How I revised my memoir, Part 2

and how strange it feels

Part 1 is here. As I came close to the end of the revisions during the past three weeks, I felt apprehensive. I didn't want to finish and let it go. I anticipated I’d miss my characters, which I do. 

Maybe more significantly, the end of the book meant the end of a lively, juicy writing process that had engaged me for several years. Coming to the end of this long beginning phase found me catastrophizing, as I woke up in the night with painful anxiety several times within a week. The theme was, "the project is over, and I'm going to turn 60, and I’m going to fall off a cliff healthwise, and boom, my life as I knew it is basically over."

My therapist pointed out that at the end of a years-long project, including when people leave a job, there can be mixed feelings and stress and even grief. I do feel some grief: there’s the loss of the brain-filling creative endeavor, and the loss of the book characters that represent real people. I've imagined myself in friends’ and family’s shoes over and over again as part of telling my own story. 

I love them all and want to protect and nurture them. I had to let go of most of them long ago in real life; even if people are alive, I’m only in touch with the minority. I am reluctant to let go of the rest “again” by finishing the book. It sometimes seems that I wish I could have stayed in touch with practically everybody I’ve ever met. I know not everyone feels that way about their past friends and acquaintances. Maybe my wish and my reluctance to let go are part of the legacy of the catastrophic early loss I experienced, as told in my book.

Now that I'm done-for-now, I miss my childhood friends, the adults who were kind to me, and my own young self-character I've tried to actualize, and my parents, and people I didn't even like. Well, except for “Larry.” I don’t miss him at all.

My book is Girl Next Door: A Coming-of-Age Memoir of Early Loss. A mom who dies in her 40s leaves her little girl with inner strength to get through the hardest of times, and to make a safe-enough path to adulthood.

An eleven-year-old only child in Chicago, alone with her feelings, Fran resolves to have the life she thinks her mom intended: a life with her mom’s family in their beloved, beautiful rural Arkansas. Reality erases this childhood vision, but to Fran’s surprise, happiness trickles into her real world. Journal-writing, bike rides, and well-chosen neighborhood friends ultimately help teenaged Fran appreciate the real life that is uniquely hers, and she begins to integrate her loss into her memories and her pathfinding.

This is The Tender Bar meets Harriet the Spy plus lyrical natural beauty.