or say anything simply for the sake of a good story. We recognized that ultimately, our priority was the truth of the story of our lives. Elyse Schein is a writer and filmmaker whose work has been shown at film festivals in Telluride and Long Island. Paula Bernstein is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Redbook and Variety. Both sisters live in Brooklyn. Identical Strangers is their first book.

About a girl: Among troubled young women, a standout It all started with an e-mail.

I’d just come home from my second shift as a volunteer at a homeless shelter for teenagers, a shelter where I myself had spent a few months at the age of 15. Now 34 and (relatively) stable, I wanted to give something back to the place that had helped save my life; I wanted to find a young woman like the one I’d been, and make a positive difference in her life.

So far, what I’d found was blowing my mind and breaking my heart.

Cheryl is nineteen and pregnant. She has a two-year-old daughter who’s currently in foster care. She also has a criminal record. Cheryl owns one sweatshirt, one pair of pants, and no bra . . . I poured it all out in an e-mail to three of my best girlfriends, told them everything I’d seen, thought and felt over the course of my four-hour shift. I just couldn’t keep it to myself, what these girls were dealing with every night while we blithely made dinner, watched TV, surfed the web. I hit “send,” and my friends’ responses were rapid: Oh, wow. So sorry to hear it. And, tell us more.

Thus began a series of e-mails I called the “Volunteer Notes.” Every week, I updated my friends on the rotating cast of characters I met at the shelter: Mandy, the meth addict with the beautiful singing voice; Marisol, the gangbanger who wanted out. After a few months, one young woman emerged as the star of the “Volunteer Notes,” and one of the stars of my life: Samantha.

Samantha had been on the streets since she was 12. Her abusive, drug-addicted parents had prostituted her since she was a kid; finally, she escaped them and made her own way through the slums of the U.S., dealing drugs and turning tricks. Now 19, she’d come to the shelter to get sober and clean up her life. I was instantly drawn to Sam for her tremendous charisma, her vast intelligence and her great writing talent, and she was drawn to me in return.

Over the next year, I chronicled my friendship with Sam in my journals and my “Volunteer Notes,” as I followed her from the shelter, to detox, to a psych ward, to rehab, to a halfway house and finally to a hospital in the Bronx, where she lay near death, suffering from the late stages of a virulent autoimmune disorder.

By this time, I knew I wanted to write a book about my volunteer experiences, which was handy, since my publisher was expecting me to come up with a second book to follow my debut memoir, Girlbomb, and they wanted it soon. I asked Sam’s permission to include her as a major character in the book – I’d been showing her much of what I’d been writing about her throughout our friendship – and she agreed, pleased that her story would live on after her.

Then came a revelation about Sam’s illness, a turn of events so shocking that I thought, I really must be a character in a book, because this can’t be happening. Over the next few weeks, I came to realize that Sam was sicker than anybody suspected, in ways nobody could have guessed. I discovered that truth really is stranger than fiction – and, often, just as hard to write.

So how was I supposed to write a book about events that were still unfolding? Well, first I got an extension on my deadline from my (wonderful, patient) editor. Then I scheduled a bunch of extra therapy sessions with my shrink. I collected all the e-mails and journal entries, and read them in one fell swoop. And then I sat at my desk and wrote as honestly as I was able to write. Sometimes I broke down and cried; other times, I slammed the laptop shut and pounded my fists on the desk. But mainly, I tried to tell the truth as I understood it, even as the truth kept changing on me.

It was a grueling experience, living through the ordeal with Sam, and then having to relive it while the pain was still fresh. But once I’d pushed myself through it, my perspective changed: I was able to see myself as a character, the events as a story. And now it doesn’t have to live in my head and my heart the way it once did. It lives safely between the covers of a book – a book I can now call closed.

Janice Erlbaum is a former columnist for BUST magazine. Have You Found Her is her second book. Her previous one, Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir, was named one of the New York Public Library’s 25 Books to Remember. Erlbaum lives in New York City.

When Robyn Scott was seven years old, her family swapped a tranquil existence in New Zealand for an adventurous new life in Botswana.Twenty Chickens for a Saddle is Scott's beautifully written portrait of her idyllic childhood there. A graduate of Cambridge University, she lives in London but works and travels frequently in Africa.

"What does your family think?"

This question is the unchallenged front-runner among those I've been asked about Twenty Chickens for a Saddle, the story of my childhood in Botswana. It is also the second question I put to myself when I set about writing, and one that I have asked my family and myself repeatedly ever since. The answers, unsurprisingly, have been varied and evolving, and, while never disapproving, thankfully became more positive as the initial clumsy pages slowly metamorphosed into a respectable book.

That is, except in one case: one that illuminates the heart of the challenges for me in writing this story.

