I Got Here Because...Part I

Of Cause and Effect

There’s a trend on Substack where people post a chronological timeline of their lives and what they were doing at a particular age. For instance, in Year Whatever I was born, followed by Age 5, 6, 7 and so on, up through today.

I’ve created similar timelines when I start working on a new biography because it helps to divvy up the chapters, which are sometimes grouped by years, other times by life stages or career highlights.

I’ve also drawn up these rudimentary outlines to help shape my memoir, but on the whole I’ve found them drab and rather colorless. Instead, I like to see how an event in the lives of long-dead relatives has led to the next, creating a throughline that reveals how my entire life has been the result of seemingly unrelated events pushing me forward, and how each one has indelibly shaped me. Also, if any one event didn’t occur, then a] I’d be a different person, or b] I wouldn’t be here at all.

I read Demi Moore’s memoir Inside Out not long after it was published in 2019, about a year after I started working on my own memoir. I am not normally inclined to read celebrity memoirs, but she and I were born on the exact same day albeit on different coasts, and so I’ve always felt a kind of affinity for her.

I cruised along reading the book but was absolutely stopped cold when I got towards the end in Chapter 22 where she repeatedly asks — and answers — the question “How did I get here?”

Her I got here because… responses were raw, honest, and chilling, and I realized I had to approach my own memoir writing in the same way, which in fact was the exact opposite of how I’d written my previous books, which tended to focus on the facts and the timeline and rarely broke the surface.

Two of her frequently-quoted lines are:

“I got here because I chose men with the same qualities as my dad and my granddad, and I turned myself inside out trying to please them.”

And: “I got here because neither of my parents was old enough or wise enough to take care of my brother and me the way that all children are entitled to be cared for.”

But I was more interested in these:

“I got here because I had a grandmother who put up with a womanizing husband who was charming and good-looking and charismatic, and she felt like she had no choice but to tolerate it because she married it.”

“I got here because I had a mother who married the love of her life, but then lived in a state of total love-hate dysfunction with him until he ended his own life.”

My own mother could have written both sentences, save for “the love of her life.” After all, for most women back then, marriage was a brave leap into the great unknown but offering the promise of a future that had to be better than the bleak current circumstances…

Right? Right?

Moore’s list of I got here because continued, creating a brutal honesty so intense that it made me realize I had to shoot for nothing less. I wrote my own version of I got here because after finishing Moore’s book, but it’s too long to recount here, so I’ll save it for next week.

Besides, I have to work up the nerve to post it. :-/

But here are the first three entries:

I got here because of the actions, both smart and stupid, thought-out and impulsive, of relatives I never knew, probably most often as a reaction to living in a country that has been fought over for centuries.

I got here because my grandfather escaped from a prison work crew in Poland, stowed away in a ship to America, jumped into New York Harbor and swam to New Jersey, and ate out of trash cans until he found a job and a place to live.

I got here because in 1920 my grandmother had the balls to escape an abusive marriage.

Their actions affected their lives, which then affected the lives of their children, their children’s children, and so on down the line just like that old shampoo commercial…

Timelines are great for keeping track of what happened when, but they usually reveal little about the lives of the people whose stories you want to tell. If you really want to dive into the raw nugget of your story — or someone else’s — you have to examine how other people’s actions [and your own] have spawned what you’ve done and who you are today.

The Takeaway: Write an “I got here because” list for your own life or the life of a relative you’re researching. While this can help you to examine how certain events can indelibly shaped a life, it may also help you to reduce current-day judgments and stop asking Why didn’t she leave him/do what she really wanted to do/Why wasn’t she stronger? while also putting the societal expectations of the time — and of their predecessors — into perspective.