Concealing a Memoir Character’s Identity

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XV

How to Write about Real People Anonymously

After my developmental editor read my essay collection, I sent him a couple extra pieces involving a Very Important Person I left out of the manuscript. I’d written the pieces for a workshop, shared them with the workshop, received feedback, and rewritten them. Then I’d set them aside, knowing if I included them in the manuscript—with the specific details I’d shared—several people would ascertain his identity, which I considered a deal-breaker.

I convinced myself I didn’t need him in the manuscript; I could write a book in which his presence in my life was nonexistent. My editor set me straight, calling him and two other Very Important Persons in the Chelsey Orbit my “triptych of superimposed happiness.” He said the absent VIP was the “logical ending.” How could I leave him out if he was one side of a triangle central to the narrative? Could I turn a two-sided triangle into a pointy hat or a pup tent instead, pretending this person doesn’t take up space in my consciousness? Leaving him out felt wrong; putting him in seemed impossible.

But my editor gave me the permission I needed in one sentence: “You can write about him completely anonymously.” I knew in that instant he had to be in the story. But how does one write about someone completely anonymously?

What I Didn’t Do

Memoirists attempt to conceal identities by changing people’s names, which I did from the outset with most of the characters in my manuscript; some writers also change job titles, hometowns, and other major defining details about people. However, I had to take this situation to the next level: I had to write intimate, honest scenes without hinting at anything that might tip off readers who know him. Aside from providing him with an apropos nickname, here’s what I didn’t do:

• I didn’t reveal where any of the action between us took place. I used the obscurity of the locations to my advantage. We could be in any city, in any state, in any country, and the interactions, thoughts, and emotions would be the same. We could sit on any bench next to any body of water and still have the same conversation. We could have met in any dive bar. We could have had philosophical conversations in any speakeasy. In a two-person world, the bustling world outside doesn’t have to exist.

• I didn’t talk about his children. Knowing he’s an attentive father is enough.

• I didn’t write the scenes that would automatically divulge who he is—no matter how pivotal they are. If I provided an example here, that would negate what I did in the book to painstakingly keep his identity hidden.

• I didn’t mention what he does for a living. While this would lend new layers to his personality, I had to skip his day-to-day involvement in the world.

• I didn’t discuss his personal hobbies and activities. Like his profession, this would be a way to build character, but his unique and disparate interests, especially when lumped together, are indicative of him as a person.

Dialogue, Setting, and Metaphors

Without these elements, then, can a writer do a person and a story justice? Of course! But how? I wrote scenes and curated written and spoken exchanges carefully to convey what’s vital. Here’s what else I did in the memoir version:

• Foremost, I made ample use of dialogue, both in-person and online. I saved texts, Facebook messages, and other written correspondence, which I wove into the story. How do two people sustain a long-distance connection in our modern digital era? How do texts relate to brief face-to-face contact, and how do conversations extend from one interaction to the next? How does technology play a role in a cyber-relationship based on thoughtful correspondence, what-ifs, and intense emotions? And how do monthslong stretches of silence affect the outcome?

• When describing his appearance, I mentioned his “gentle, kind smile” and “bright” eyes without referring to height, hair color, eye color, etc.

• I described the setting without naming it—and I explicitly connected setting to time because much of the in-person scenes occur in roughly the same space on the map. For example, the bench where we had a key conversation one year no longer existed a few years later after a major renovation when we met up there again. How did the same setting change from year to year? What does it look like, and what occurred there? There’s no need to name the exact spot.

• I used metaphors to describe my feelings about him and our situation. I reconfigured the “boy meets girl” fairytale narrative to explain my motives. What does a timely, realistic “fairytale” look like, and how does it differ from the sugarcoated ones fed to us in Disney films?

• I wrote scenes in which I discussed this person with other people. What are outsiders’ reactions to our connection and the circumstances surrounding it?

• I wrote imaginary scenes that never happened. I envisioned an alternate universe in which they did. The reader is privy to what’s real versus what’s in my head.

Is This Chapter a Novel Instead?

At dinner recently, a close friend and I talked about some of the important events I had to leave out and how frustrating that was. She suggested I write a novel on the topic instead. Now I can’t stop thinking about it. Autofiction would be an excellent way to tell the story—and use my imagination to its fullest potential.

I never thought of myself as someone who could write fiction until I read Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation. I knew I wanted to write a novel after I read that book. I started a novel in 2019 loosely based on my experiences as a high school English teacher. I worked on it for a year, completing one hundred pages of a draft. Then I realized what the story was about. I planned to start from page one again. I put it aside, and I haven’t picked it back up yet.

But now I have a cool new idea, thanks to my astute friend. I don’t know whether to be grateful or pissed she thought of it first. In the meantime, I have to figure out what to do with the memoir I already wrote: Set it aside? Cut it up on the floor and rearrange it? Write more? Keep sending it out as is? Publish more pieces of it as standalone essays?

The Problem with Memoir Endings

Before I consider scrapping a decade of my work, we have to talk about endings in the next installment. I wrote at least four or five of them. I may have to write yet another one if my circumstances change again before I hear a “yes” from the publishing powers that be—if that ever happens.

How does a writer end a memoir when life never stops unfolding until she’s no longer living?

Lost in Los Angeles

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XIV

My penchant for overthinking spilled onto the page, but guessing games don’t make the cut.

By page 193 of my essay collection, I’m still making the same mistakes: starting essays with backstory instead of scenes; writing lengthy origin stories about how I met certain people—and often sharing what happened to them after they were no longer in my life; including every detail about every experience without curating the sparkly bits; and speculating about what other people are thinking and why they’re acting the way they are.

No one knows what a person is thinking and what that person’s motives are, especially when the writer barely knows them, so why hypothesize?

I’m Not a Mind Reader

When I moved to Culver City in 2009, I was pushing thirty-six and still reeling from a momentary marriage, a called-off wedding, and a couple post-relationship, fringe-dude disappearing acts. This would have been an opportune time to find a therapist; instead, I sought experiences that would further deplete my self-esteem and thrust my imaginary family out of reach. My wonky headspace and move to Los Angeles to live with a childhood friend collided, and if this collision had made a noise, I imagine it would have sounded like the space shuttle sonic boom above our house that shook the foundation and launched me off the sofa.

Reading the initial thirty-four pages that recount the self-inflicted rollercoaster of desperation that was my midthirties, I note a few instances of pointless conjecture about the reasons why one of my roommate’s friends spurned my advances, aside from the obvious one: Perhaps he didn’t want to sleep with you, dumbass.

Like this:

“He had willpower of steel—or maybe other women on the side. His personal life was a mystery, part of his game. He seemed to get more pleasure out of torturing me than actually having sex.”

Or this:

“I was beginning to think he had a phobia about intercourse. Maybe he was afraid of diseases, or maybe deep down . . . a good boy was hiding. I could never tell.”

And it doesn’t matter. I didn’t have any idea what he was going through at all. Guessing his intentions—or lack of them—on the page serves no fascinating purpose for the reader.

My Premature Agent Search Was Unsuccessful—Thankfully

I feel compelled to harangue my younger self for expending so much mental and emotional energy for no justifiable reason. It can be grueling to read early drafts of a me that’s me—but also not me anymore. On the plus side, I am grateful my full-court press to find a literary agent didn’t pan out when I hadn’t rewritten my manuscript yet. That the essay collection never found a home is a blessing—and I never use the word “blessing.”

One agent read it front to back in one day and said she was interested in seeing a revision that dealt with my anxiety and trouble saying “no” in other aspects of my life aside from romantic love, but that wasn’t the direction I was compelled to go in.

