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Memoir

Memoir

Behind the Book: Why I formed the Council of Dads

Behind the Book by Bruce Feiler

by Bruce Feiler

It was the most desperate week of my life. It gave birth to the most hopeful idea I’ve ever had. In July 2008, I learned that I had a seven-inch cancerous tumor in my left femur. I instantly worried about my three-year-old twin daughters and what life might be like for them.

Would they wonder who I was? Would they wonder what I thought? Would they yearn for my approval, my love, my voice?

“I asked each of them to teach a different lesson to my girls—how to live, how to travel, how to think, how to dream.”

Three days later, I awoke with an idea of how I might give them my voice. I would reach out to six men from all parts of my life and ask them to form a “Council of Dads.”

My initial instinct was not to tell my wife, Linda. We should focus on the positive. We should live in the moment.

But I quickly lost my resolve. Linda cried at first, but as soon as we began discussing who should be in my Council, she started rejecting my nominees. “I love him,” she would say, “but he doesn’t represent you.” She added, of another, “I would never ask him for advice.” Starting a Council was a very efficient way of finding out what my wife really thought of my friends!

We needed a set of guidelines.

First, no family members. We figured my family would already have relationships with the girls. Plus, as Linda said, your friends know you differently from your family.

Second, men only. Many of my close friends are women, but with their mom still around, we sought to fill the Dad space in our girls’ lives.

Third, intimacy over longevity. We thought some more recent friendships might better capture the father I wanted to be.

Finally, a dad for every side. We looked for men who might capture different aspects of my personality.

We ultimately settled on six men: my oldest friend, my camp counselor, my college roommate, my business partner, my closest confidant and a tortured romantic poet friend. I asked each of them to teach a different lesson to my girls—how to live, how to travel, how to think, how to dream.

I then asked each one for a single piece of advice to convey to my daughters. Their answers ranged from the best way to take a trip—“Be a traveler, not a tourist”—to the best way to make your dreams come true— “Don’t see the wall.” One advised them not merely to seek the answers but to “Live the questions.” Another counseled that even when they experience pain they should still “Harvest the miracles” around them.

Their answers surprised, at times confused, but ultimately moved me. They also changed our lives. I remember after my first conversation with one of the dads, I said to Linda: “Their wisdom is not just going to change how our girls live. It’s going to change how you live.” (The advice had to do with the proper way to jump in puddles.) These answers were intended for my girls, but they’ve already made me a better dad and friend.
And therein has proven the magic of the Council of Dads. We did it for our girls. But it has transformed us. The experience helped build a bridge between our friends and our kids. It created an entirely new community in our lives. It reminded us of the power of friendship.

Recently, on my girls’ fifth birthday, the Council of Dads convened for the first time ever. They argued about politics, parenting and height. They complained about the weather, one another, me. In short, they were men! (My wife said she had wondered for two years what they would talk about. The answer: sports cars!)

But our girls didn’t care. They were delighted as they moved from dad to dad, reveling in the private bond they share with each one. Our girls don’t understand the shadow that hangs over the idea. All they know is that these men are not just Daddy’s friends.

They are their friends.

That night, after the girls were sleeping, we went around the room and each man spoke of how the experience had changed him. One felt the Council helped replace the voice of his own father. Another took the advice he gave our girls and changed how he parents his own children. The last person to speak was my confidant. I call him my ThinkDad. He calls himself The Contrarian.

“When I first heard the idea of the Council, I rejected it,” he said. “You would triumph over your illness. We wouldn’t need to exist. Today I realized I was wrong. Whether we’re healthy or sick, male or female, we all need to be reminded of what’s most valuable in our lives. We all need to be surrounded by the people we love. And seeing the looks on the girls’ faces today, I now know we all need our own Council.”

Bruce Feiler is the best-selling author of Walking the Bible and America’s Prophet. His new book is The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me. Feiler has been cancer-free since completing chemotherapy last year.

Memoir

Memoir

Behind the book: Finding gratitude—and my way as a writer

Behind the Book by bookpagedev

Although I had wanted to be a writer much earlier in life, when I finally received a powerful inspiration, it wasn’t a call to write a book or even anything that could be described in conventional terms, as, say, an essay or something. Rather, it was an inspiration to be grateful, to notice the good things in my life, and to write thank-you notes for them. Three hundred and sixty-five thank you notes, to be specific. So for 15 months, I was writing, but not really writing a book. The only things I was writing were thank-you notes.

I needed a powerful inspiration to finish a writing project. I had long ago abandoned my dream of being a writer, and, after starting my own law firm in 2000, my life had become completely consumed by my work. But the responses and improvements in my life that sprang from the thank-you notes were immediate, surprising and themselves inspiring. So I kept writing them.

I wrote the thank-you notes first on an Excel spreadsheet. I would record the name and address, and the spiritual or material gift for which I was thankful—a kind of “gratitude list.” Then I would write out a first draft of the note in one of the fields of the spreadsheet. This helped me to organize my thoughts, so I wouldn’t have to repeatedly start over when I started to handwrite the note. I didn’t want to waste paper. In other fields of the spreadsheet, I would make notes, for example, about how someone responded when they received the note.

As the year went on, and I began to feel better about life, there were times when I would think of going back to writing. Then I would look at my spreadsheet, and see I was behind on my thank-you notes. So instead of writing something else, I would write more thank-you notes.

The book was written in the few spaces I had in my life. While I drank my first cup of coffee at Starbucks. I would finish one cup while typing, get my refill for $0.50, and be off to work. I wrote thank-you notes to two special baristas who would remember my name and my order and greet me on these mornings. Ever wonder what all those people huddled over their laptops are assiduously typing? I was one of them. This is what I was typing.

The book reveals what I could sense about the source of the inspiration at the time it came to me. The man who began the project on January 1, 2008, would not have harbored some of these thoughts. When I started writing the notes, the spell-check pointed out that I could not even properly spell the word grateful.

Writing 365 thank-you notes led me to discover that my life was not nearly the tragedy I saw it as. My life was instead blessed and protected, fostered and defended by hundreds of people who had taken an interest in me, cared about me and at various points along the way, rescued me. I hope that those who read it will find a way to make similar discoveries in their lives.

John Kralik is a lawyer whose 2008 vow to write a daily thank-you note inspired a memoir and a new way of looking at his life. He lives near Los Angeles. Read our review of 365 Thank-Yous.

Memoir

Memoir

Reflections on rising from the ruins

Behind the Book by Dan Woolley

by Dan Woolley

You wonder what you will feel like in the last moments of your life, when you finally look death in the face . . . how your beliefs about death and the afterlife will play out. For me, it moved really quickly from abstract to tangible, given I was buried under six floors of rubble following the January 2010 Haiti earthquake. I will never pretend to understand why God allowed me to be rescued while many others did not make it out alive.

I traveled to Haiti with Compassion International to document the organization’s work to permanently rescue children from poverty. As I was trapped, I found it ironic that I had come to Haiti to rescue children from poverty. Little did I know that I would need rescue.

After a day of capturing footage my colleague and I had just been dropped off and stepped into our hotel when the Haiti earthquake erupted all around us. I was trapped in the wreckage of my collapsed hotel in an elevator car the size of a small shower. My head and leg were bleeding as I fought to stay alive using all the resources that I could—my iPhone and its first-aid app, camera, journal, sock and shirt. In moments of despair, I had time to reflect on how I viewed myself, my marriage, and my faith in Jesus Christ. The earthquake shook loose a lot of things in my life that weren’t important, leaving me with a firmer foundation.

I don’t know why I was spared while others were not—including a Compassion International colleague who was right next to me when the quake hit. I don’t take lightly the difference between my outcome and the suffering of others. But, I tell the story of the 65 hours I spent buried in the rubble of the quake in Unshaken: Rising from the Ruins of Haiti’s Hotel Montana.

