I arrived late to the writer’s party, but I’m here now. Apparently, it’s never too late.
When I started writing creatively, I was forty-five. Diving straight into the deep end, I began by writing a novel, Pearls My Mother Wore. Initially, I thought it would be a short story, but as the characters and plot developed in my imagination, the page count grew. Along the way, I read books on writing craft, took classes, joined critique groups, and hired editors and advisors. I’m a hairdresser during the day, so as I finessed the novel into something pleasing, I often compared it to combing hair: going over and over the lines, getting the tangles out, smoothing the various strands until it was ready for the world to see. After four years of shaping, I was comfortable calling Pearls My Mother Wore done. To make it available, I then went the self-publishing route; that was like giving it a last blast of hairspray and sending it out the door. I hoped it would hold up and not look silly at the end of the day. That was in 2009, and so far so good.
But then, and perhaps it was to be expected, readers kept referring to the novel as a memoir. “No,” I would declare, explaining that many aspects of Pearls had been emotionally autobiographical, but nothing in it ever occurred in real life; it was fiction. It’s true that the main character is a hairdresser living in my hometown of Sonoma, but that decision was made mostly as a matter of expediency. I didn’t want to do the research or take the time required to create an entirely invented person, so I went with what I already knew. The protagonist’s career and location had little to do with the bigger story I was endeavoring to tell, which was (to me) about appearances, acceptance and forgiveness.
After hearing so many people say that they “loved” my “memoir,” I thought, Shoot! Now I have to write a memoir to set the record straight. That thought did not exactly light me up. My personal history was, let’s say, complicated; figuring out how to tell it in story form seemed beyond me. I played with the idea of tackling another work of fiction, and I was enticed by the idea of making it a father-themed tale—to provide nice symmetry to the first book—but the problem was, I had grown up without ever meeting my biological father, and all of my fictionalized fathers rang hollow.
For four years, I fished around for something else to write that would hold my interest. There were three equally competing impulses: fiction, memoir, or nothing at all. But then, quite by chance, I made a pivotal discovery regarding my father. It was a case of “when the student is ready, the teacher appears.” What followed was to re-frame much of what had felt too complicated to explain, including a childhood of neglect, the sudden and unexpected death of my mother when I was sixteen, functional illiteracy (I could barely read or write up until my early twenties,) and the confounding mysteries surrounding who and where in the world was my father. His true identity was revealed to me when I was in my mid-fifties. By then, I had come a long way: lifting myself out of poverty, learning to read and write and eventually earning a Bachelor’s degree in English, tackling my own addictions, and even finding trustworthy love. Once the piece about my absent father had fallen into place, my life’s journey had memoir written all over it. The clue that eventually lead to my father was found in a metal file box that my mother owned. She called it her strongbox.
I began writing The Strongbox not because the core story is so unique but because it’s all too common—married man abandons his “illegitimate” children. I couldn’t accept that condensed version of the facts. There was more to it, had to have been. My mother died young, at the age of forty-three, so without her to provide answers, I ended up fumbling for many years with fragments of misleading, and false information. The only way to make sense of my family of origin history was to dig and keep digging. At times I felt like a beggar scrounging for whatever morsels I could get my hands on. Compelled to pry where I wasn’t wanted, there were no permission slip, no invitations, no hearty pats on the back, but I took all that I could find and then made the most of it.
Pluck, determination and resiliency are some of what readers will find in The Strongbox. In the telling of what happened, I made every effort to keep me central to my memoir. It’s not a tattletale, it’s not about avenging the past; it’s not an airing of grievances; it’s a reckoning, a summation of many incomplete parts. My accounting is of what wasn’t there as much as what was. Laying claim to my history through the written word has been to shine a light into the cobwebs of the past. It’s my attempt to legitimatize a history that includes “illegitimacy.”