I pitched another agent face-to-face at a conference who said, “This is exactly what I’m looking for,” and then she read my manuscript. At first she wasn’t a solid “no,” but she was rightfully ambivalent after peeking under the hood because this version isn’t tight or multilayered enough, in part because of the excessive speculating.

Turn the Guesswork Inward

The assumptions continue with another lad I liked who “talked to me like a real person.” He was a recent Los Angeles transplant and “hadn’t been in town long enough to play fake LA games with women, I figured.”

We had just met. I knew nothing about him. How did I know if he was a game-player or not?

In another attempt to infuse feelings into a real person, I mention my roommate “felt [like he was] in the way, I suspect” when I was flirting with yet another one of his buddies.

Instead of wondering how he felt, maybe I should have asked him!

Even if I’m correct in my theories about the drives and sentiments of men I knew when I lived in Los Angeles, they have no place in the text. The more imperative question is why I was acting like a teenager in my thirties, hiding behind a fake “quest for merriment” that concealed a lack of trust in my own judgment about people’s character; a deep-seated fear of rejection; and the engrained conviction I didn’t deserve the fulfilling life I wanted.

Attempt to Answer the Vital Questions

To unlock this chapter, then, is to magnify only those scenes that endeavor to unravel my own motives and feelings. The men’s actions speak for themselves. Holding the reader’s hand undermines her intelligence; what she thinks based on my retelling is up to her.

So, in the fifteen-page revision, I start with a key middle-of-the-story scene inside “The Lodge,” the room in our house that resembled a log cabin—the setting for much of the mayhem that ensued in the time between Easter 2009, when I moved in, and Halloween 2010, when I moved out. After leaving the reader with questions about what happens next, I explain my current state of mind, tying this chapter to the previous one, mentioning the abrupt departure of a person I considered important—the “launch point for a tailspin.”

And instead of spotlighting the interiority of the supporting characters, I underscore my own gobbledygook in relation to others’ behaviors I can actually observe. In other words, I examine my desperate, sad self—an element an early writing teacher indicated was lacking—stating things like, “It fed my inclination for people-pleasing,” and “I had entered the unattractive realm of wanting people to like me at the expense of me not liking myself,” and “I pursued every guy based on a mere twinge of attraction.”

By the end of the chapter, the reader knows the most pertinent absurd, amusing, and distressing events that transpired in 2009 and 2010 inside The Lodge in Culver City—excluding ones I know for certain would upset my old roommate, with whom I’m still friends—a conscious choice to circumvent that which is Not My Story to Tell.

A New Anonymous Character

As I reinforce words that first appear at the beginning of the chapter—underpinning my midthirties conviction that love and happiness are reserved for others—the reader is now primed to meet a person who is completely absent from the essay collection, someone my second mentor gently nudged me to consign to a rightful—yet anonymous—starring role after I shared workshopped pages I’d cast aside. Leaving this person out of the manuscript felt like a glaring lie of omission.

But how does one write about a person totally anonymously? It’s not easy, but it can be done.

Attention High School Seniors: It’s Time to Write Your College Application Essay!

In a short essay or personal statement, university-bound seniors must make every word count.

It’s still summer. You are (hopefully) enjoying the sunshine. Your senior year of high school (hopefully) hasn’t begun yet. You (hopefully) aren’t thinking about classrooms, lectures, and homework. You may even be on a family vacation or lazily scrolling through social media, watching Netflix, or working a summer job for some extra—or indispensable—cash. This is not the time to focus on the nebulous “future,” right?

Actually, it is.

If you plan to apply to a four-year university for the 2024–2025 school year, now is the time to brainstorm, write, and revise your college application essay(s)/personal statement(s).

A Special Kind of “Essay”

I’m certain the word “essay” conjures many thoughts and emotions—not all positive. Maybe it invokes those dreaded five paragraphs you’ve been perfecting—or avoiding—since middle school. Maybe “essay” makes you think of painstaking research or literary criticism to prove you read and understood the deeper meaning of the latest novel your English teacher plucked from the district-approved “canon.” You know the one: It was written at least a hundred years ago. It was assigned to a whole class of varied individuals, and you were all supposed to connect with it and apply it to your modern-day lives. You were asked to glean its themes and metaphors and write about them in a formal fashion with examples from the text.

I know those essays well. I’ve written and read countless versions of them.

Here’s the thing: College application essays are not those kinds of essays.

As a former high school English teacher and current published essayist who has read and assigned those frightful five-paragraph academic papers, I can say with conviction that a college application essay is more fun to write. (No, really.) It’s satisfying because it’s creative, and it’s about you.

Throw Out the Rules

Have you ever had an English teacher tell you never to use “I” when you’re writing an essay—no first-person narrative ever? I have. Guess what? It’s time to toss out that rule and embrace your own narrative. Now is your chance to showcase your unique personality—your voice on the page; a distinctive spin on a specific experience from your life; what you learned about yourself; and how you did or did not change your outlook or behavior as a result of that experience. Bonus points if you learned something universal about the world you can apply to your future as a college student on an incredible campus of your choice!

Where to Begin

The anecdote you choose to write about for your college application essay/personal statement informs the person you are today—right now—with all of your imperfections and marvelous attributes, and it doesn’t have to be a giant tragic—or joyous—life event. In fact, it’s probably best if it isn’t. If you can morph a mundane, unremarkable incident or concept into something weighty and thought-provoking because of how you write about it, you will stand out from the hundreds of other essays in the gatekeepers’ inboxes.

Don’t Fear the Blank Page

If you’re like me, the blank page can be scary. After all the relentless work you’ve accomplished as a young scholar up until now, how can a piece of writing that’s 650 words or fewer stand between you and your dream school—your introduction to the big, bad awesome world of adulthood with all its potential, where anything can happen? If you take it one step at a time, I promise it doesn’t have to be as painful as it appears when you’re staring at that blank page.

This is your opportunity to exhibit your character; to sound like you in a more informal way than when you write bookish papers; to be proud but humble; humorous but not overtly so; an adept storyteller using all five senses; and a straightforward, succinct, reflective interpreter of a personal tale—momentous or otherwise.

A Failure Transformed into a Success

How will you grab a smart reader in the first sentence? How will you make your essay jump out from the pack of other deserving incoming college freshmen?

Let me give you an example:

I once guided a friend’s son through the process of completing his Common Application essay—an online portal used by more than 900 universities. The first draft he sent me began like this: “Humans are fallible creatures . . .”

This is true. The words themselves are solid. But the eyes of someone reading hundreds of these submissions would most likely glaze over if they saw this. Why? Because it’s too broad; it’s something everyone already knows; and it tells me nothing specific about my friend’s son.

Based on my suggestions, in a future draft, he wrote an honest, direct statement about himself instead: “My junior year I made the worst decision of my academic career. I plagiarized an assignment . . .” In fact, he copied an entire essay word for word after three years of busting his backside to succeed without duplicity.

Why would he choose to take this action and admit he cheated on a crucial paper—years before ChatGPT—in an essay meant to help him gain access into his favorite college? Because the rest of the essay explains why he did it and how he overcame such a questionable choice, the actions he took to better his emotional and educational circumstances, and how his current stance makes him an excellent candidate for admission into the university. In the essay, he wrote, “I cheated, but I’m not a cheater.” (Spoiler alert: He got in.)

Start with a Scene

If I advised him now, I would go even further: Start your essay in a scene. If someone was watching a defining moment from your life in a film, what would they see, hear, and feel? The first part of your essay should read like fiction even though it’s true. Universities want to know you can write, and they want to learn about you as a real human—not only someone who will impact their institution but someone who is self-aware and grows from mistakes. Readers like a compelling story about overcoming adversity—self-inflicted or otherwise.