As I spend this week in Haiti revisiting the sites and people that I met last year, the sounds and the smells are so familiar as if the island nation was shook by the earthquake just yesterday. Then, I look down at the scar on my leg, a scar that will forever remind me of my time in Haiti and the Haitian people there who continue to suffer and work to get back on their feet post quake.

I have an advantage. Last January trapped beneath six stories of rubble I was taught very literally about how quickly life can change in an instant. I worked hard in the months following the quake to hold onto the clarity and now it share with others through my experience in Unshaken.

Dan Woolley, an interactive strategies director at Compassion International, is the author of Unshaken: Rising from the Ruins of Haiti’s Hotel Montana (Zondervan). In response to interest in the first-aid app he used to save his life, Woolley is currently working on a different kind of first-aid app—one that helps people focus on what matters most. More info at DanWoolley.net.

Rescue photo credit: Los Angeles Times/Rick Loomis.

Return photo credit: Reuters

Memoir

Memoir

Behind the Book: A very personal take on the self-help industry

Behind the Book by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro

by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro

When she set out to write a book about Americans' long-standing interest in self-improvement, writer Jessica Lamb-Shapiro was forced to confront a painful event in her own family history. The resulting journey forms the heart of her insightful and often funny new book, Promise Land.

Truth be told, a book about self-help was the last thing I wanted to write. My father, a child psychologist, had been writing self-help books since I was a child, and subjecting me to self-help culture for just as long. Self-help was about as interesting to me as the homemade cooperative board games my father and I used to play (no one wins). But when my father signed up for a weekend workshop with one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul authors, I was intrigued. It seemed odd to me that someone with so much experience writing self-help, who was smart and thoughtful and by normal standards successful, could still be seduced by the promise of improvement.

"Thinking about my mother’s suicide while writing a book about self-help suddenly seemed not just ironic but incredibly, regrettably, relevant."

Going to that conference with my dad reminded me how funny and absurd self-help could be, and at the same time how meaningful or tragic. It reminded me that self-help is not about Tony Robbins or Eckhart Tolle, but about the countless individuals whose irrepressible, unrelenting desire to improve sustains them. I’ve always been fascinated with the never-ending aspect of the American Dream. I also wanted to explore the idea that people who didn’t read self-help books were still affected by self-help culture, how it’s part of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Once I looked into the history of self-help and found out Victorians loved it, I was sold on the topic.

For a few years I struggled with the structure of the book. I had the idea that I could look at different genres of self-help—books on parenting or grieving or dating—but it ended up feeling flat and repetitive.

When I started looking at books on grieving, I couldn’t help but think about my mother’s suicide when I was a young child. My father and I had barely talked about her death, and reading those books gave me a sense of community and continuity and made me feel like less of a motherless weirdo. Thinking about my mother’s suicide while writing a book about self-help suddenly seemed not just ironic but incredibly, regrettably, relevant.

Not only had I started a book about self-help, which I hadn’t really set out to write, I was now writing a book about a taboo subject in my family, which no one wanted to talk about. On top of that, I had a real aversion to “memoir,” and it seemed especially ridiculous for someone in their 30s to write anything resembling one. Worse, I had been writing a book that was supposed to be funny. You know what’s not funny? Mother suicide. I felt like I had been batting a piñata, but instead of candy and toys severed human limbs fell out. Children screamed, and everyone left the party.

On the plus side, adding a memoir element solved my structure problem. A pyrrhic victory.

I’ve always liked that about writing, the way it can blindside you. The way you can blindside yourself. This is why I titled my prologue “On Missing The Obvious.” Writing the book forced me to talk to my father about my mother. Over the years I spent writing Promise Land: My Journey Through America's Self-Help Culture, we visited her grave for the first time, and my dad started talking to me about her life, and what her death was like for him. It was difficult for me to bring up something that I knew was so painful for him, but talking about it together seemed to help. Which isn’t to say that some days didn’t end in tears and hours of watching of puppy videos on the Internet for emotional triage. But ultimately, my book about self-help ended up being a kind of self-help exercise for me, and maybe even for my dad—which, if you think about it, is kind of funny.

Promise Land is the first book by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, who has published fiction and nonfiction in The Believer, McSweeney's, Open City and Index magazine, among other publications. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and lives in New York City and Columbia County, New York.

Truth…

Memoir

Memoir

Behind the Book: Telling my grandma’s remarkable story

Behind the Book by Cathy LaGrow

by Cathy LaGrow

It was summertime, the world slow and hot, when I first learned Grandma’s shocking secret. My baby boy was almost three months old. He and I had not yet gotten the hang of breastfeeding, but were getting there. I was exhausted. My brother Grant called with the news.

“Grandma has a long-lost child,” he said. “When Grandma was just 16, she was raped by a stranger and got pregnant. She really loved the baby, but she gave her up for adoption. That was in 1929. She’s always missed her baby. Anyway, that daughter, who’s 77 years old now, just found Grandma. They’re going to be reunited in a few weeks.”

Author Cathy LaGrow (right) with her long-lost aunt, Ruth Lee (left), and grandmother Minka Disbrow.

This narrative was interrupted by a great many “What’s?!” from me.

At some point, my brother mentioned that one of our six new cousins was an honest-to-God astronaut who’d been to space four times.

Grandma was now 94. I’d known her all my life. She was dignified, strong, uncomplaining. I could never have imagined this: a monumental secret, a beloved, lost child.

Grandma and her daughter had their joyful reunion that summer. Several years later, after I’d had another baby and waded through another long round of diapers and interrupted nights, one of my new cousins, Brian, suggested that the reunion story would make a great book.

“I’ll put some stuff together,” I told him. “I’ll do some research and writing, and then maybe we’ll find somebody to author the book, and I can turn everything over to them.” Grandma was very healthy, but she’d just turned 100 years old. There was no time to lose.

Grandma was now 94. I’d known her all my life. She was dignified, strong, uncomplaining. I could never have imagined this: a monumental secret, a beloved, lost child.

And so it began. Grandma lived 500 miles away and had no computer, so I typed pages of questions: What were your parents’ full names and birthdates? Why did they come to America? I’d mail off the questions and she’d return them within days, answers printed in her careful penmanship.

With my two small boys tumbling underfoot, it proved impossible for me to work from home. I started driving to the local library on evenings and weekends. Sometimes I’d hurry home at my sons’ bedtime for sweet goodnight kisses. Other times I’d still be at the library when the staff dimmed the lights at closing time.

I pored over details of early 20th-century life on the South Dakotan prairie. I checked ship’s manifests, consulted historical train schedules. I searched through online records: newspaper articles, county graphs, weather bureau statistics. Grandma and I spent two long weekends together, recording hours of conversation.

And I wrote. Paragraph by paragraph, Grandma’s life began to take shape. As I fell more deeply in love with the story, I realized that no other author would take more care of it than I would. Although my credentials consisted of a single published story and a modest blog—which I used mostly to discuss geeky things like particle accelerators and black holes—it became clear that I was going to write this book.

Summer days passed with me tucked away at the library while my guys played at a park, or fished at the river. I tried to ignore the sun beaming gorgeously beyond the windows. At home, laundry piled up. Stacks of research papers sprouted on tables. Last fall, I spent Thanksgiving alone at home, kneeling on the carpet, pages spread around me. As I edited, I ate handfuls of microwave popcorn and tried not to miss my boys, or the turkey they were eating at their grandparents’ house.

When it was time for Grandma to review the bulk of the manuscript, I booked a plane ticket so I could hand-deliver it. She still lived in the same cozy Californian apartment that I’d visited as a child. Back then, I’d always be dashing off to the nearby beach, trailing beach towels and sand buckets.

Now, my nerves jangled. I’d poured my heart into this project for nearly two years, and I’d done it for her. Although I’d taken great pains to be accurate, I wondered if I’d gotten a million things wrong, anyway. What if Grandma had to slash sentences on every page? The publisher had assigned a tight deadline. There wouldn’t be time to start over.

