Time To Make The Donuts...Or Not

The post I planned earlier this week is a post I’m now feeling blech about. So instead, here are a couple of snippets and observations pulled from my notes and sketches.

An Author’s Life

I was signing books after a talk at a luncheon in Moultonborough, New Hampshire, a couple of decades back. It was an annual event run by the town historical society.

One woman stepped up to have her book signed. Her cheeks were flushed, she stammered.

“Oh, but your life must be so glamorous!” she gushed.

“If you call wearing fur-covered stained sweatpants and staring at a screen all day glamorous,” I said. I signed the book and handed it to her. She gazed at my signature with adoration I’ve seen reserved for rock stars and/or the subjects of my books.

A few minutes later, another woman grabbed my book Moving to the Country Once & For All, a guidebook to just what it says.

“Oh!” she squealed. “This was what you were on Oprah for, right?”

“Yes,” I replied. Moultonborough and surrounding towns were the kind of places that ended up on regular lists of the kind of places that city- and suburb-dwelling readers would kill to move to. “But you already live in the country,” I pointed out.

“Yes,” she said. “But this was on Oprah!” When I signed the book, I swear she swooned.

Captain Obvious Asks a Question

I’ve taken countless writing and memoir workshops over the past seven or eight years. I’ve recently pulled back, not only due to repetition but also because I have a good enough grasp of my story’s beginning, middle and end. Plus I just finished transcribing the last of at least fifty or sixty legal pads where I sketched out scenes and ideas over the last few years and took notes from said workshops. It’s finally time to start putting it all together, and more importantly, I’m ready to start.

This week I transcribed this question from a past workshop:

“Maybe you can write about how a parent impacted a specific aspect of your life?"

My response: The real question is how did my parents NOT impact a specific aspect of my life?

I am only starting to examine their influence now, after spending most of a lifetime studiously looking away and forcefully denying that they shaped me in any way. And this presents a clear problem: After decades of distancing myself from their influence, once I start to yank on one thread of this Gordian knot, it loosens up others in the near vicinity. One tiny snippet of memory turns into a flood and the lid of my lifelong suppression is pulled off and I am washed away in a flood of memories gushing fast and furious.

At first, I am joyous. Look! I CAN remember! My pencil can barely keep up with the torrents.

But then I recoil. Too much.

TOO MUCH.

And so I shut down for a few days.

I am unclear how to deal with this. On the one hand, this is how I’ve worked in my professional life: the only way to dig out the juicy little nuggets that flesh out the people I am writing about is to go go go, upend every rock and stone you can find, no matter how disgusting and slimy the underside.

When I’m in this flow, only then can I make the connections between different stages of life and patterns of behavior, which is deeply satisfying and justifies the deep dive and hours of sitting.

But it is quite something else when I turn the same spotlight on my own past. No wonder none of my biography subjects have agreed to talk to me. I always thought it was because they wanted to see what I would dig up on my own. But now I think that perhaps they think a stranger is easily able to see what they flinch from and try to keep buried.

So of all the lessons my parents taught me, perhaps this is the most entrenched because it colored absolutely everything else: don’t feel and don’t tell anyone. But also the most necessary to deal with.

This Week’s Takeaway: If you don’t feel up to what you had planned, it’s okay to swerve away and change your plans at the last minute. Take a break, shift gears, do something else. Your body and brain are telling you to let up for a reason; try hard to listen to them.