I Can Guide You

You don’t have to go through this process alone, nor should you. Let’s work together. As your college application essay specialist, I will:

• . . . brainstorm topic ideas with you, asking compassionate, probing questions about your background, interests, achievements, mistakes, and skills.

• . . . provide guidance during the writing process, sharing more than two decades of experience as an essayist, editor, and mentor about what makes a good story; when you should “show” what happened; when you should “tell” how it affected you; how to find the structure; and what to focus on, cut, or expand to make your essay stand out.

• . . . proofread your essay for grammatical errors, repetition, word choice, spelling errors, and other mechanics.

• . . . act as an adviser and cheerleader, highlighting your strengths and where your writing works best, as well as which sentences can be improved and how.

Learn More!

Proto-Cyber-Courtship to Real-Life ‘Relationship’

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XIII

Two Beginnings, Two Endings, Tangential Characters, and Toying with the Timeline

At this point, you may be wondering, “How many dudes can this silly girl fall for before she gets it right?” Will I ever get it right? I get it wrong way less often than I used to, and I now have a better understanding about why I got it wrong so many times, in part because I wrote a whole book about it—kind of the point!

Take for instance the guy I met online long before dating apps became the norm. In my essay collection circa 2014 to 2017, a twenty-eight-page piece about this same-aged man starts at the beginning of our story, the night before my twenty-sixth birthday in 1999 when we were playing Hearts on Yahoo! with a couple other strangers. He sent me an email after the card game to wish me happy birthday. We then wrote long emails back and forth nearly every day for a couple months. He didn’t know what I looked like. I didn’t know what he looked like. If you remember life before social media, you understand.

I gave my online pen pal too much real estate in the essay collection. Also, it wasn’t prudent to start at the beginning. In the revised version, I begin our tale on a dirty shag carpet in the basement of his friend’s house in the mountains of Virginia on New Year’s Eve 2001 because it’s more interesting to watch him stroke my hair while I lie on the floor than read our instant messages about hockey the night we first chatted. In the memoir, I reduce our initial cyber-courtship to a brief mention, incorporating it into a scene in the mountain house in Virginia two years later. It speeds the story along and gets the reader to the “good stuff” more quickly—the necessary stuff to understand how this relationship played out.

I Should Have Saved Those Emails

That said, it may have been useful if I’d saved the digital correspondence from when we first “met.” It would no doubt be an enlightening glimpse into my twentysomething psyche and how I interacted with someone I considered a “friend” before we ever came face-to-face, something that happens regularly in our world now but was much more anomalous then. When I switched from Yahoo! to Gmail twenty years ago, I printed our email exchange and saved it in a file in my closet. One day—most likely during one of my many moves—I shredded it and put it in the recycle bin.

I do, however, still have the emails we swapped in Gmail in 2008, and I include relevant portions of them in the manuscript. They were crucial to writing a memoir, dredging up pain I didn’t want to relive but had to relive; a writer signs up to relive pain when she writes a memoir—it’s part of the deal.

Girl Meets Boy—Then Meets Him Again

Back in 1999, after we mailed photos to each other, I dragged my best friend to San Francisco to meet him in person when he was visiting friends. In the essay collection, a few paragraphs explain my crappy navigation skills—pre-GPS—and how my best friend and I pulled the cord on the bus several blocks too early. The reader takes the long trudge up a steep San Francisco hill with us in uncharacteristic heat. I yank the reader out of the story to explain our terrible public transportation skills: “The way we get blatantly ignored trying to hail a cab in New York City is YouTube-worthy.” The forward momentum of the story lags—at the same slow speed as our trek up the hill.

When we finally make it to our destination, my pen pal is standing in his friends’ living room holding a welcome gift: a new blue Washington Capitals cap. (I still have it.) On page four of the essay, the story moves at a more rapid clip. I blaze through the trip to San Francisco in one paragraph, adding, “I’d hastily put Archer into the ‘friend zone,’” a line that later inspired the current chapter title: “Out of the Friend Zone.” In the essay collection, I include two scenes about meeting him: the online meeting and the in-person one. It’s excessive.

Ditching Peripheral Characters

The next seven pages are devoted to New Year’s Eve 2000, an unflattering, extended incident in a La Jolla dance club, where free vodka cranberries and immaturity spurred careless behavior. I wore a shiny purple tank top I called my “lucky shirt,” and I danced and kissed Archer’s friend’s roommate. There’s dialogue, conflict, a clear setting, physical gestures, humor, and humiliation. It’s a fully fleshed-out scene, but in the end, my apology to Archer eight years later in his apartment is more important than detailing what happened with a fringe character I’d never talk to again.

Instead of this . . .

“. . . [the stranger] gave me a piggyback ride, my long black skirt stretched across his back. As I bounced on him, he hailed us a cab back to his house.

‘You don’t even know my name, do you?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I do. You’re the girl on my back!’”

. . . there’s this:

“‘I was such a jerk eight years ago that night I kissed your friend at the bar. I’m still sorry about that,’ I said.

‘You didn’t owe me anything.’

‘Yes, but that was still a really shitty thing to do. I wasn’t a very good friend.’

‘It’s okay. I haven’t lost any sleep over it lately.’”

I was able to condense the long New Year’s Eve segment into a couple sentences, referencing it in a more emotional, retrospective context the summer Archer and I finally dated eight years later. He and I are the stars of the story, not the acquaintance who never mattered to me.

Tinkering with the Timeline

The linear structure of the essay collection from 1999 to 2008 is fine, but it leaves too much room for the kitchen sink method: I include every detail about everything that happened between me and my long-distance pen pal without considering if each scene earns a rightful spot in the text. When I revised the material, the summer of 2008 became the anchor I kept returning to because that’s when most of our important interactions took place.

So, the current memoir structure is this: New Year’s Eve 2001 (I did something shameful. My pen pal took care of me!); summer 2008 (We dated!); 1999 and 2001 (We met online—a truncated version! Before I did something shameful on New Year’s Eve, we had a friendly week in DC!); summer 2008 (We continued to date but still used email as our primary mode of honest communication!); summer 2008 (Foreshadowing: I almost met another man at a wedding—a pivotal figure I would meet two years later!); summer 2008 (Everything falls apart with my pen-pal-turned-almost-boyfriend!).

In the latest version, while moving back and forth in time, I provide context about where we are and when we are, explicitly linking the nonlinear scenes together, so the reader (hopefully) doesn’t get lost.

I also provide deeper insight into my own character—something that was absent when I was too close to the material. Writing when the emotional experience was fresh—so as not to forget the details—was beneficial; editing from a temporal distance once I “saw” what the experience meant was key.

Writing Toward Self-Awareness

It took several years and several revisions to understand something fundamental—and really obvious—about myself: I pursued emotionally unavailable men because I, too, was emotionally unavailable. Toward the end of the essay collection, I discuss a story Archer wrote about a man who calls his best friend after a catastrophic one-car crash to tell him he’s in love with his wife. I write: “Even in fiction, the protagonist wanted what he couldn’t have. Maybe this was Archer’s modus operandi. I’ll never know.”

After our relationship comes to a halt, I avoid him at a hockey game—a bonus ending!

Here’s the current ending, sans hockey: “Even in fiction, the protagonist wanted what he couldn’t have. Maybe this was Archer’s standard operating procedure. Maybe it was mine too.” This sets up a four-year romantic tailspin—coming right up.

A ‘Stalker,’ a Disappearance, and a Couple of CPR Dummies

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XII

On my fiftieth birthday, I recall a crush from twenty-four years ago.

