Mining my Memoir and Other Reliquaries

I know. I know. A memoir is not actually a storehouse for relics such as sacred bones or castoff pieces of clothing—the stuff of saints and the holiest of holies. A memoir is a container for a story from a life. And not necessarily a holy life, except for the belief that all life is holy, even that of a sinner such as me.

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Capturing a Moment

I’m on the move, looking for beauty. Improvising once again.
So goes the first line of a “captured moment,” written in my journal decades ago while on a year-long journey. Following is the rest of that “moment,” as it now appears in my memoir.

London, August 1990
I’m on the move, looking for beauty. Improvising once again.

The Leicester Garden, a traveler’s hotel recommended in Frommer’s, is too plain, too basic—the carpet’s thin and the bed uncomfortable. So I set off on this scorching day to my new hotel, the Garden Country Hotel on Kensington Gardens Square.

The gravel path through the Kensington Gardens makes wheeling my too-heavy pack difficult. No, not difficult, but rough enough that I am conscious of having to drag it along. My feet are swollen in huaraches, my skirt clings to sweat-sticky legs, and I am lost. Or, if not lost, at the very least, I don’t quite know where I am. And it’s bloody hot.

The trees are tall and grand and spreading and the lawns lush and green on either side of the gravel path. Benches line the way and on one a man leans back, face to the sun, shirt off. His bare chest fairly gleams in the bright light. I’m drawn to stare at his whiteness, that bit of belly above his trousers, the small and roundish pink of his nipples, his hairless chest. I don’t know when I have seen a whiter body.

No bird song disturbs the still air, the birds must be drowsing, too, like the man on the bench. We are all knackered. The verdant aromas of late summer, grass thick and lush and tempting, if I stop here, under this grand oak, in plain sight, in bright daylight, but in the shade…

Planting myself on the grass, skirt under my legs, I remove my shoes. The contrast of my aqua skirt against the deep emerald pleases me. I rub my bare feet in the grass. Is there a better sensation for a girl with Missouri roots? This, I think, is what home feels like.

Pack placed behind me, I lean back, then slide a little further down until I am nearly prone. My eyes can’t help but close against the branch-dappled sun and, stranger in an unfamiliar place, single woman on the grass under a tree in a public park, I fall asleep, deeply and completely.

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This is just one of many moments “captured” in my journal that I later transplanted, revised and included in my memoir. Our lives are filled with moments, large and small, from which we emerge a different person.

In just a few weeks, I’ll launch “Captured Moments,” a new generative writing session via Zoom. In this monthly writing group, we’ll embark on expeditions to discover, uncover, and recover those moments of change in our lives. Participants can use the sessions to produce new material for a work-in-progress, or create fresh, free-standing flash or micro-memoirs or narrative fragments.

The series begins Monday, May 17 at noon (PT). You can find out more and sign up here: https://judyreeveswriter.com/captured-moments/

Does writing the story change the writer?

Writing has always been a two-step dance for me, an improvisational hallelujah followed by a patterned pas de deux. I’m mostly pas de deux these days, my partners a developmental editor and a couple of beta readers who have generously and kindly offered suggestions to make my memoir better.

It began in the summer of 2016, as I spilled out my story as I remembered it, aided by decades old journals, into ten sloppily filled spiral-bound notebooks in a two-year, morning after morning, dedicated practice. Those ten notebooks of 199,000-plus words became a 120,678-word Scrivener manuscript draft, which became a 103,343-word second draft, which then—change the whole damn structure—morphed into a 101,559-word third draft, and then a 96,981-word fourth draft.

Now into draft five, I’m at 93,538 words and still revising and editing. Still attempting to make it better. I toss out unfixable mistakes and hone others into “make it work” sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and sections, occasionally stepping outside the boundaries of the manuscript page and back to the notebook for a deeper dive to discover what I want to say or what I meant to say. Or what, if anything, I even know about what I am trying to say.

In the doing of all this, I travel back to the time my husband was alive and bringing up avocados from the orchard on the hillside of our Jamul home. I travel back, in memory and photographs and decades old travel books ordered from eBay, to the time after his death, that I wandered around Europe, the Soviet Union, and then India.

On this day, as I continue to revise the manuscript, I mark the date. Thirty years ago today and a few months shy of my planned year-long sojourn, the intensifying first Gulf War sent me back to America.

My journey and my story was and is a search for who I was, who I became, and who I am now. The writing changes the story and the story changes the writer. Can we ever say, “This is who I am” and be certain of what we say? Or do we forever revise our story, to make it—and ourselves—into something better?