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.