I handed her the chapters, a highlighter, and a pen. “Mark anything that isn’t right, Grandma,” I said, “and I will change it.” She read late into the night. The following morning, she gave the chapters back to me, and I began to flip through. This was the moment of truth. I turned page after page.

Grandma had changed exactly three words. She loved the book. I’d gotten it right.

Cathy LaGrow has been married to her high school sweetheart, Dan, for almost 25 years. She is a licensed, nonpracticing U.S. Customs broker and a piano teacher. She lives in Oregon, where she's often found in the kitchen baking or curled up in a chair reading. Cathy's mother is Minka Disbrow's second child, born nearly 18 years after the baby Minka gave up for adoption.

Memoir

Memoir

Writing about boyhood and the myth of the self

Behind the Book by John C. Hampsey

by John C. Hampsey

In the lyrical and evocative coming-of-age memoir Kaufman’s Hill, John C. Hampsey recalls his boyhood in Pittsburgh in the mid-1960s: dealing with bullies, coping with a cold and distant father, and escaping to the refuge of a wooded hillside. In this behind-the-book essay, Hampsey explains how capturing the “truth” of what happened in the past presents a special set of challenges for a memoirist.

Before writing Kaufman’s Hill, it was my meditative essays that often veered toward the personal; my fiction was about stories I made up. Then in 1996, on a whim, I wrote a story about when I was seven, based on an image I had in my head for years—late afternoon, playing down at the creek with the Creely brothers who were often cruel to me, and one of them finds a dead rat.

That image led me to a “true” story—“Rat Stick at Twilight.” My writer’s group thought it was the best “fiction” I had ever written. One member said it offered a perspective on childhood he hadn’t seen before. That was all I needed. The story became Chapter One and I was on my way toward writing Kaufman’s Hill, my boyhood memoir set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania between the years 1961 and 1968.

In the early stages, the writing was an aesthetic quest. I had made the instinctive decision to write the book from the perspective of the boy, rather than that of a man looking back. I believed that the boy’s point of view would result in a greater intensity and sense of presence. But it also meant that I was restricted to the language and vocabulary of a boy. And I wanted the writing to be lyrical and fresh. My struggle, then, was to maintain the boy’s voice, but also to keep the writing aesthetically charged. It could be done, I decided, but it was slow going.

"Unconsciously, we construct the specific stories of our lives to coincide with timeless universal patterns already seared into the ganglia of our brains."

Meanwhile, the issue of “truth” persisted. Some of my early readers wanted me to fabricate plot lines in certain places for a different result in the action. And I kept saying, without totally understanding why, “I can’t. Everything in the book is true, as I remember it.”

Yet I still didn’t consider what I was writing to be memoir, because the book, consisting largely of vignettes, was woven together in the form of a novel. When someone asked, I referred to Kaufman’s Hill as an “autobiographical novel.”

In my struggle to write truth and not fiction, I didn’t realize, at first, how much we mythologize ourselves when we write about our pasts. Unconsciously, we construct the specific stories of our lives to coincide with timeless universal patterns already seared into the ganglia of our brains. And every time we look back, we re-weave the fabric of the past in keeping with a new understanding of these universal human patterns.

For instance, in the third chapter of Kaufman’s Hill, Taddy Keegan, a Huck Finn-like character, arrives out of nowhere, and his presence in my life seems to suddenly free me from the tyranny of the Creelys. Amidst my admiration for Taddy’s carefreeness and courage, and my desire to be like him, the Creelys seem to no longer matter; they almost seem to no longer exist. But whether Taddy Keegan’s actual arrival in my actual life was as well-timed and organic as it appears in the book, I’ll never know. Perhaps I just remembered it that way because the story of my life would then make more sense in a mythical and universal way.

And it is not just the character of our past selves that is part of the myth-making; the person looking back, the writer, is also inside the myth. And even the person who later writes an essay about himself as a memoirist who recorded a story about himself as a boy is part of the expanding myth―a myth about a boy that both the memoirist and essayist want to believe is true.

Marshall McLuhan once said that myth is simply information that’s speeded up lightning-fast. I believe that when we write memoir, we are trying to catch up to that speeding myth. And sometimes we succeed. We capture a glimpse of it and record it as our true myth of self, despite the fact that time moves on “swift as the weaver’s shuttle.”

John C. Hampsey’s boyhood memoir, Kaufman’s Hill, was published this month by Bancroft Press. He is professor of romantic and classical literature at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

Before writing Kaufman’s Hill, it was my meditative essays that often veered toward the personal; my fiction was about stories I made up. Then in 1996, on a whim, I wrote a story about when I was seven, based on an image I had in my head for years—late afternoon, playing down at the creek with the Creely brothers who were often cruel to me, and one of them finds a dead rat.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Perfectly unhappy

Behind the Book by Kim Korson

by Kim Korson

Kim Korson is your new favorite curmudgeon, a true Negative Nancy, the ultimate Debbie Downer. She's perfectly happy being unhappy, and she shares her path to negativity and all the merits of discontent in her acerbic, witty memoir, I Don't Have a Happy Place. In a Behind the Book feature, Korson shares a bit on not being "wired for mirth."

I can’t recall what the fight was about. The details are fuzzy, but it was a benign argument, devoid of bruised feelings or threats of couch sleeping. I do remember there was a showdown in the living room, barbs shooting out of our mouths but none of them landing until my husband yelled, “Can’t you go lie down in a field somewhere and find your happy place?” to which I replied, without missing a beat, “I don’t have a happy place!” Here, we had one of those romantic comedy moments where a tense situation was diffused by (unintentionally) humorous dialogue, and laughter ensued. The fight was over, but my comeback pinballed around my brain for weeks after.

I am a glass half empty. I am negative, have a poor attitude and, if we’re being honest, don’t care much for fun. I come from a long line of depressants and have spent my lifetime managing my undesirability, and, not to brag, but I think I’ve figured out how to be a malcontent with grace. But just when you think you’ve learned how to function out there, the world fights back by pelting you with those dumb lemons they’re always talking about, in the hopes you will make pitchers of sweet lemonade. Happiness. Everything is about happiness. The world is obsessed with it. It’s what your loved ones wish for you, what books teach, what articles quiz you on—all anyone wants is for you to be happy. Is that wrong? It’s a delightful request, most would say. But what if you are not happy? Or worse, what if you find the pursuit of happiness exhausting, relentless, impossible? What if you are just not wired for mirth? Is that even allowed? Are you a failure as a human being if you are not happy? I needed to know.

I decided to forage through my life, picking through experiences where good humor was expected—summer camp, falling in love, following dreams—to see if happiness seeped in or if I’d kept it at bay.

I’m not big on lessons, but I have learned that humor makes unpleasant people or situations palatable. For a malcontent, I laugh quite a bit and I wanted to focus on the dark humor of unhappiness in my book I Don’t Have a Happy Place. Some of our most traumatic events contain hilarity; you just have to find it. While there is nothing amusing about losing a cherished relative, throw extended family together, and, I promise you, there will be no shortage of comedy.

People say happiness is about moments. I chose to use linked, short-but-true stories to focus on the transitory nature of both happiness and misery. I wanted each of the essays to be able to stand alone but also to weave together a lifetime of unhappy thoughts. Once I strung together all the moments, I could step back and see how I fared. Turns out, I’m kind of depressing. But I know this about myself and have since let myself off the happy hook. And I’m happy with that.

Kim Korson is a writer, originally from Montreal, Canada. She’s written for O Magazine and Moomah The Magazine. Kim now lives in Southern Vermont with her husband and two kids. She doesn’t get out much.

Kim Korson is your new favorite curmudgeon, a true Negative Nancy, the ultimate Debbie Downer. She's perfectly happy being unhappy, and she shares her path to negativity and all the merits of malcontent in her acerbic, witty memoir, I Don't Have a Happy Place. In a Behind the Book feature, Korson shares a bit on not being "wired for mirth."