The essay collection I wrote in 2014 not only includes essays about boys I dated but also an essay about a boy I wish I’d dated. In spring 1999, after boyfriend number three and I broke up, I took a required health class to finish my teaching credential, and on the first day of school, I had a rare “where has he been all my life?” moment when a handsome young man walked into the room and sat down a couple seats away from me. I saw him for three hours once a week for sixteen weeks and didn’t ask him if he had a girlfriend until we were walking to the parking lot on the last day of the semester. He was still dating his high school girlfriend “unfortunately,” he said. We hugged goodbye, and I didn’t see him again for nine months.

Likeable Unpublished Essays

A couple essays in the scrap pile might be publishable with some rework. One of them is about a night two weeks before I turned thirty when my best friend and I went to our usual Irish pub and met a gorgeous twenty-three-year-old lad who only had eyes for me at a time when I was feeling washed-up. (If only I could go back twenty years and shake that thirty-year-old’s shoulders and tell her to enjoy her youth while it lasts.) I revised that essay for seven years and never tried to publish it.

The other essay—“Stalker”—is the one about the boy in my health class. I was the “stalker,” despite the target of my affection not fearing me, in part because he didn’t know I was—sort of—stalking him. (I swear I’m not unhinged, just resourceful.) That I was able to locate his whereabouts nine months after our class ended without the help of the internet and track him down in person—with a tip from a dear friend—is more impressive than creepy, if not a tad delusional.

If I tackled that essay again, I would focus on the two most noteworthy scenes: the day I followed health-class hottie to a Saturday CPR certification and the afternoon I found him on campus when I was no longer a student at the university—the last time I would ever see him.

Stalker

Here’s a section from the day I supposedly learned CPR:

Partway through the semester, our instructor informed us we needed CPR certification, so he gave us a weekend CPR training schedule. I signed up for one immediately, but the next week I overheard Mr. Right telling the teacher when he was signing up for his CPR course. I cancelled mine and rescheduled to take his. I didn’t tell him. I was jubilant I would see him an extra day out of the week—a Saturday even.

Oh my god, it’s official. I have become a stalker, I thought.

The morning of CPR training, I arrived early and sat in a chair against a wall across the room. I nonchalantly scanned strangers’ faces without making eye contact and fake-read a novel. (Smartphones would have been so convenient back then.)

Then I heard his sexy voice at the front door as he signed in with the instructor. My heart soared into my throat. When he saw me across the room, pretending I didn’t see him, peering out a window, side-glancing in his direction, he beamed. I beamed. I put on my best surprised face.

“I thought you signed up for a different day!” he said.

“I did, but then I couldn’t make it,” I lied.

We all lined up on the cold, hard floor and set up plastic CPR dummies with permanent O-shaped mouths and dead eyes. They could have easily doubled as weathered sex dolls. It was disconcerting.

Dreamboat crouched next to me, hovering over his designated lifeless synthetic body. We practiced mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on those dummies. I watched him through my peripheral vision, his gorgeous lips blowing air into his peach-skinned doll, his strong hands compressing her rubbery chest.

Why aren’t we partnering up and testing this shit out on each other? I thought.

Yet, I still didn’t tell him how I felt, and I had the perfect in. I hadn’t always been this reserved with men, so what was stopping me? None of our other classmates were there. It was me, him, and a couple of stiffs who wouldn’t kiss back. The words “I really like you” stuck to my tongue.

Somehow I got CPR certified that day, but I was thankful to take home a brochure with a step-by-step diagram because, when I left with my official card, I could not recall anything. I had been too busy fawning over the hot boy.

How many breaths vs. compressions? How is it different for babies? Oh my god, someone is going to choke and die because I have a crush.

The One Who Got Away—or Not

The following school year, when I tracked him down on campus, passing off our run-in as a coincidence when it wasn’t, he had broken up with his girlfriend, and he almost skipped class to have dinner with me. He hesitated, looking at his watch. Then he went to class. This time I didn’t let him get away without my email address and phone number, but I didn’t ask for his. I knew he would call. He never did.

For weeks I thought maybe this was the one time in history someone actually lost a phone number, but his lack of contact could have been for any number of reasons: He was busy as a post-grad and didn’t have a job yet; he met someone else; he lived with his parents; he wasn’t as into me as I was into him! Duh.

I expended a ridiculous amount of emotional and mental energy on a fantasy. I barely knew the guy! I had done this before, and I would do it again. In my late twenties, I wasn’t totally over college heartbreak, and my confidence was shot—although, not nearly as shot as it would be in my thirties after continuing the same pattern over and over, always with the same result: a self-fulfilling prophecy of rejection. I focused on “relationships” that were “safe,” not sustainable.

The Best-Laid Plans

About a decade later, I scoured the internet to locate his whereabouts—more stalking. He was married, living in a rural town on the other side of the country, working as a used car salesman. He had a dog but no kids. In class he said he wanted to teach to have more time with his future children.

What happened to his plans? I wondered.

And what happened to mine? I only lasted as a high school English teacher for two years. I wanted children and never had them either. I have moved back into my childhood home five times as an adult. It took me a long time to recognize there’s nothing wrong with plans not working out the way we expect. Do they ever?

Still an Effective ‘Researcher’

At the end of the essay, I mention the nonexistence of “fate” and reword the concept of “sliding doors,” but, like most of my first essays, I didn’t dig deep enough into self-reflection. I do, however, still find the story funny, and when I started this blog entry, I looked up that dude again. (Have I learned nothing?) He still lives in the same state on the East Coast, but I’m not sure if he still sells cars or if he’s still married, and I don’t care anymore.

I eventually let go of the boy and the essay. I couldn’t determine how to infuse the piece with more weight without connecting it to something else, but I never figured out what that something else was, and the essay doesn’t lend anything new the reader doesn’t already know about me: I’m a dreamer; I am drawn to good-looking men who disappear; I’m adept at internet research, even when a certain person of interest, whose shirt was buttoned incorrectly the last time I saw him, isn’t on social media.

No Writing Time Is Wasted

In addition to several excised essays and chapters—I have a document of marooned paragraphs I couldn’t part with forever, determined I would someday find a use for them. I played an effective trick on my psyche. I have more than 44,000 random words of potentially usable material that I will never use. Nonwriters might consider the time spent writing these dustbin words a waste, but it never is. All craft practice is worthwhile. Writing a book means writing more than one book—and possibly several.

Status Check

After ninety-six agent rejections and twenty-four independent press rejections, my memoir is in one independent press Submittable queue and one inbox of a very generous editor who read my overview and said she wants to help me figure out where else to send the book, even though she only publishes novels. After a two-year break from querying agents, I am ready to do it again. Maybe I’ll find a home for my memoir before the ten-year mark—or at least sometime while I’m still in my fifties, which started today.

The Yes Girl and Her First Love

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XI

A Working Title, a Slayer Concert, and Links Between Unlikely Events

When I worked on the first iteration of my manuscript, I wrote essays about my love life in a linear fashion because it didn’t dawn on me to do otherwise. I wasn’t explicitly connecting the stories, so it made the most sense not to write about my short marriage, then tell the story of my first love, then, say, sprinkle in my grief over never having children. I aimed for clarity; a linear structure seemed like the logical way to keep the reader from getting lost. I’d participated in enough writing workshops to know it’s not unusual for even the most discerning reader to become befuddled. When a nonfiction writer tells her story, she may forget strangers know nothing about her before they start reading. She can’t assume readers will understand her background, desires, and characters from her life unless she fills in the gaps—at strategic times: When did this happen? Where? Who is this person? Why is this situation important? How did we get here? A writer wants to complicate the story in as much as she wants the reader to turn pages to find out what happens next, but puzzling the reader for the sake of puzzling the reader is a surefire way to ensure she won’t finish the book.

