A Memoir is like a quilt

Writing a memoir is like stitching a quilt together. I started with small patches, scenes from the past and the present. A memory of an explosion in Cape Cod. Ice skating on a pond in upstate New York while my parents were in the hospital. A phone call. A black telephone chord on a brown table. Cradled in the warmth of my aunt, uncle and cousins. My sister’s tears. Her asthma. Returning to New York. A family reuniting.

But these were all scraps of memory that took years and years to sew together. I was afraid to go deeper. I woke up scared about remembering. I had dreams of fire. I couldn’t cross bridges. I had a husband and small children. I wanted their memories to be of the zoo, swinging in the park, reading books. But I seemed to tell too much because the telling became obsessive like sanding a table and wanting to get past the old paint and scratches down to the grain. But I learned to balance the past—that memoir—with present joys. The book still was not ready, though. It would take more years to bake and the death of my parents to free the parts of the story that I didn’t want to tell when they were alive.

It was only after working with an editor/friend in Montreal that the book took shape. I made timelines for each character. Everyone has a story from beginning to some sort of end. The stories were separated. The characters were developed—what they liked to eat, what they liked to wear. What flowers might they choose to place on the table. Then the stories were put together, like vanilla and chocolate batter that is swirling together so the swirling is just right. That took a couple of years, to write the sketches, to merge the stories. To go back and forth as life does like on a sea saw. Not one moment but past, present and future like the sun dipping at the same time as the moon rises. Or how all the stars, even the ones light years away are illuminated.

The story was finally told and sold. It started as a patchwork quilt, small patches of remembering.