Graphic Memoirs, Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir Graphic Memoirs

A strikingly drawn portrait of the refugee experience

Behind the Book by Thi Bui

by Thi Bui

Thi Bui’s debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, is a deeply affecting look at her Vietnamese family’s complex journey to the very country that inflicted a lion’s share of the destruction to their home region during the Vietnam War. Bui’s story ranges through many time periods: the present, her childhood in California, her parents’ extensive and exhausting process of attaining refugee status and their tumultuous time in Vietnam. Bui’s prose is carefully crafted, and her brushstrokes are similarly spare and simple, rendered in a muted palette of black, white and burgundy. The effect is immediate: Readers will be drawn into each and every frame. Bui’s minimalist approach ensures readers can’t gloss over the harsh realities of her family’s immigrant experience, but it also forces us to recognize the universal struggles and triumphs that all families experience. Fans of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis will not want to miss this incredibly relevant work.

Bui reflects on the current political climate and encourages Americans to listen to the incredible stories of refugee families like her own.

The idea that people come to this country to steal from it is a crazy one.

As the poet Warsan Shire has attested, “No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border / when you see the whole city / running as well.”

Running for safety is one of the most basic, primal instincts we humans have. It is natural, and human, to migrate in search of security, shelter, food and a better future, perhaps a place to raise one’s children. Borders, the structures that can halt such migration, are shaped by conquest, wars and treaties, and as such are entirely man-made and unnatural.

“In my experience, people who have had a brush with death help others when they need it.”

Periodically, conflict or natural disaster—or some terrible association of the two—force large waves of people into involuntary migration. To have lived one’s entire life free of this experience is to be very lucky. To go through it, I think, peels away some layers of the veil between life and death. You realize that the stability of your world is not to be taken for granted. That things can change, and go from bad to worse very quickly, and you must be ready to grab those important to you and run, or stay and fight, and nothing is guaranteed. In The Best We Could Do, I narrate the story of my family who fled from home in a small boat in the late ’70s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In my experience, people who have had a brush with death help others when they need it. People who, perhaps because they have not had that experience, lack the empathy to extend help to refugees often say that we should be helping our own instead. But often they don’t do that either.

America, the land of such amazing contradiction that I have learned to call home, and into which I pour a significant amount of taxes, donations, labor and love, is at a crossroads. Either it succumbs to fear of “outsiders” (many of whom are just as American as anyone else) and hurts many people, or it progresses into a multicultural social experiment that will be the envy of other nations. I would like to see the latter happen, and I know that living together is a learning process. So I offer my little book, the best I could do, to put human faces and names and personal stories onto the words “immigrant” and “refugee.” And I seek out and read and listen to stories that are different from my own. It is the best way I know how to build community and understanding.

I am holding out my hand. Not to steal. Not to take. This book is an offering of peace, and a hope for understanding.

Thi Bui's debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, is a deeply affecting look at her Vietnamese family's complex journey to the very country that inflicted a lion's share of the destruction to their home region during the Vietnam War. Bui's story alternates between many time periods: the present, her childhood in California, her parents' extensive and exhausting process of attaining refugee status and their tumultuous time in Vietnam. Bui reflects on the current political climate and encourages Americans to listen to the incredible stories of refugee families like her own.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Letting go of a myth opens the door to a new reality

Behind the Book by Loren A. Olson- M.D.

by Loren A. Olson- M.D.

As a child, I clung to the myth of Santa Claus until the evidence against it finally overwhelmed me and I had to let go of it. Parents reinforce the myth by encouraging children to believe in Santa Claus, promising them that if they are good, they will be rewarded.

I desperately wanted to believe in the myth of my heterosexuality, too, and I clung to it as well. I was a very good boy—doing everything that was expected of me—and society rewarded me for it. Then one day, that myth got blown apart. The barrier between my rational thought and my unconscious desires fell, allowing both sides to blend together like colors on an artist’s palette that cannot be separated again.

I began to ask myself the question I’ve been asked by others so many times: How could you not know you were gay until you were 40?

"The more I spoke with other men about their experiences, the more I recognized the commonality of the emotional pain experienced by men who censor any word, thought or behavior that might expose their same-sex desires."

As a psychiatrist, trained in science, I went to the literature of psychology to find an answer. However, everything I read focused on much younger men. Psychologist Vivienne Cass created the classic model of gay and lesbian identity development in 1979, about the same time I was struggling with this issue. Although she suggested that healthy men could go through the process later, the model indicated that most subjects had formed a gay identity by their mid-20s. I was already 34.

I began to meet other men, many of them married with children, who were either struggling with their sexual conflicts or were somewhat further along in the process than I was. I dug deeper into the literature but found little that discussed the transition of men from a straight identity to a gay or bisexual one later in life.

I then began to examine this transition in the context of my life. I grew up in rural Nebraska in the 1950s. During this time, gender roles were rigidly defined, and being a “sissy” meant being weak and subordinate. Senator Joseph McCarthy held hearings accusing homosexuals and communists of committing subversive acts against the government. Psychiatrists considered homosexuality a pathologic deviancy. No one I knew lived as openly gay. It wasn’t that people spoke out against homosexuality; they didn’t speak of it at all. It was as if a blackout existed on all information about any healthy expression of sexuality.

The more I spoke with other men about their experiences, the more I recognized the commonality of the emotional pain experienced by men who censor any word, thought or behavior that might expose their same-sex desires. Gay men attempt suicide at a rate three times higher than the general population, some of them multiple times, and these suicide attempts often occur at the time they make the decision to come out.

I realized this story needed telling, and I thought, “Why not tell mine?” The first step I took was to do a convenience sampling of other older gay men to validate my hypothesis that the coming out process for older men is different from that of males who came out at a younger age. My findings supported my hypothesis and encouraged me to write Finally Out.

As an older gay man, I also saw the heavy burden placed on us by the stereotypes of being older, especially being older and gay. When I heard a gay man say, “I’m 82, and this is the best time in my life,” I thought, “What does he know that I should know?” So I examined the opportunities of aging and recognized the parallels between coming out as gay and coming out as old. In both cases, developing a positive identity depends upon destroying internalized stereotypes and adopting a positive attitude about our sexuality and our age.

My hope is that some of the answers I have found will offer others insights into why some men who love other men might marry and have families, choose to come out or not, or delay coming out until midlife or beyond.

Loren A. Olson, M.D., the author of Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight, is a board-certified psychiatrist with over 40 years of experience. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and has been named an Exemplary Psychiatrist by the National Alliance for Mental Illness.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

How to write a memoir in a forest office

Behind the Book by Liz Clark

by Liz Clark

Surfer and environmentalist Liz Clark has been sailing—mostly solo—from Santa Barbara to the South Pacific on her 40-foot sailboat, Swell, since 2006. In her wild, challenging and nomadic life filled with sea and surf, she has traveled 20,000 miles, living in harmony with nature and becoming an outspoken environmental activist. She is perhaps best known for her cat, Amelia the Tropicat, who was her first mate for five years. (Tropicat died in January of this year; in her memory, Clark has raised over $12,000 to bring a team of veterinarians to French Polynesia to do an island-wide spay and neuter program.)

Clark shares all the adventures and surprises of her voyage in her new memoir, Swell: A Sailing Surfer’s Voyage of Awakening. Authors often speak of the discipline required to write a book—but Clark takes it to a whole new level, proving that writing can be done anytime, anywhere.

I always hoped to write a book, but I never imagined that I would write that book while on my sailboat anchored at a small island in the South Pacific.

After nearly a decade of nomadic sea life—sailing from place to place in search of waves to surf, new inspiration, new friends and the next paycheck, I was presented with the opportunity to write my story. The timing felt right; it was time to drop anchor for a while.

