It's all in the rewrite...

I wrote the "shitty first draft" of my memoir as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge in 2014 to write 50,000 words in a short period of time. What I could get down on the page at that time was devoid of scene, more of a listing of events on a timeline. I included large swaths of my mother's journal entries, which I thought were germane to my story, and which helped me quickly reach my 50,000 word target.

Eight years later, I am actually writing my memoir, a complete rewrite, recreating scenes from the original lists of events in that first draft. Eight years of ruminations, processing, holding space for the unexpressed grief and other emotions I wasn't able to face when I initially embarked on this journey so many years ago. My memoirist guru, Mary Karr, recently referred to the process of writing her current memoir about her sister as "Drip, drip, ouch." So true.

My latest triumph was being able to finally write the scene of my 21st birthday in 1979 with action, dialogue, and attendant emotions, when all hell broke loose with my grandmother after the dinner I had prepared. That was two months before I left Ann Arbor to move to Seattle, and six months before I began speaking to my grandmother again. At sixty-four, the agitation I felt in the moment after I threw my grandmother out after that fateful dinner still activates my adrenaline and sets my heart to racing. But this time, I was able to grab the reins, and write through that agitation, faithfully recreating (I hope) the scene of that evening. For me, coming down from the analysis of the event at 50,000 feet eight years ago to now recounting the actual scene in 1st person present narrative is what makes the process--"drip, drip, ouch"--so rewarding. I believe I've really done the work if it feels like coming out the other end of an exorcism when I'm done.