My literary agent, meeting my maternal grandparents a few months ago, had posed the well-worn question. We were having sundowners – whiskies, brandies and salted peanuts – which, but for the lush backdrop of a Cape Town garden, were straight out of the now faraway world of the book. "It's a decent read," replied my grandfather. "And quite nicely written," he added. Then he frowned, almost accusingly. "But maybe now you can explain to me what on earth the fuss is about? Why would anyone care what we all got up to in a little town in Botswana?"

This had been the first question I asked myself two years earlier, when it was suggested I should write a book. "No one would," I'd told myself. The conclusion was persistent: When, after a few months of others' encouragement, I dusted off the idea and wrote a hesitant first few thousand words, I reviewed them with dismay.

I had begun – unimaginatively – with my first day in Botswana, when I met both the country and my paternal grandfather; and when, in the gathering darkness, two brown fruit moths fluttered down and sipped red wine-laced grape juice from the corners of my grandfather's lips. The memory was vivid and magical. But in the unforgiving light of the morning after words met page, it seemed suddenly indulgent: Two moths? Who cares? The magic was in being there as a little girl . . . magical only to me.

Snakes, I decided: safely, objectively, indisputably exciting.

I rewrote the beginning, featuring a large, poisonous, ultimately disembowelled puff adder in the first few paragraphs, relegating the humble moths deep into the story. Increasingly confident, I proceeded over the next weeks to describe – littering adverbs and adjectives – the black mamba that had dangled menacingly over my shocked father from a shower head; the heart-stopping evening my little sister had heroically chased another (even bigger!) black mamba poised to fatally strike our tiny terrier; a burly, scarred friend of ours who'd bravely broken a crocodile's jaw; several swashbuckling snake-lion-mortal-danger stories from my wild grandfather's early days in the wilds of Botswana.

I soon ran out. And after four frustrating discussions with my parents and siblings, I had just a couple more. Beyond these, the dinner party hits, nothing. Think harder, I pleaded. By then putting together a proposal, I was becoming concerned that even if an agent liked the idea I might nevertheless, horribly, find myself with nothing more to say.

My agent, David Godwin – now eyed quizzically over a crystal whisky glass – had liked the idea. "But the book came alive for me with the moths," he'd said to my astonishment. "You should begin with the moths." And so began for me the delightful process of discovering how the quieter, character-rich moments, hovering discreetly in the shadows of grander memories, often most comfortably inhabit the page. And in evoking these, began in each of us a gathering snowball of recollections.

The recollections came, naturally, in varying shades. But when I showed the first draft to my family, all but two differences were quickly resolved. My father disputed that he and his father stopped talking to each other. "He stopped talking to me," he maintained. My mother disputed a description of the mechanism of a catapult built to stun geckos, to scare them into dropping their tails, to feed to the pet snakes in our schoolroom. On both, I stood my ground.

Hours before the deadline for the final draft, my mother was helping me do a last frantic fact check. I walked into the lounge to find her perched on the sofa, surrounded by hundreds of pages – several including arguably less-than-flattering descriptions of her. In her hand was a wooden ruler, pierced with a drawing pin, almost a la the catapult. Seeing me, she smiled, pointed it at the bookcase, and released a rubber band stretched along its length. The band flew wildly off course. "See," she said triumphantly.

The moths begin the book. Of the early stories, the puff adder alone is found in its pages. The catapult mechanism remains unresolved. We are all still talking to each other.

How I came to write ‘Why I Came West’ It seems like I’ve always been writing books about the Yaak Valley: or have been, at least, since I first wandered into this valley in the most northwestern corner of Montana, in the summer of 1987. The valley is roughly a million acres of low-elevation Pacific Northwest rainforest nestled in a bowl of the Northern Rockies, the wildest and most biologically diverse valley in the West.

I inhabited that first year in a state of suspended bliss and wonder, wandering the hills and writing fiction. It was only after I had been there four full seasons that I began to notice, however, the slipping-away, then rushing-away, of wildness – new dust-riven logging roads being plowed far and high up into the valley’s wildest haunts. At that point, I began to write about my love for the valley, and my hopes for its future.

That’s what writers generally do when the object of their affection is at risk of being lost. There’s all the more inclination for a writer to write, trying to slow or deflect or outright prevent the damage.

I’m not sure when it occurred to me that in all my years and all my books, I had not yet so much changed anything in the valley, but had myself been changed by the struggling, entreating, lobbying and yearning – the ceaseless caterwauling of 21 years of activism on behalf of this hard-logged and overlooked place that doesn’t have a significant enough political constituency (only 150 people live year-round in the upper, wilder half of the valley) to gain much Congressional notice.

I’ve come to realize that everything about this valley has shaped me into who I am – has given me cause to question my faith as an environmentalist living in the woods. The only way to be effective, I think, is to dive deeper into the local community: tough duty for a hermit poet. And watching vast stretches of overstocked second- and third-growth forest die has turned me into a logger, of sorts – though I still cherish and demand, with what feels some days like every breath and every thought, wilderness designation and protection for the farther, wilder country: the true untouched remnant wilderness, guideposts of ecological health.