My life suddenly shifted from an ever-changing canvas full of adventures, freedom, movement and fluidity to one gargantuan task of fitting the prior decade into a meaningful piece of literature. I was stuck searching for words instead of waves, and seeking a mental horizon clear enough to figure out where to begin. Procrastination set in. First I had to catch up on all the other things I had to do when I finally stopped moving—like software updates on my electronic devices, backing up photos, writing blog entries and replying to starred emails, along with scrubbing the hull, hauling water, cooking and surfing. I decided that the two-foot-by-three-foot nav station, which also functioned as my dinner table, counter space and computer desk, wasn’t going to cut it for book writing. So my next task was to create a groovy new place where I could really dig into this project.

I removed the wooden door to the head (ship-speak for bathroom) and cut it to fit perpendicularly across the bunk in the forward cabin. I found a three-legged chair at the dump and lashed on a fourth leg. The orange-backed, metal-legged, fourth-grade classroom chair fit into the tiny space, but with only about an inch clearance in any direction. I’d make it work. I stacked my journals and logbook and a few of my favorite reads next to a heart-shaped rock paperweight and a penholder, ran an extension cord and voila—I had a writing space.

But approach-avoidance continued, and a week went by before I actually tried to sit in the chair. In the meantime, I noticed that if I forgot to shut the hatch above when it rained, the desk got drenched. When I actually squeezed my sixth grader-sized body behind the desk into the fourth grader-sized chair, my legs jammed into the bulkhead of the bunk and my elbow hit my underwear drawer. The desk was wretchedly uncomfortable. As I tried various ways to make it work, the hatch above started leaking again when it rained. When it was nice out, the tropical mid-day sun came blazing down on my head. I soon retreated to the nav station.

On a good day, I spent three hours at the computer, answering emails and posting on Instagram before writing. Around 3 p.m. the local kids came by to jump off Swell, and then by 4:30 my cat master started stirring. If Tropicat wasn’t brought ashore daily, I was ambushed and shredded by dinnertime. So afternoons were for cat adventures. We hiked and went to parties, visited friends and did yoga on the beach. On one of our hikes we found an overgrown plateau in the forest with low sturdy branches, so I started bringing my hammock and computer to work in the shade of the forest. Depending on the life cycle of the mosquitoes and the chance of rain, it extended my workday, and Tropicat was pleased.

One morning, I accepted an invitation for a morning surf session on the other side of the island, which turned into Tropicat going AWOL on the small islet. It had been raining constantly and we hadn’t been able to get out much. So I spent the next 42 days not writing, but trying to find my beloved first mate.

Tropicat finally reappeared, and a new friend I’d made while searching for her offered to help build a table in the forest where I could write and Tropicat could run around and climb trees. We lashed together a wide, tall desk made from purou branches and stripped bark. He made a bench seat high enough for my legs to dangle so the ants wouldn’t crawl up my feet. It was shaded by an old mango tree and broad-leafed purou bush. This was a serious upgrade, and I finally got some momentum going on the book in my forest office.

Both Tropicat and I loved spending time in the forest, but some days were steamy hot, made worse because I wore full-length clothing to protect myself from the mosquitoes. When it rained, we ended up under the desk. One day, after a highly productive streak, it started pouring, and even with my yoga mat wrapped around my semi-waterproof bag, the computer’s hard drive got wet. I wasn’t doing regular backups and lost everything I’d written in the past month. Lucky for me, my boss at Patagonia chalked it up to “product testing” and paid to recover the lost work.

Seasons came and went; occasionally the table needed to be lashed together again. Although I was mostly just hurling events and feelings onto the screen, I made progress. The sweet guy who had helped find Tropicat had become my sweet companion, and by the time the original desk finally collapsed into a wad of rotting sticks, I’d made it through a first draft of what would soon be Swell.

Clark in her forest office, with Tropicat.

Surfer and environmentalist Liz Clark has been sailing—mostly solo—from Santa Barbara to the South Pacific on her 40-foot sailboat, Swell, since 2006. In her wild, challenging and nomadic life filled with sea and surf, she has traveled 20,000 miles, living in harmony with nature and becoming an outspoken environmental activist. Clark shares all the adventures and surprises of her voyage in her new memoir, Swell: A Sailing Surfer’s Voyage of Awakening. Authors often speak of the discipline required to write a book—but Clark takes it to a whole new level, proving that writing can be done anytime, anywhere.

Memoir, Nature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Nature Memoir

Helen Jukes reflects on the year that inspired her meditative new memoir

Behind the Book by Helen Jukes

by Helen Jukes

What do we mean by “home”? It’s not a question one usually asks when feeling at home. It comes instead out of a sense of dislocation: when the home is present but lacking in some way; there but not there; visible but, for some reason, amiss. To ask the question is to state a nagging suspicion that the word has become dislodged, detached, decoupled from its meaning. The person asking is not necessarily homeless, but neither do they feel totally secure. They might say, as they leave the office, that they’re going home, but the associations they have with that word, their expectations about it—comfort, shelter, recuperation, rest—sit oddly with the house that they’re headed for.

I tend to reach dead ends when asking such questions of myself. For answers, I need outside input, to have my thoughts interrupted by other people, by books, by encounter and experience. What I want to describe here is what happened when, for a short while, this question was interrupted, unsettled and ultimately reframed by a colony of bees.

“Home is a place from which worlds can be founded; a place where meanings are made.”

I’d moved to Oxford from the south coast of England. A job offer had come at just the right time, and I’d moved towns to take it. I was renting a room in a house not far from the city center, a small terrace room with moths in the carpets and mold spores on the walls and a slim garden out back that had grown overcrowded with weeds. I’d brought cushions and houseplants, pictures and pans—all the trappings of a domesticity that, on the cusp of my 30s, I still felt ambivalent about—but, a few months in, the place wasn’t feeling a lot like home. The new job was stressful. I got back in the evenings tired and drained, too exhausted to do much more than make some food and go to bed. This was nothing out of the ordinary, of course—in fact, when I looked around at my colleagues, all of us pinned behind our neat desk cells, it seemed almost a foregone conclusion. I’d crawl under the covers at night feeling dulled, dumbed down, depleted.

Into this space, this not-quite-home, arrived the bees. I was gifted the colony by a group of friends, and in the months before they arrived, I cleared the weeds in the garden, bought a hive and some beekeeping equipment and read a lot of not very practical books about beekeeping history and folklore.

Honeybees in real life are not like the ones in books. They’re brittle and trembling, and when I lifted the lid of the hive, they didn’t buzz, they hummed—like a machine but more unstable, more liable to volatility. Once a week I made a full hive inspection, prizing the combs apart one by one as the bees rose up in a cloud around me—light, sharp and impossible to predict. The task was more involved than I’d anticipated, and I was going to become more involved, more unsettled, than I’d thought.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings.

What was I looking in on? Thousands of individuals, or a singularity? A superorganism? An intricate and fine-tuned system, or a confusion—a chaos? Often I had the sense of complex networks, of an intricate and highly sensitive collectivity. But as to what was actually happening inside the hive from week to week—well, it often felt like guesswork. The bees built in directions I hadn’t planned, responded to changes I hadn’t noticed or anticipated. Often, by the time I noticed a potential threat—a wasp raid, a hailstorm, a sudden temperature drop—they’d already responded to it.

The colony was getting stronger; the comb was thicker, darker, fuller every week. I’d peer down at the honey collecting in the wax cells and feel a silent wonder at the journeys the bees had made—the distances they’d traveled and how they’d still found their way back home. Inside the house afterward, I’d feel oddly shaken, moved at the sight of all that work—the making and feeding, the living and dying and being born—going on inside.

It was around this time that another beekeeper encouraged me to start an observation diary. “Note down what’s happening week to week,” he said. “It’ll help you pick out the patterns and spot when something’s amiss. The more you look, the more you’ll notice; the more you notice, the more you’ll see.”

So I bought a notebook and began doing as he’d said. I wrote what happened at the weekly inspections, and then I wrote what happened when I was not inspecting—when I was just sitting out by the hive, not doing anything very much. Soon I began noting other things, too—lines from books and articles I’d read, conversations I’d had, dreams I’d dreamed (one about honey seeping through my bedroom ceiling; one about hornets with huge teeth inside the house).