I wanted the ideal reader I couldn’t envision yet to understand my trajectory from wholesome teenager who couldn’t determine if her first kiss was a real kiss to a forty-something single woman who can’t remember how many men she’s kissed. So, after writing an essay about high school, I wrote an essay about my first boyfriend, whom I began dating three weeks before graduation and stayed with until I was twenty-two. I called the essay “First Love, First Everything.”

Choosing a Working Title

Around the time I was working on this essay, I thought of the manuscript’s working title. It had only been a few years since my midthirties roommate bequeathed me a theme song and sang it often and unprompted while wandering through the house: “I’m just a girl who can’t say no!” He said he’d buy a Take-a-Number ticket dispenser to mount next to my bedroom door. My favorite word at the time was “yes.”

Many books have “girl” in the title—despite social media flak—but I couldn’t find any named Yes Girl. That’s it! I thought when I came up with it. My manuscript would be named Yes Girl for the next seven years, until mentor number three combed through my latest query letter and the first chapter of my revised memoir and said she read the title as Yes, Girrrlll, which had never occurred to me. She suggested I either rename the manuscript or add “The” to the title: The Yes Girl. Problem solved. She did believe, however, the title no longer matched the content unless I did another massive overhaul, so I renamed my memoir with the help of my oldest friend. (We’ll get to that later, along with how often I’ve brainstormed subtitles only to discard them.)

Two Stories a Decade Apart

The essay “First Love, First Everything” is fourteen pages, double-spaced, starting on page twelve of the collection, but in the current version of my memoir, boyfriend number one’s story is woven together with my two-year stretch as a high school English teacher, in which I compare “Jake’s” personality to my students, providing an opportunity to reflect on how young we were when Jake and I got together—like the students who now sat in front of me in my classroom ten years later. I make connections between experiences that aren’t readily obvious but nonetheless make sense, which makes the material nonlinear and more interesting. The chapter starts on page twenty-six, and I condense four years with Jake into half as many pages as the original piece.

The idea to connect the two sets of scenes a decade apart came to me while working with mentor number two three years after I wrote the essay. It’s a prime example of how valuable it can be to embrace the process and give it time. In hindsight, I would not have been content publishing the first version, despite a few funny moments I later removed. Reading it now, I view the cut material as needless, and much of it is not my story to tell in the first place. In fact, I wonder what the hell I was thinking explaining the parts of his story that have nothing to do with me; it’s not his book!

Chaperoning a Boy to a Metal Concert

In the essay, I describe our first date. On the way into school before 8:00 a.m. in spring 1991, when he put his arm around me and asked, “Wanna drive me to a Slayer concert?” I said, “Sure!” despite only liking the opening band on a four-band bill. Jake didn’t have a license yet. I had a car. He needed my wheels. That this is the origin of my complicated adult love life is apropos. It’s too spot-on to work in fiction.

I picked him up in my 1980 green Volvo in a pink shirt and white jacket, “instead of the customary black I’d been wearing since ninth grade. We went to Taco Bell in Costa Mesa and gorged on Taco Supremes before heading to the Pacific Amphitheatre. The line at the show wrapped around the fairgrounds. No one was wearing pink.”

I talk about waiting in line outside the venue during Alice in Chains’ entire set because concert security was tight. “I heard the faint sound of Layne Staley’s voice through the trees. I never had a chance to see him perform again before he died eleven years later. I wish we’d skipped Taco Bell.”

I talk about “long-haired metal heads with too many tattoos” and “inappropriate pat-downs” and “metal detectors.” I talk about the greasy-haired boy, no older than eleven, who bounced on his orange plastic seat behind us during the show, shaking his fists in the air, screaming, “I’m so stoned!” I write too much minutia about the beginning of that four-year relationship, despite sharing my uneasy, timid reaction to being in an environment that wasn’t my scene, revealing the personality of my eighteen-year-old self. The content begs to be pared. I eventually shrink the concert to two short paragraphs before moving on.

Avoiding Spoilers and Omitting What’s Not Mine to Tell

In both versions, I focus heavily on ditching my virginity because it was . . . tricky. Here’s the part of the series where avoiding spoilers becomes an issue. I’ve been considering how to explore the process of writing a memoir without giving it all away. Let’s say when I was eighteen, anatomical limitations prohibited certain activities. In the essay, I get sidetracked explaining said constraints by sharing a humorous conversation with a high school friend who didn’t have the same problem I did. This conversation isn’t essential for the reader to understand what happens next when my new boyfriend and I attempt to have sex for the first time.

In the memoir I extract three full pages from the middle because, although as a newbie book writer I am compelled to clarify how Jake came to be the teenager he came to be—and how that affected our bond—writing about his relationship with his mom, intimate information about his childhood, and the ways in which he manifested trauma has ethical implications waffling between fuzzy and blatant. In any case, it doesn’t matter what he experienced before he met me; it only matters what happened between us that’s within his control.

Multiple Breakups and No Regrets

In the essay, I write more than one breakup scene because we broke up more than one time, once on a landline when I was in Northern California on vacation with my mom for my twenty-first birthday. The only breakup that counts, though, is the definitive one, and after he’s no longer my boyfriend, the paragraph about what he did with his life next is unwarranted too. Like I said, it’s my book, not his. (Taking the scissors to the last couple paragraphs of an essay usually works out.)

In the memoir, I skip speculation about why “he transformed from worrying about my loyalty to being indifferent for no discernible reason” because, to this day, I have no idea why he did a “180-degree flip,” nor do I care anymore. I spent the summer when I was twenty at a community pool with my best friend, her boyfriend, and his friends. I write, “Where the hell was Jake?” He wasn’t there, but what’s more significant is having no regrets about dragging out a relationship that should have ended much earlier because a first love is impossible to let go of—until it isn’t. What’s important is how wildly in love I was and how innocent and pure it was. What’s real is how unbroken and hopeful I still was when we parted ways. What’s vital is how fortunate I am to have memories of young love because old love is different—much better in many ways—but different. I have regrets, but this isn’t one of them.

Slain Darlings

In the revision process, I axed a few details I still find amusing. Here they are without context:

1. When I was in the new-love stage of lying on the floor with a stomachache and the inability to think about anything else besides him, my seven-year-old sister asked my mom, “What’s wrong with Chelsey?”

2. “The way I was hearing it, she could hold her vagina up to her ear and hear the ocean.”

3. “Like 9½ Weeks, the whole world was our giant fridge of cut fruit.”

The First Essay of the First(ish) Draft of a Collection

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part X

When I sat down to write a book, writing an essay collection was a logical choice, and starting with romantic missteps in high school seemed like the best place to start.

In January 2014, with a few essays written and workshopped—and one of them published in an anthology—I finally realized I was capable of writing a nonfiction book about my tragic—and hilarious—love life, the topic I was drawn to almost exclusively. Up until then, however, I had no particular plan for these lengthy, nonchronological essays about dumb boys and my broken heart. At forty years old, it had been eighteen years since I had written in a journal, “I just want to be a writer,” and now I was able to say aloud, “I’m a writer,” without adding an undermining caveat. My assuredness wasn’t high, but it was improving because of people like Shawna Kenney, whom I wrote about in the last entry.

When my self-confidence was in the basement in 2008, after standing in a long line waiting for David Sedaris to sign When You Are Engulfed in Flames, I said, “I’m a writer too, but I’m not as good as you.”

“You’re probably as good a writer as I was when I was thirty-five,” he said when he found out how old I was. I doubted this was true, but it was thoughtful of him to say. He drew a turtle in my book while fifty-plus more people waited to talk to him.

While doodling, he asked if I was a Pisces.