Living in the forest and tasting the wild grouse – hunting them with my dog – and following the elk in the snows of autumn, and gathering mushrooms in the spring, and berries in the fall, has turned me from a hunter-for-hobby into one who is about as close to a subsistence hunter as can still found in the Lower 48.

Living off the grid in deep cold winters has turned me from a sometimes-effete literary guy into a plumber and mechanic of sorts. A sharpener of saws.

This valley has shaped me, but everything about the West has shaped me. Growing up in petrochemical Texas in the 1960s, under the shield of Anglo-Western myths, shaped me; studying wildlife science and geology in northern Utah, a Gentile among the Mormons, in that beautiful landscape and gentle culture, shaped me. The American West has always buffeted and shaped individuals, and continues to do so; this is one of its great values to our nation and society, and one of the many reasons the protection of our last big wild vital places – our homeland – is so important, not just for the sake of the mountains themselves, and the shimmering dignity and vitality of intact wild places, and the plants and animals and processes that live there, but for our own questionable and malleable and puny selves, as well.

We need wilderness. The more confusing and crowded and "civilized" the world becomes, the more we need it. The faster it disappears, the more we need it.

Why I Came West is about the different paths that have led me to this understanding, and about the challenges that have been placed in my way. I’m pleased to report that our little community has drafted a legislative proposal that we sent on to our delegation, in March: one which includes some Yaak wilderness. We might finally be getting closer. The land is changing slowly, degree by degree and year by year, while the changes in me have been huge.

An acclaimed nature writer and novelist, Rick Bass worked as a geologist for eight years before moving West and settling in the Yaak Valley of Montana. His many books include The Lives of Rocks, Platte River and Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had. His latest book, Why I Came West: A Memoir, is being published this month by Houghton Mifflin.

I never planned to write a breast cancer memoir. Never planned to get the cancer that would inspire it. But in January 2006, my first novel was on submission and hadn’t sold yet. In the meantime I’d written a second novel about a woman who finds a lump in her breast and thinks she might have breast cancer and wonders if she’s lived a meaningful life. I sent it off to my then-agent and went in for my annual mammogram and was told it was “suspicious.” A week later I was having surgery and while I was waiting for my own results, I received an e-mail from my agent (who didn’t know about my health scare) that said something like, I don’t really like the breast cancer novel. I’m not sure I care whether that woman has breast cancer or not. Ouch!

But the writing disappointment was a minor blip compared to how the diagnosis rocked my world and shattered my sense of self. I was about the healthiest person I knew. I never got sick. No aches or pains. I ran. I practiced yoga. I ate mostly vegetarian, whole grain and organic. I was the person others consulted for health and anti-aging tips.

I felt like a fake, a fraud. Even after I was told I had the “good” cancer, it was non-invasive and they got it all out, I felt panicked and paralyzed. I couldn’t write, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything other than stare out the window at my garden not yet in bloom and Google health sites and obsess about recurrence rates. And make homemade batches of organic facial creams with stuff like shea butter and jojoba oil. I thought about starting an organic facial cream company for vain hypochondriacs like me. I asked my husband to bring home an electro magnetic field measurer (I’m still waiting for that… do those even exist?). I suggested we move to Utah and live off the land (even though I don’t know the first thing about gardening or farming, my husband reminded me).

Finally, after weeks and weeks of this, my husband pressed a journal into my hands and said, “You have to write this down.” I shook my head. I was not a journal keeper, never had been and I did not want to write any of this down. But one day I picked up the journal and a pen and without even thinking, I wrote: “I’m sitting topless in the oncologist’s office on Valentine’s Day. Cancer is a Bitch.”

Once I started writing, the words flooded out. I shook and wept and fell asleep and woke up and wrote some more. The ironic thing is, as I poured those raw, intimate thoughts out, I thought, I will never EVER show those words to anyone. I thought writing them down was a way I didn’t have to burden my friends and family with my crazy thoughts. (And now you can go buy them in hardcover or my newly released paperback and I hope you will!) Eventually, I wrote those thoughts into an essay I called "Cancer Is a Bitch" and sent it to some trusted writer friends who said it was powerful and I should do something with it. But what was it? What would I do with it?

Soon after that, I read that Literary Mama was looking for columnists and on a whim I pitched the idea of a breast cancer mama column and they said yes and I started writing “Bare-breasted Mama.” To be honest, it was painful to write and I felt naked, like I was exposing myself both physically and emotionally. But the responses from readers were so soulful and many hadn’t even had cancer but they either knew someone who had or were just responding to the midlife issues about motherhood and marriage and career that I wrote about. They thanked me for making them laugh (because believe it or not the book is funny!) and cry and think. Their words gave me the courage to keep writing and opening up and eventually to leave my then agent and pitch the idea of a breast cancer memoir to a new agent.