Throughout history, honeybees have carried great imaginative and symbolic meaning. They’ve appeared in religious texts and literature, in healing rituals and magic rites. These days we may be more likely to think of them, if we do at all, as suppliers of our health foods and pollination services, but at other times their role and relationship to us has been far less scrutable. In cultures across the world there are stories of honeybees as messengers, able to pass between realms. For ancient Greeks the sound of bees buzzing through the cracks of rocks was a sign of souls emerging from the underworld. The Mayans believed that bees were imbued with mystical power, and in British folklore they’re known as small messengers of God.

Other stories take a rather more practical tone. The Greek essayist Plutarch claimed that honeybees were especially bad-tempered toward men who’d recently had sex and that they could sense adultery and punish it by stinging. The Roman writer Columella advised beekeepers to “abstain from sexual relations” the night before opening a hive, and in a tradition once common across Eastern Europe, a girl’s virginity could be tested by having her walk past a beehive. (If the bees left her alone, her purity was judged to be intact.) One might argue that these traditions tell us less about honeybees and more about our own species’ inclination to project onto others our preoccupations and meanings; but what I find interesting about them, and what they each have in common, is the sense that bees and humans are not entirely separate—that our fates are necessarily, and sometimes curiously, intertwined. Looking back over the last hundred years of farming practices, one could be forgiven for thinking that that insight has all but disappeared from our minds.

Reading my observation diary now, I see that these and other accounts of not-quite-separateness are noted alongside newspaper headlines warning of bee-harming pesticides, of colony losses and wild bee declines, of habitat destruction and fragmentation, of commercial beekeepers now operating at industrial scales, equipped with the tools to intervene in every part of the inner life of the hive. I suppose I’d arranged them side by side like this because a few times, reading these articles on a lunch break at work, I’d felt a wave of affinity toward the tiny creatures in my garden—a note-quite-separateness of my own. Weren’t we both suffering the effects of a drive toward intensification, of a culture that placed market profit above creature life?

“What if home wasn’t about staying put, I wondered then. What if it was something in me?”

It isn’t sensible to identify with a colony of honeybees—one risks spending the whole time searching for similarities or picking out likenesses where there aren’t any—but still something was happening out by the hive. This I sensed but struggled to articulate clearly.

Back in my garden, watching the bees lifting, dustlike, from the hive each week, I found myself again circling that question: What do we mean by “home”? The word seems inseparable from houses now, and from notions of domesticity and ownership. Yet when I looked it up, I learned that its original meaning referred not to a building or even a geographical location but a state of being—a place at the “heart of the real,” according to the historian Mircea Eliade. A place from which worlds could be founded; a place where meanings are made.

Humans have kept honeybees for over 6,000 years, but as a species they’ve never been fully domesticated. When a swarm of bees leaves a hive today, they’re as wild as they ever were—not reliant on the shelters we’ve made and just as capable of following their own instincts about how to live. What if home wasn’t about staying put, I wondered then. What if it was something in me? What if I carried it around, an active capacity?

By late summer, there were honeybees among the sheets hanging from the washing line and wasps picking at the jam lid when we ate breakfast outside. On warm days, we left the windows of the house open and found bumblebees in the sink, butterflies on the walls, a dragonfly, once, on a bookshelf. Strange things happen when we pay attention. The Reverend William Mewe, experimenting with an early observation hive in the 17th century, claimed that when he began regular inspections of his colony, honey production increased. I saw no reason to suspect that my own gaze had prompted anything but mild agitation among the colony in my garden, but I did find that my own seeing and sensing changed. I was feeling more at home in Oxford—not more settled, but easier in myself and more able to move around freely. Sensitivity often gets a bad rap. We tend to associate it with being overly fragile, and as I struggled to adjust to the pressure at work, I certainly worried that I lacked robustness. But the bees were sensitive in a different way—highly alert and responsive, tuned to each other and to their environment. Watching them at work, that sensitivity seemed to me like a new and exciting form of power.

I was not like the bees, but I suspect that my impulse to identify signaled something important—an encounter that unsettled any easy distinctions as to who the true keepers were in this relationship, and who the kept. Surely this says something about the importance of encounter with other creatures, especially ones whose laws and logics are so different from our own.

By the end of that year I was feeling more connected. Perhaps, unknowingly, I’d absorbed a little of that special honeybee sensitivity. Also, my sense of “home” had changed. I no longer thought of walls and windows but a feeling I could build and share. Yes, as summer drew to a close, “home” appeared less tangible, more movable, less fixed—and oddly, more immediate.

Headshot of Helen Jukes by © Liz Hingley

In this behind-the-book essay, Helen Jukes talks about the inspiration for A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, a memoir that’s full-to-bursting with warmth, wildness and visions of the gleaming, humming natural world.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

How to write a great memoir in 10 years or less

Behind the Book by David Adjmi

by David Adjmi

Lot Six, David Adjmi’s memoir of the journey from his conservative Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn to becoming a celebrated New York playwright, is vibrant, edgy, scenic, exciting, sensitive, faithful and funny. Here Adjmi tells the story of how eight years, four editors, a case of shingles and a self-guided crash-course in editing led, at last, to one of the best memoirs of the year.

“We need stories to live,” wrote Joan Didion, though I never quite believed her. I mean, yes, I understood what she was saying, that stories were the foundation of human societies, but I never really understood it as an immediate, visceral truth. I was a playwright—all I ever did was write stories—but I didn’t think I needed them to live, or that anyone needed them to live. If I didn’t hear or tell a story, if I abstained from narrative art altogether, I didn’t shrivel up and collapse; I was still living and breathing, and it was fine.

In 2009, I was asked by an editor at HarperCollins to write my own story. I still don’t understand how it happened. I had my New York debut that spring with a play called Stunning at Lincoln Center Theater, and the New York Times profiled me in conjunction with the opening. A week or so later, I got an email from an editor at HarperCollins named Claire. She’d read the profile, saw my play and somehow got the idea that I should write a memoir.

At first, I thought this was a completely stupid idea. Nothing significant had happened to me. My life was boring and unworthy of memorialization. My play was about the small and marginal Sephardic Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn (where I’m from), and I’d raked it over the coals; I didn’t have anything more to say about it. But Claire said I didn’t have to write about that community. She said I could write whatever I wanted and that she would help me—that she’d be with me every step of the way.

Together, we came up with a conceit: I would write 10 essays on works of art that inspired me and use these to elaborate on my own personal history. It was all a little heady and vague, but I started to get excited to write this book.

I dragged up my old notebooks from college classes on Kafka and Russian literature. I watched and rewatched my Criterion Collection movies on DVD and feverishly took notes. I wrote down every single thing I experienced that I thought might constitute a memory. Three years later, I printed out 2,000 pages, jammed them into a suitcase and took off for a writing residency, where I read through what I had and cut frantically in my attempts to distill this graphomaniac glop into a book.

“I didn’t have homeless parents. I didn’t chew off my own leg and eat it because I was trapped in some remote glacial cave in the Arctic. What made my story worth telling?”

In the fall of 2013, I got a very wobbly and messy first draft to Claire. I was exhausted, and I was desperate for her to give me notes, to tell me how to shape my book and do all the things I thought editors did. Months passed with no word, and I started to get a little antsy. I asked my agent to check in with HarperCollins, and she called me right back. “You’ve been orphaned,” she said.

This sounded horrifying. “What you do mean, orphaned?”

She told me Claire had left HarperCollins and was no longer my editor. Sometimes these “orphaned” books were just shelved, but in my case Claire’s assistant, Hannah, had been promoted to editor and wanted to take over the project herself.

A few days later, I got a really nice email from Hannah. She wrote lovely things about the manuscript, but she thought that the critical essays didn’t really weave together with the memoir stuff, and ultimately she didn’t know what it was about. This was unsurprising to me; I didn’t know what it was about either! The 10 essays were meant to connect and form some composite impression of me, my life, but they didn’t.

