Coming Soon…(really)

I’ve announced the upcoming publication of my collection of essays—The Stuff of a Life—so often that you’d be forgiven for assuming it’s all a hoax. Sometimes I think that myself. Life has interfered, it’s true. But my courage has waned as well. The book will be published by Embajadoras Press, which means I’m really in charge of the situation myself as the press is a cooperative self-publishing venture. I come to the moment of decision, and back off. Then I do it again. Is that really how my mom felt, or just what I imagine?… Perhaps I should re-work the chapter on coming of age one more time…Will people think I’m still a snob when they read about my adolescent airs of superiority?…And what about my foray into politics, did I get the tone right? …and so on and on. Not to mention the heavy decisions about punctuation. Comma or semicolon? Inside or outside quotation marks?

Enough. I’ve been working on these pieces for years. I’ve ordered too many examination copies to count. Yes, I fret. Do these essays accurately reflect my memories? They try. Do they reveal my shortcomings, past and present? Well, yes, some of them. I cringe a bit, but isn’t that inevitable in honest memoir? Do they do so in a humourous and largely forgiving way? I hope so. But in the end, readers will judge all of that. I can’t keep second-guessing myself.

And besides—as the courses and coaches continually remind those of us who listen—good memoir is not primarily about the writer herself. That would be an autobiography (and pretty dull). Memoir is about broader themes and universal questions that the writer illustrates with her own memories, life stories, and reflections on those memories and stories. Ideally. So it’s not about whether I choose to downsize, it’s about the emotions and the dilemmas of downsizing. It’s not about a snobby adolescent girl, it’s about snobbery—and what that girl thinks about it from her perspective many decades later. It’s not about the choices I’ve made as I age, it’s about this puzzling stage of life when time becomes the only currency that really matters. There’s a lot of other stuff too, like how growing up Quaker felt then and what it means to me now, how the Cold War shaped the world view of my generation, and what the constraints of campus life meant to women in the 1960s. But I don’t want to give it all away.

Watch for an announcement within the next couple of weeks. Honest. Along with information about a newly designed webpage and for local folks–covid willing–a festive book launch event, likely in early Fall.