“Gemini,” I said. “My sister is a Pisces.”

“Close enough,” he said.

Where to Start

When I finally sat down to write a book, it made sense I would write an essay collection because I had already been compiling standalone nonfiction pieces, and that was still my go-to genre when choosing other people’s books to read, like Sedaris’s.

I heard from published author acquaintances, “Essay collections are hard to sell,” and “the memoir market is saturated,” but someone was publishing them because I read them all the time! I wasn’t deterred. (I was naïve about publishing.)

But where to begin. When I thought about starting at the beginning-beginning—in my childhood—I thought about how stable and uneventful it was. A book about my first fifteen years would be boring! I didn’t have a tumultuous upbringing—quite the opposite. My parents loved me, took care of me, had a sister, in part, for me, and although we had nowhere near the money of so many others in our upscale geographic area, we only ever had “first-world problems.” I wasn’t abused; no one in my family was an alcoholic—although, some of us have a penchant for falling in love with alcoholics; my parents were still married and didn’t fight; my sister and I got along well; and I had a substantial group of supportive friends. I was fortunate and grateful. The only “real” problem I had was anxiety. (There’s a whole book about that I have yet to write.)

“Sweet Seventeen, Barely Been Kissed”

External conflicts arose when I reached an age when romance was a factor—or should have been—so I decided to start there, writing what would be the first chapter in my essay collection: “Sweet Seventeen, Barely Been Kissed.”

Here’s the beginning of that essay:

“When I was eighteen, I named my nonexistent children with my sixteen-year-old first boyfriend Jake. We would have one boy and one girl: James and Tiffany. I didn’t envision a white picket fence, but the kids were a given, and I thought we’d always be together, starting with the night before my eighteenth birthday, the first time I stuck my hand down his shorts. We were sitting on the lifeguard tower closest to the Newport Beach pier on a breezy June evening right before I graduated from high school.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It won’t bite.’

I was in love.”

(Note: I changed the names of the characters in my true stories from day one and have ever since, not including immediate family members.)

In that first essay, I describe previous opportunities for first kisses that never happened, sort of happened, and happened but maybe didn’t count. (I confirmed years later a major high school crush does count my first kiss with him, so that’s a plus. I promise I’ll explain.)

I start with an eighth-grade graduation party in which seemingly everyone from my class—except the one boy I wish was there—is crammed into my friend’s attic bedroom playing a kissing game:

“. . . when the deflating balloon they were batting around the room landed on me at the party, I said, ‘I’m not playing. I just want to watch.’ The response I got was, ‘You have to play if you’re going to watch. If not, you have to leave.’ It was a dilemma. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t want my first kiss to be part of a stupid party game. I also didn’t want to tell them I’d never kissed anyone before.

They arbitrarily demanded I kiss Mark, a boy who’d been in my class since kindergarten. I’d never been into him. He had a giant fuzzy mole on his cheek. Since then, I have kissed more questionable men, but I was picky at fourteen. Thankfully my cute brunette friend from second grade squealed, ‘I’ll do it!’ She threw herself at him. They slobbered on each other. I watched, relieved and disgusted, holding the balloon.

I wouldn’t have another opportunity to make out with anyone else through the better part of high school because I was clueless about male advances and an off-putting chickenshit who was attracted to petrified boys. It proved torturous to be loyal to so few crushes throughout my teen years.”

High Expectations

I wanted my first kiss to be special. I wanted it to mean something. I had built it up in my head since elementary school. I had been the go-between for my junior high school friends, relaying messages back and forth from hormonal girls to their would-be boyfriends, unwittingly getting them together, then watching as they made out next to their lockers, but I was never the protagonist in this narrative. I was the innocent sidekick. Maybe I’d been a hopeless romantic and too selective, or maybe I was scared and never noticed when boys liked me—nor understood why anyone would, for some ridiculous reason—oblivious to flirting until college, always attracted to the “safe” boys who wouldn’t make a move or the “wrong” dudes who ignored me. Maybe I came out of the womb destined to have trouble with romantic love; maybe it was learned; maybe both played a role, but the main reason I was drawn to writing a book about love (and lust) was because I was trying to understand why I found myself single at forty with no children, when that’s the opposite of what I’d always wanted, assuming I’d have what my parents have without being proactive, not understanding it was a choice and that I have agency.

Technically my first kiss was with a good friend when I was sixteen. It was a quick peck while sitting around with other friends on a regular Friday night watching TV or making cookies, only so they could say, “See, now you’ve kissed someone.”

That Time I Blew My First Real Kiss

From the essay:

“My second first kiss was with a boy named Chase. It’s iffy to count my second first kiss though. I was seventeen. I had never been on a real date before, probably because I’d been wearing my friend Dean’s letterman jacket to school because I was cold, thereby warding off any possible suitors. Later, at my ten-year reunion, a male classmate asked, ‘Didn’t you date Dean in high school?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We were just friends.’

‘Then why were you always wearing his letterman jacket?’

Oh fuck.

When Chase finally called after my junior year to ask me out, I said yes. He was a year younger and had recently gotten his license. I had been pining over him for almost two years, like I’d done with a different blond boy in junior high. We’d only acknowledged our mutual adolescent attraction once. When I was in tenth grade, we met and sat next to each other in biology. One day I lent him my Catching Up with Depeche Mode cassette tape. The ’80s version of texting, I inserted a note into the plastic cover that said, ‘I like you.’ It came back with a one-word response: ‘Likewise.’ Like was underlined. I had to check my dictionary to determine what ‘likewise’ meant. I was giddy, but neither of us mentioned it again the entire school year, until he wrote something vague in my yearbook: ‘I’m really sorry that I didn’t. I guess I wasn’t ready.’

Didn’t what exactly?

On our courageous night out to the movie theater more than a year later, I put my hair in a ponytail, threw on my black Doc Marten boots, a white Erasure T-shirt, and faded skinny jeans, and paced my driveway. I watched his white compact car roll down my street soon after a rare phone call. He stopped midway down the block, turned on his overhead light, stared into the rearview mirror, and rapidly combed his short blond hair. He didn’t know I was watching him primp. I chuckled. He wore jeans and a button-up shirt and smelled shower fresh.

We saw Presumed Innocent. I don’t remember the film because my mind was focused on the boy radiating heat two inches from me. I held my breath, waiting for him to make a move on my skinny ass. Chase, not Harrison Ford. Neither of them did.

Chase dropped me off at my house afterward, where his clutch went out. He was embarrassed. I said he could use our landline to call his mom. It was 1990 after all. Their phone conversation went something like this:

‘Hey, mom, we got back from the movies, but my car broke down.’

Pause.

‘No, it’s okay. I can get a ride home.’

Pause.

‘No, please, really, it’s okay. She can give me a ride home.’

Pause.

‘Geez, mom. It’s okay. Fine. Bye.’

He turned to me, exasperated.

‘She’s coming to pick me up.’

So much for my first real kiss, I thought. I’d been nervous about this moment all night. I was somewhat relieved but still bummed. There’s no way he’ll try to kiss me now, is there? I thought.

When his mom arrived, she politely waited in the car, but she left it running, adding to the anxiety of a quick, unromantic goodbye to accompany our transient, tense evening. We stood within her line of vision. I anticipated a hug. His face moved in. I wasn’t prepared and didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I closed my eyes and pushed out my puckered lips. His tongue hit my closed mouth and then immediately disappeared. I opened my eyes. He was scurrying away.

‘Bye,’ he called over his shoulder. I’d blown it. I hadn’t opened my mouth. He had licked my face. His breath smelled good. I was in heaven.”

Where Is This Collection Headed?