When I sat down to begin a new draft, I felt depressed and exhausted. I felt trapped with this book contract. Claire said she’d be with me every step of the way, and now I was stuck with a job I couldn’t do. I was a playwright, not a memoirist. It was a different set of skills altogether, and I was uncomfortable writing about myself; I didn’t really feel I had a self, at least not one that could serve as the center of a book. I had suffered but couldn’t write convincingly about my suffering because I couldn’t bundle the details of it into a societally germane and marketable package. I didn’t have homeless parents. I didn’t chew off my own leg and eat it because I was trapped in some remote glacial cave in the Arctic. I wasn’t a drug addict. I wasn’t addled with disease. What made my story worth telling? There was no story.

Two years later, God knows how, I eked out a new draft. I didn’t have a model for how to rewrite; I was working off intuitions. I sent the manuscript off to Hannah and hoped for the best.

She called me a few weeks later. “I have some bad news,” she said. “I’m leaving HarperCollins and moving to San Francisco. I’m sorry!” I was orphaned again. But, Hannah added, Jonathan Burnham had read the new draft and liked it enough to edit it himself.

Jonathan was the executive editor of HarperCollins. I was sad to lose Hannah, but I thought this was a pretty nice consolation prize. And the fact that he liked my manuscript made me believe I’d actually done a good job with the draft and was probably close to the finish line.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Lot Six.

In the spring, he and I had lunch together at a swank bistro in the financial district of Manhattan, right near the new HarperCollins offices, to talk about next steps. Jonathan seemed to like my book and didn’t need it to be a story about a man who took drugs or was aphasic or chewed off his own leg; he accepted the low-concept aspect. “The writing is amazing and obsessive,” he said, twirling his Florentine pasta around an expensive looking silver fork, “but at the same time, I don’t know why I am reading. I don’t know why I should turn the page.”

“OK,” I said, nodding and trying to sound professional even though I was dying inside.

“I am happy to turn the page,” he continued, “but I don’t need to turn the page.”

The truth was I had no idea how to make Jonathan need to turn the page. I hadn’t the remotest idea how to write or shape a book, and I was an orphan. Jonathan had graciously stepped in to help edit the book, but he was very busy—he basically ran HarperCollins—and he wasn’t going to write the book for me (which is what I secretly hoped someone, anyone would do). No one was going to guide me with the infantilizing specificity I’d hoped for back when I signed the contract.

Jonathan said it needed “another churn,” and he agreed to give me a year. By this point, I was seven years into the process.

I knew if I was ever going to finish this damned book, I’d have to become an editor myself. So that’s what I did. I went online and Googled books on developmental editing. I picked a few and, over the course of a couple of weeks, devoured them. I also read Mary Karr’s excellent The Art of the Memoir, Philip Lopate’s To Show and to Tell and Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, all of which gave me skills to edit and deepen my work.

As a playwright, I’d been trained to boil everything down to action. Plays don’t tell you what the characters are feeling; great actors make the interior lives of the characters visible. But books need to make feelings visceral and explicit or the work has no interiority—and I had almost no interiority in my book.

“Though I could empathize with characters in my plays, I couldn’t empathize with myself, and I was ashamed of this.”

I started to think of my book as fiction. And by fiction, I don’t mean false; I mean a technology that distills a series of events into a story. Fiction was a way to get at the truth.

It wasn’t that I was lying in the earlier drafts. But truth in art isn’t just a matter of intention; it’s a matter of craft. I’d used craft to write my plays, but in those earlier drafts of the book, I was unwilling to use my craft to tell a story. Now I began to approach the book the way I approached my plays. I compressed multiple plotlines into a single strong plotline. I reorganized and restructured events to create a dramatic build.

As I reworked it this time around, a strange thing started to happen. The content of the book began to mimic the writing process. My book started to become the story of a man who didn’t believe he had a story but made a life for himself writing stories and who, more or less, found himself in the mirror of art.

At this point, the whole “10 essays about art” conceit fell away. The book had to be about me. I had to turn myself into a character in a story and, most importantly, I had to interrogate this character with the same vividness and specificity I brought to my plays.

This was where the terror really cropped up. Though I could empathize with characters in my plays, I couldn’t empathize with myself, and I was ashamed of this. But if I didn’t expose all this stuff about myself, I knew I would have a lousy book. The threat of being a shitty writer chastened me and forced me to humanize myself. My hubris made me honest—and it hurt.

Throughout the revision, I became incredibly depressed. I was sobbing nearly all the time. My friends were worried about me. My theater agent gently suggested I go on meds. The stress was so great, I ended up with a case of shingles that culminated in an ugly boil on my face. The boil swelled to the size of a golf ball and, days later, crowned mysteriously in a yellowish-black pustule that dried up and dropped right off like a tiny shriveled currant.

“Although I’d wanted some editor to magically shape the material and tell me what my book was about, no one could have done this for me.”

I had a new pebble-sized hole in my face, and I was flat broke because what was meant to be an 18-month writing project stretched out to nearly a decade, but oh well! I kept writing. I wrote and sobbed and somehow got to the end of the draft, which I sent off to Jonathan. He’d soon be promoted to CEO of HarperCollins, and I’d be passed to a new editor—again—but in some respects it didn’t matter. The book was already so much better, I could feel it. Although I’d wanted some editor to magically shape the material and tell me what my book was about, no one could have done this for me. The deep private archeological work of writing a memoir was mine and mine alone.

And it wasn’t just an excavation. The sentences, to paraphrase the writer Garth Greenwell, weren’t just “empty containers for thought”; they also produced the thought. There was a kind of alchemy at work. It was as if my actual life was a tattered copy, and my book was the glorious, pristine original. In writing about my life, I was able to both connect the dots of the past and endow that history with new life. In crafting my life experience into a story, I willed myself into existence. That’s the beauty of art. That is what stories do for people. And that is what writing a memoir did for me.

Adjmi tells the story of how eight years, four editors, a case of shingles and a self-guided crash-course in editing led, at last, to one of the best memoirs of the year.

Memoir, Nonfiction, Parenting

Nonfiction Parenting Memoir

11 Things I Wish I’d Known About Writing 11 Years Ago

Behind the Book by Sarah Sentilles

by Sarah Sentilles

In Sarah Sentilles’ memoir Stranger Care, she writes beautifully about risking love, vulnerability and loss by becoming a foster parent. With the same care and attention, she shares how to tend your creativity and help it feel safe enough to flourish.

1. Set an intention

Before I begin a new writing project, I set an intention. My intention for Stranger Care was to write a love letter to our foster daughter, Coco, that would mother her when I’m no longer allowed to. I wanted to write a book that would help create a world where she’ll be safe and loved, no matter where she lands. Whenever I got scared while writing, whenever I wondered, What am I doing? What difference does it make?, I returned to my intention. And it grounded me, kept me going.

I learned this practice from my friend and teacher Juliana Jones-Munson. The intention should be personal and healing, she told me, not external or dependent on other people. Your intention should remind you why you write, and it should be powerful enough that everything else—what critics say, whether you sell it—pales in comparison.

2. Welcome first thoughts

During a writing workshop I took with Nick Flynn through Tin House, Nick had us do timed, constraint-based writing exercises by hand. This helped me learn to welcome first thoughts, my initial ideas, and helped me practice trusting myself. I took another workshop with Carolyn Forché, who was Nick’s teacher, too, and in that workshop at the Hedgebrook writing retreat center, she taught me to embrace generative writing.

Before that, I was an incessant reviser. I’d get stuck on the first paragraph or the first few pages of my manuscript, and every day I sat down to write, I would rework those. But Carolyn said, “Don’t revise. Don’t go back. Go forward.” She told me to write for three hours a day, to write whatever came to my mind. It didn’t matter. Just keep writing. And her directions unleashed a torrent of words.

