joyfinderhero (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
joyfinderhero) wrote2009-08-26 12:16 pm
joyfinderhero) wrote2009-08-26 12:16 pm
Entry tags:
Memoirs, and memories
I'm back to work on my memoirs.
I'm writing in a class full of other aspiring writers, with a skilled and published memoirist as teacher and guide. So when I write something that assumes my readers remember the 60s and 70s as well as I do, somebody asks questions. My second draft fills in the blanks, and begets new questions. Or, just as instructive, new reader assumptions that, being incorrect, induce me to clarify again.
Some of the scenes of childhood are crystal clear to me, and come into better focus as I write. Some of the scenes of my mid-thirties are surprisingly opaque to me, and only days later do I get more information. Sometimes this is funny.
This week I've been writing about the few men I dated during my years of single-parenthood between the end of marriage #2 and marriage #3.
I was by no means promiscuous in those years, but I was also not much into serial monogamy (never mind 'going steady'), and sometimes it was a challenge to make clear to some guy that "two dinners and a goodnight kiss" was not a down-payment on exclusivity. Just because we had a date for Saturday did not mean he wouldn't see me at a midtown restaurant with someone else -- and no guilty looks, either. And that this would remain true even if we moved in together.
Just now, though, I'm finding it funny that I keep mixing up incidents. Was it Mike or Rich that got so mad at me because I went to my college reunion and had a fling with an old crush? Was it Stan or David that kept insisting that I let him fix my car, instead of paying the expert, because (as he later admitted) he thought the expert was flirting with me? Which of the several guys I knew who drove 15-year-old Corvairs was the one who helped me find mine, when I couldn't afford a whole new fuel injection system for my Volvo?
These questions bubble up, and I write what I remember about them, and then wake up at two in the morning realizing I've written something inaccurate, and what the truth was instead.
It's a humbling process. Conscious mind / Talking self wants to believe that it knows and remembers everything, but clearly it's only some subconscious aspect of Basic self that really does.
I'm writing in a class full of other aspiring writers, with a skilled and published memoirist as teacher and guide. So when I write something that assumes my readers remember the 60s and 70s as well as I do, somebody asks questions. My second draft fills in the blanks, and begets new questions. Or, just as instructive, new reader assumptions that, being incorrect, induce me to clarify again.
Some of the scenes of childhood are crystal clear to me, and come into better focus as I write. Some of the scenes of my mid-thirties are surprisingly opaque to me, and only days later do I get more information. Sometimes this is funny.
This week I've been writing about the few men I dated during my years of single-parenthood between the end of marriage #2 and marriage #3.
I was by no means promiscuous in those years, but I was also not much into serial monogamy (never mind 'going steady'), and sometimes it was a challenge to make clear to some guy that "two dinners and a goodnight kiss" was not a down-payment on exclusivity. Just because we had a date for Saturday did not mean he wouldn't see me at a midtown restaurant with someone else -- and no guilty looks, either. And that this would remain true even if we moved in together.
Just now, though, I'm finding it funny that I keep mixing up incidents. Was it Mike or Rich that got so mad at me because I went to my college reunion and had a fling with an old crush? Was it Stan or David that kept insisting that I let him fix my car, instead of paying the expert, because (as he later admitted) he thought the expert was flirting with me? Which of the several guys I knew who drove 15-year-old Corvairs was the one who helped me find mine, when I couldn't afford a whole new fuel injection system for my Volvo?
These questions bubble up, and I write what I remember about them, and then wake up at two in the morning realizing I've written something inaccurate, and what the truth was instead.
It's a humbling process. Conscious mind / Talking self wants to believe that it knows and remembers everything, but clearly it's only some subconscious aspect of Basic self that really does.