Next thing I knew I had a new agent, a new book, a new lease on life.

That was three-and-a-half years ago and my life has changed dramatically since then. I have not only launched my writing career, but also have launched two daughters off to college, watched my son turn into a skateboarding teen, run two half marathons, am in training for my first full marathon (in a few weeks!). I have also become a professional speaker and college and medical school lecturer. Plus I feel stronger and healthier, and more sure of who I am and where I am headed, than ever before in my life.

And in the midst of all this life hurtling forward, I made more discoveries. I discovered I could get up in front of other people and share my story with strangers and stand with survivors in solidarity and hold their hands in mine and hope I could give them hope. More significantly, the beauty and wisdom and raw truth I saw in their eyes filled me with hope and a newfound respect for the courage of the human condition and fueled me to not be afraid to share more of myself and be the person I meant to be and live the life I meant to live.

For me that means running my first marathon in a few weeks (oy!), the release of the paperback version of Cancer Is a Bitch, and more speaking and lecturing and a new book in the works and fewer whys and more why nots. And taking more time to gather family and friends around my old pine harvest dining room table overflowing with vases of hydrangeas from the garden still in bloom and good food and stories and hearty laughter and the gratitude and joy of being.

Gail Konop Baker writes from her home in Madison, Wisconsin. Her memoir, Cancer Is a Bitch, is available in paperback this month.

My new book, The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them, is an affectionate memoir of my experience as a single mother. The book spans the 18 years I spent raising my daughter, Emily, with the help of my family.

I didn’t set out to write a memoir, however. My intention was to write a how-to book, full of tips, hints and useful information. Because I’m a syndicated advice columnist, I’m used to telling people “how to”—how to cure a heartache, how to confront a friend or how to manage an obnoxious mother-in-law. Due to the success of my column, writing an advice book seemed like a natural fit. My agent and various editors referred to the advice book project as a “slam dunk.”
I was pondering the challenges of writing my how-to book during a trip I took from my home in Chicago to visit family in Freeville, the little farming village in upstate New York where generations of my family have grown up and grown old.

While there, I went to the village school—the same one I attended as a child—to watch my niece’s kindergarten play. On the very same creaky wooden stage where I poured out my own pint-sized aspirations as a kindergartner, I watched my niece and her classmates act out and reflect the story of our lives in this small community. The kids were dressed as chickens, pigs and Holstein cows. They sang and danced in a make-believe barnyard.
It was adorable.
I looked around. The audience was populated with people, many of whom I’ve known all my life. I sat in my folding chair, flanked by my daughter, sister and mother in the old auditorium my grandfather and other men in the village had helped to build.
Given my surroundings, I couldn’t help but think about the arc of my own life. My how-to book idea went away in that moment and I decided instead to write my own story.

In my work as an advice columnist, people often challenge me by asking how I know what I know. I’m not a counselor. I don’t have an advanced degree. I got here the hard way, by living my life and making my share of mistakes. I took the back roads of life, through marriage and divorce and raising my daughter as a single parent. I got here with the help and support of the people in my little world.

My agent was skeptical when I told her I wanted to write about my daughter, aunts and cousins, my sisters and mother. We are ordinary people whose lives, nonetheless, have been blessed with incident. I told her I wanted to write about people and livestock and the little community I come from. 
My agent asked me to write a chapter. She said, “I want to see if there is any there there.”

The first chapter I wrote detailed the loss and longing I felt when my own father abandoned our family farm, leaving his four children to run our failing dairy. And then I wrote another chapter, about the fumbling hilarity of coping with the livestock he had left behind. As I was writing the book, Emily graduated from high school in Chicago and I made the decision to move back to Freeville permanently. Once again, I was surrounded by my family—the women Emily refers to as “the Mighty Queens.”

I wrote about blind dates and my work life. I wrote about my faith and personal failings. I wrote about sending Emily to college and saying goodbye to the person I had raised and was now launching into adulthood. I wrote about “the Mighty Queens,” those women who had supported us, championed our successes and wept with us during our difficult times.

During the course of working on the book, my dear aunt Lena died and we buried her in our family plot in Freeville. I reconnected with the people in my hometown who are all characters in my life story. I fell in love with a man I had known since childhood. And finally, my story felt complete.
 In my work giving advice to other people, I often feel that the two hardest questions for any of us to answer are, “Who am I?” and “What do I want?” I’ve struggled with those questions myself—but finally, through telling my own story, I found the answers.

Amy Dickinson succeeded the legendary Ann Landers as the advice columnist for the Chicago Tribune in 2003. Her column, “Ask Amy,” is now syndicated in 200 newspapers. She is also a regular panelist on the NPR quiz show, “Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me.”