The rest of the essay covers the one time I went to Chase’s house, and while we watched MTV, I lay sprawled on his bed, and he stood leaning against his desk chair—far away from me. Next I go to the prom with Dean, which is a disaster that ends our friendship. Then I detail how I met Jake in typing class, and why I was attracted to someone so cocky—the opposite of Chase. The essay is 3,155 words, but the meaning of the piece—aside from showing how inexperienced I was in high school—comes at the end:

“I don’t recognize that innocent girl anymore: a girl who sidestepped a first kiss in eighth grade, found comfort in a boy licking her face, and daydreamed about the one guy who would love her fully and make babies with her. She’s a wholesome version of me cloaked in a tiny burgundy velvet prom dress. She has yet to be rejected or make faulty decisions, and while this hopeful teenager has been obscured, she and I still have one desire in common: We both want lasting romantic love, even if the definition has changed. The picture of love no longer needs to include wedding bells and a baby. It calls for experienced partners who’ve already loved and lost before. It involves passion, friendship, and commonalities. Perhaps it even includes older children who already have a mother. The best part, however, is the dream still necessitates a first kiss.”

I still like that paragraph, and the essay showcases my voice and humor, but it’s missing depth. One paragraph at the end doesn’t quite cover how the essay should speak to the other ones yet to come. Where am I going with this collection? Why am I writing it? For whom am I writing it? Why is it universal?

Writing the Book I Had to Write, So I Could Start Over

In 2014, during a six-month period, I write an entire first draft—editing as I go because that’s how I roll—attempting to answer these and other questions in 79,000 words; trying to recall the long-ago details of my life; struggling to sift through what’s important and what’s not; and not understanding that much of what will appear in later drafts hasn’t even occurred yet. I tweak the book for the next year and a half and initially call it done.

If I had known how much longer it would take to write and revise an alternate version; write and revise a nonfiction book proposal; research and query agents; and submit to independent presses, I may have given up before I started, but thank goodness I didn’t. (And you shouldn’t either!)

Next: more from that first(ish) draft of my essay collection—the book I had to write so I could start over and write a different book later.

A Tribute to Mentors

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part IX

The missing workshop feedback, what I found in my parents’ garage, and my first true writing advisor.

Remember at the beginning of this series when I said I saved everything related to my writing for the last fifteen years? I lied. The only drawback of an in-person workshop is when the feedback is handwritten on hardcopy pages, the stack gets large, and when you move as often as I have, and you eventually publish the essay you revised in that 2013 UCLA Extension personal essay class—the “dead ex-student essay” from blog #8—you feed the pages into the shredder because you don’t think you need them anymore.

My Garage Stash

I hunted for the notes from my UCLA instructor and classmates in that ten-year-old workshop in my parents’ garage in the dusty plastic tubs with my childhood memorabilia, photo albums, and cases of CDs—yes, I saved those. Here’s what I found instead: two sets of small Sculpey clay hands and feet molded onto gnarled wire hangers my grandmother used to build unique, standing sculptures of Santa Claus at Christmastime. My cousin and I retrieved the creepy extremities—the last remnants of Granny’s unfinished art—hanging in “the cold room” in my grandparents’ empty house after the four-day estate sale before the house sold. They were the only items that didn’t sell. It’s no shock why.

Granny’s Unfinished Art

In my parents’ garage, I also found a stack of yellowing papers from the 1990s when I worked on my teaching credential at CSULB, where I wrote bad fiction about the same boyfriends who now appear in my memoir manuscript and one-page, single-spaced essays. The professor who assigned the “one-pagers” was a ruthless grader. Receiving a ten out of ten on one of his papers was next to impossible, and I did it more than once—total bragging rights! (Do you know hard it is to write an entire academic paper on one page? That’s where I learned to edit!) I didn’t think of him as a “mentor” because he was grouchy, arrogant, and uppity about who deserved the title of “professor.” (He did.) Students either loved him or hated him. I loved him, but he didn’t change my life.

An Accepted Essay That Was Never Published

I didn’t find the helpful feedback from my UCLA Extension workshop cohorts in the garage, but I found the essay I wrote about my instructor—and now close friend—on my laptop. It was accepted for publication in 2014 but was never published. (R.I.P. Literary Mothers.) So, with a few minor edits, I am posting that essay here since it never made it to its intended online destination.

The piece is an homage to mentors, the compassionate, miraculous people who lift you up when you don’t believe your writing is up to snuff; whose words encourage you to keep going; who are the reason you decide, “Yes, I can write a book”; who—when you’re nearly forty years old and walk into class with a heavy backpack and a heavy heart—accept your first essay for publication in an anthology; invite you on a California book tour to promote the anthology; summon you to at-home workshops, where you write most of the essays that become the first draft of your manuscript; and tell the backstage bouncer at a punk show you’re an “official photographer” so he’ll let you into the Descendents’ trailer to babysit Milo’s kids while she interviews the band. These are the people who change your life.

It’s been said often before because it’s true: Writers must find their people. I hope you find your version of Shawna Kenney.

Center for Sex and Culture, San Francisco

Before getting to the meat of “how I wrote a memoir” in blog #10—when I actually start writing a book—here’s what I wrote about Shawna nine years ago:

“My Superstar”

March 2014

My 2013 New Year’s resolution was to start writing again. I was almost forty. I’d taken a number of online classes before, but I hadn’t written a word in two years. My latest workshop had deflated me. There I felt judged on my character more than my work. I was labeled based on one essay about one incident. The responses drove me into hiding.

I’m not good enough. This is as far as I’m going to get, I thought.

But when I’m not writing, I suffer.

So, after a two-year ego-healing break, I decided to try again. This time I wouldn’t hide behind the internet. I wanted face-to-face interaction with other writers.

I found Shawna Kenney’s UCLA Extension Writing the Personal Essay course on the university’s website. When I read her bio, I thought, “She’s my people.” It wasn’t the success of her memoir I Was a Teenage Dominatrix or the “award-winning” accolade in her title; nor was it the numerous literary publishing credits that reeled me in. It was the way she presented her approach to teaching. I knew she would be positive, practical, and nurturing.

I wasn’t wrong. In her ten-week class, I handed out the same essay that incited the negativity that caused me to quit writing in the first place. I wasn’t giving up on it. It’s a story of forbidden sex, desperation, and death. It is not a flattering portrait of me, but it’s true and doesn’t represent all that I am. I knew it was a story I needed to tell.

Dispersing twenty hardcopies, I was terrified. My hands shook. But Shawna had already created a safe space for her students to be themselves and put forth their best work without judgment. I had hope.

At this point, I didn’t call myself a “writer,” only “someone who writes—sometimes.” My first in-person workshop changed that. Shawna and my fellow writing students spent an hour discussing the merits of my work, providing constructive observations that would help me make the piece better. After that, I was eager to submit more material.

I anticipated Shawna’s feedback. She wrote, “You have such a natural writing voice,” and, “You make yourself vulnerable on the page.” She called my first workshop essay “a post-modern romantic tragedy.” Words like “publish this!” and “I could see something like this in The Believer” sustained me.

She asked the right questions: “What does this narrator want more than anything?” and she never questioned my ability to succeed in the future: “I look forward to reading another adventure in dating written in this voice!”

It’s Not Dead Fest 2015, San Bernadino

After previous writing classes, I’d have the best intentions; then I’d stop writing when I wasn’t held accountable because of a debilitating fear of failure. I’m still afraid, but I move through the fear as a result of the bravery I see in Shawna.

In 2013 and beyond, I continued to “ride the Shawna train,” I joked, and took two more of her ten-week workshops, as well as an online writing prompt class. In fall 2013 I submitted an essay to Shawna for a Seal Press anthology she was editing: Book Lovers. She accepted it. I never would have written the essay if she hadn’t asked me, “Are you going to submit something for my book?” It was a particularly difficult essay to write and the first one I published in print.

