A late-to-the-party memoir

I never enjoyed creative writing.

But a story burned inside me for twenty years and I had to get it out. Encouraged by a poet friend, I began to put words on paper. Those first attempts at writing were laughable. Cringeworthy. Who did I think I was? It took years of practice and many failures to find my voice.

Then a funny thing happened. This one-dimensional story—a rant about my dysfunctional in-laws—took on a whole new trajectory as I learned to look for deeper meaning.

The stack of love letters had everything to do with it. What a gold mine, my writer friend said. She was right. Fifty wartime letters from the South Pacific, bound by a brittle rubber band, saved in a dresser drawer for half a century.

But that’s a story for another day.

A story of love and loss, of darkness and light, of letting go and reclaiming what’s been taken.

So there I was. One hateful rant, one poignant voice from the past. Yin and yang, two polar opposites. How could I weave them together? That was my dilemma. It took ten years of sustained effort to write my memoir. And several more to reflect on what it truly meant.

Next task:  compress sixty-eight thousand words to two hundred for a query letter. Worse yet, distill it into a single sentence. I can do both now. But it wasn’t easy—far more difficult, in fact, than writing the book.

Over the years, I’d ask my husband if he’d like to read my story. Nope. At least he was consistent. In fairness, I think he already knew it in his heart.

When he glanced at my website this morning and read about my search for the truth of his identity, he said:  search for your own fucking identity. If that isn’t proof of his bloodline, I don’t know what is.

Maybe that should be the title of my book.