Now when I start a new project, I write for three hours every day, for weeks and weeks and weeks. Only after that kind of generative writing do I begin to understand what I might be working on. And only then do my ideas begin to trust me to write them. Only then do they show themselves. I picture my ideas huddled in a cave in the back of my mind, and they send out scouts to see what will happen. “Let’s see how she treats this idea,” they whisper to one another, and then they push one forward. “Will she bludgeon it? Call it stupid? Think it’s garbage? Or will she write it down, put it on the page, tend it?” Your creativity is watching how you treat your ideas. It will only send more when it seems safe.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Stranger Care.

3. Be a magpie

When you’re working on something, whether it’s a memoir or a novel or a painting, act like a magpie and collect everything that shines. Or, to use another bird metaphor, be a bowerbird. Collect whatever helps you build a structure that will draw some future reader to you. In The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp calls this “scratching.” She writes, “I’m digging through everything to find something. It’s like clawing at the side of the mountain to get a toehold, a grip, some sort of traction to keep moving upward and onward.”

Write down the lyric you can’t get out of your head. Take notes about the story you heard on the radio that you can’t stop thinking about. Collect the poems that make you cry. Everything is connected to what you’re working on, even if it seems unconnected. If you find yourself drawn to an article about whale song, write about it. If you keep thinking about the fact that birds are dinosaurs, write about it. One writer I work with told me her story was getting cramped, as if her writing room were shrinking, but when she gave herself permission to invite other ideas into her writing—how clouds form, the history of rice, how a bud knows when to bloom—she felt like she’d opened a window and let the world in.

4. Writing is the remedy

My saboteur, the voice that tries to stop me from writing, is a wily shape-shifter. My saboteur will say anything to keep me away from the page—that I’m a fraud, that people will hate me if I write this book or that essay, that I’m wasting my time, that my ideas are boring and derivative. I’m writing fiction now, so my saboteur sounds different than she does when I’m writing nonfiction. She’s taking a new approach, insisting the plot idea I have is too dramatic, over the top, dumb. You don’t know what you’re doing, she says to me every morning when I sit down to write. Who do you think you are? But as soon as I recognize that voice for what it is, her power evaporates. As soon as I start to write, she’s gone. And the more regular my writing practice is, the quieter that sabotaging voice is. Not writing gives my saboteur an opening, but all I need to do to close that door is touch the page.

“Your creativity is watching how you treat your ideas. It will only send more when it seems safe.”

5. You don’t know what you’re writing until you have a draft

You can’t know what’s garbage and what’s gold until you’ve written your way through a draft. You can’t know what belongs in a project and what doesn’t in the beginning either, because you don’t know what you’re writing yet. Be patient. Hold your story loosely. Wait for it to show you what it wants to be. Listen. Write down all your ideas. Save everything, all your strange little fragments and scenes. Editing won’t happen until later.

So many of my writing clients say they aren’t sure what they’re writing yet, but can I help them find an agent? This, too, is putting the cart before the horse. How can you find the right agent for your book if it isn’t written yet? For me, the goal is to write the best possible book you can write and then assemble the team that understands what you’re trying to do and can help you do it better. I’ve worked with so many people who sold a book proposal for one kind of book only to realize they were actually writing a very different book. They weren’t writing a commercial self-help book at all; they were writing an intimate memoir about their childhood. They weren’t writing a memoir; they were writing a page turner of a thriller. But they’re stuck with a team who wants the book they proposed, not this other thing that their art has become. Let your art lead the way. Wait for it. The timing will be right and perfect.

6. Keep your writing to yourself

When I first started writing, I wanted to show everyone every new thing I wrote, like right away. I’d write a paragraph and show it to someone, anyone, to see what they liked and what they hated. But now I don’t show anyone what I’m writing until I’ve taken it as far as I can on my own, which sometimes means I don’t show anyone my writing for years. And then, when I think it might be ready, I show my agent, Molly Friedrich. And that’s pretty much it until we think the book is ready to be sold.

At its heart, writing means learning to listen for your voice—or for the voice that wants to come through you. That voice is hard to hear when you’re letting other readers and critics chime in all the time. Be monogamous with your writing. Keep it to yourself.

“Our ideas come from deep within, and they come from the stars. Treat these visitors with love.”

7. Your story chose you

It occurred to me recently that when we worry our story idea isn’t good enough, it’s disrespectful to the idea. Thinking we’re not good enough to write it is also impolite. Our ideas come from deep within, and they come from the stars. Treat these visitors with love. Tend them.

Draw Your Weapons took me 10 years to write, and during one of those years, I complained to a friend, the writer Alice Dark, about how sick I was of working on that project, how ready I was to be done with it. “Sometimes we have to become the person our book needs us to be before we can finish it,” she said. Sometimes that becoming happens fast. Sometimes it takes a long time. But your story idea chose you. (Elizabeth Gilbert writes powerfully about this in Big Magic.) That idea knows you have everything you need to become the writer it needs.

8. Write first thing

I do my best writing in the morning, first thing. I don’t check my email or social media, and I don’t look at the news until I’ve done my writing. Sometimes I “forget” and check my phone when I’m still in bed, and on those days, I might as well put my brain in a barrel and light it on fire.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport makes a compelling argument about the need for undistracted, focused time for thinking and writing and problem-solving. It doesn’t happen when we multitask, or check email, or look at Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or whatever social media platform sucks up your time. I’m addicted to this stuff, and I know it impedes my creativity. When I step away from this never-ending stream of distraction, I can feel my mind reset. I can feel my internal emotional life settle. My thoughts and my time belong to me again.

Writing first thing is also connected to boundary-setting. We tend to think of boundaries as selfish, but really they’re generous. When you close your studio door or say no to an obligation or block out time for your art, you give other people permission to protect their time and space to follow their creative dreams. And if you’re a parent, your boundaries give your children the freedom to set boundaries, too. It shows them they can protect what’s important to them.

9. To turn toward your writing is to turn toward the world—and change it

I’ve spent a lot of time and energy believing that if I pay attention to what’s happening in the world, my attention can somehow make terrible things not happen. But it turns out I don’t have much control over what politicians do. Or corporations. Or governments. Or viruses. Or courts. But I do have control over what I write and dream and imagine. I have control over what kinds of activism and resistance I engage in. And I have control over where I put my energy. I can choose to put my creativity toward the kind of world I want to help bring into being.

So, experiment. Stay away from the news and see what happens when you don’t absorb all that panic and fear. I’m not saying don’t pay attention at all—but I am saying choose a different kind of attention. In A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders writes that the aim of art is to ask big questions:

How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel at peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?

“It turns out I don’t have much control over what politicians do. . . . But I do have control over what I write and dream and imagine.”

To write well is to care for the world and the beings we share it with. To write well is to learn to live in the world in more just and life-giving ways. Matthew Salesses puts it another way in Craft in the Real World. “Craft is never neutral,” he writes. “Craft is the cure or injury that can be done in our shared world when it isn’t acknowledged that there are different ways that world is felt.” He continues, “Craft is support for a certain worldview. . . . Revision must also be the revision of craft. To be a writer is to wield and be wielded by culture.” Writing is political work.

10. Write through the hard stuff, even while it’s happening

When it became clear that our foster daughter Coco would be reunified with her biological mother, and when we’d have hard days in court or with the social worker or just walking around with our broken hearts, my husband, Eric, would look at me and my puffy eyes and say, “Go write.”

“I can’t,” I’d say.

“Go write,” he’d say again and point to my desk. I’m grateful to him. I’m grateful for those raw pages. I wrote Stranger Care in real time, and working on it brought Coco close, even when she wasn’t. I felt so helpless—I feel helpless still—but I find some agency in arranging words on a page, even when those words are, “She is gone.”

11. Your project is well supported

We don’t write alone. We write for the generations who came before us, and we write for the generations who will follow. One of the women who participated in the WORD CAVE, a four-day virtual writing retreat I offer, told me, “I write because my grandmother couldn’t.” What more powerful reason could there be?

Read our starred review of Stranger Care here.

With care and attention, Sarah Sentilles shares how to tend your creativity and help it feel safe enough to flourish.

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