Incomplete memoir (Part 2)

About five years ago I started writing a memoir. I kept at it for a little while, writing about 1,000 words a day for a few weeks. I hadn’t yet been to therapy and there were many things I didn’t really understand about my life, but I still find the unfinished memoir to be a fascinating look into my own past. I’ve decided to post it in installments here, with only a few redactions. You can find the other sections by clicking the Memoir category.

2.

This is the story of the 28 years in between the plastic spear and the telephone call. It’s the story of my emotional and political awakening. Of 25 moves in seven states and two countries. Of 10 years of marriage, more than a dozen jobs, two children, and three last names. This is as much of it as I can remember and feel like telling.

The remembering part isn’t easy. There’s so much of my early life that I’ve forgotten or intentionally erased. Add to that the normal tendency of kids to forget a lot of the things that happen to them when they’re very young, and you’ve got a life that in many ways seems to start in high school or even later.

For years, I’ve had a strong desire to tell this story, and a fear that I have no real story to tell. That my life is no different from that of thousands or millions of other kids from broken homes who go through life feeling like one foot is on the ground and the other is sinking in quicksand. I haven’t had it particularly rough in many ways. What lessons do I have to impart to anyone else?

But I’m so attracted to language. To words. I love to read, and not just for the content of the stories, but also for the words themselves. Michael Pollan expressed the same love of the wash of language, the flood of words, in his beautiful book A Place Of My Own. I read entire pages and paragraphs and books and can’t remember what I read five minutes later, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the act that matters, that grabs my attention and holds it, that carries me into that other world.

And with this love of reading is the unrequited love of the writer. I’ve given my heart to the concept of a memoir, but I have no expectation that the act of writing will love me back.