Because of Shawna’s insight and guidance, I learned to call myself a writer without wincing. I tell strangers I meet, “I’m writing an essay collection,” because I am. It’s an arduous task I always thought unattainable; now I have 105,000 new words because she gave me the freedom to write them.

She also arranged for public readings. I’ve now read in public six times, three times to promote my story in her anthology. I was afraid for people to read my work before I met her. Now I love to hear people’s reactions live when I’m in front of a microphone. I have a newfound confidence I couldn’t have imagined.

As a writer pre-Shawna, I was paralyzed by perfectionism. My editing background made it impossible for me to get words on a page, always worried about the finished product. I now follow her example and know I can fix the words as long as there are words to fix.

I’m “doing the work,” she says. “It’s just a draft,” she tells us.

Her carefree attitude is matched by her intelligence and her own ability to craft. “There’s a reason she’s the teacher,” one of my classmate’s said after reading Shawna’s anthology introduction.

Shawna published a piece in xoJane’s “Unpopular Opinion,” an essay she called very unpopular on Twitter. Of the hundreds of comments posted under the piece, many were downright cruel. Instead of discouraging me from publishing, this only gave me more resolve.

I’ll never please everyone, I thought. If Shawna can have the courage to take this verbal backlash, so can I.

She calls us her “supah stahhhhs” and her “lovelies.” At the end of a long weekend in San Francisco, after two terrific readings and Q&As, we hugged on the street and cried, and she said I was “the female Davy Rothbart.” I’ll take it.

I know now that if I don’t ever publish the book I’ve been writing in my head for forty-one years—the same one that’s now forming on paper—it will be because I choose not to, not because I can’t. Because of Shawna, I’m tackling my passion with “all [my] Chelsey vigor.” She’s my superstar, my editor, and friend. Today I thank her on the page.

Northern California Book Lovers Tour

Feedback as an Act of Compassion

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part VIII

What’s the effect on a writer when an instructor’s critique goes beyond the page?

It’s 2011, and I’ve signed up for another online writing workshop with one of the same instructors I worked with at Gotham Writers Workshop. Only this time the platform is her own setup. For the past three years since I ended my last “real” relationship, I’ve racked up dubious experiences with men who aren’t right for me, and my self-esteem is plummeting, but these romantic blunders make for excellent storytelling—if told properly. As I make poor decision after poor decision in a loop of desperation, I stockpile material for personal essays, my future manuscript, and sessions with a therapist.

One such example is the five-and-a-half-page, single-spaced essay I submit for critique about a year-long off-and-on fling that isn’t quite over yet. I spend four paragraphs setting up the scenario with backstory before I get to how I met this dude who is, in his own words, “in no place to be anyone’s boyfriend right now.” (Pro tip: If someone says that to you, believe him.)

“Shortcut Origin Stories”

In the fifth paragraph, I set the scene for how we meet and describe his appearance, including the hat he’s wearing to cover his premature receding hairline. It’s my ex-boyfriend’s birthday party, and we’re in a sweaty, crowded Irish pub in Newport Beach. (Remember the guy from the Del Taco drive-through? Yeah, that ex-boyfriend.) My ex plays matchmaker and gives his childhood best bud’s little brother my phone number in June. We don’t get coffee until August.

None of this is important. Girl meets boy. They talk in a bar. There’s a spark. Girl’s ex-boyfriend gives boy her phone number. They make plans to get coffee two months later. So what? Many encounters start like this. What makes this one unique? (“Shortcut origin stories,” my 2017 book coach says.)

It gets slightly more interesting in September when the twenty-eight-year-old first kisses me in his mom’s driveway as we look at the stars through the constellation app on his phone, pointed up to the sky, spinning in circles. Cute, right? But again, so what?

Next I spend a few paragraphs recounting an exhausting trip to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios with the bouncy young man and his peppy haunted-house-enthusiast friends, where our age disparity is glaring. (In 2010, I’m thirty-seven.) I write, “The highlight of the night was when we sat on a tram wearing 3-D glasses watching dinosaurs. Resting.” At 2:00 a.m., when we say goodbye in the parking lot, I think this isn’t going to happen. (Second pro tip: If your gut tells you this, listen to it.)

The Beginning Is Not the Beginning

I get why I include the trip to Universal Studios: to show the gap in our energy levels. However, I can venture even further into the timeline of our courtship before I write the first scene. There’s no such thing as “the beginning.” There’s only the point where you decide a piece of writing should start, and I agree with the instructor of this workshop when she says the essay should commence toward the end of the second page: “The first time we had sex was two days after he buried his father. I was an escape.”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

The setting of our “love nest” for the next few months is inside a plywood haunted house in his mom’s driveway—a building as temporary as our relationship, which I state explicitly.

The instructor’s feedback is cogent: “Take out any lines in which you explain things. You note the haunted house is a metaphor, and your intimacy is as makeshift as the structure. Trust your readers to understand this. Let the metaphor reveal itself.”

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

In the first and second drafts, I employ the “kitchen sink” method, including every detail I can conjure about what went down with this young man: helping him tear down the haunted house after Halloween; sitting on the couch watching TV with his mom’s dog wedged between us; helping him move to his own apartment; helping him clean his own apartment; attending concerts; visiting his sister’s hoarder house; Taco Tuesdays with his friends, who ask, “Are you guys together?” and not knowing how to respond; discussing the future or lack thereof without actually talking about what we’re doing. I slowly peal back the layers, learning about him piecemeal, sensing he’s hiding something. (Hint: He is.)

But why do I invest so much energy in this dead-end, flimsy partnership? When I write the first draft, I don’t have the answer.

In the nine-and-a-half-page, single-spaced revision, I attempt to address my teacher’s question: “What is this relationship about for you?”

I write, “I was scared of my age, scared of not finding reciprocated love before the ticking clock stopped. I was jealous of all the time he had to figure out his shit. I thought being with someone younger would keep me young for a little while longer.”

It goes deeper, but I’m too close to it to see it—and I don’t know all the facts yet. I don’t recognize his self-absorption; I don’t know he’s also dating men; I don’t realize I, too, am emotionally unavailable. It’s impossible to finish an essay if the events haven’t fully unfolded, and the writer has yet to grasp the import of what she’s trying to convey.

“You remain far too unexamined,” my instructor notes, and she’s not wrong.

I include all the conversations I remember, not only the significant ones—like the time we discuss how many children he wants, and he says four while I look at my watch, and he tells me, “You’re fucked.”

“Use dialogue to reveal character,” my teacher says, and she’s not wrong.

Whittle It Down

After workshopping this piece again a few years later once I have some distance, my fairy godmentor from UCLA Extension—whom you’ll meet in the next entry—says I can put the lengthy essay in the “done pile,” but the version I ultimately publish is fewer than eight-hundred words. I cut most of the scenes, whittling down the meaning of the relationship into its essentials, focusing on the plywood haunted house and an analysis of myself, rather than the minutia of a pseudo-boyfriend whom I eventually cut off abruptly. (Is it still “ghosting” if the person you ghost already dumped you?)

I call myself “the queen of involvement with kings of mixed messages” and write, “Deep down I knew this wasn’t love because love is easier.”

“Mock Intimacy in a Fake House” appears in the original essay collection I eventually compile. As I transform the book into a memoir, however, the superfluous essay falls away. The relevant takeaway is not the casual relationship I have between thirty-seven and thirty-eight but my state of mind when it ends: the realization I am no closer to finding a healthy adult partnership and will never have children if I continue to waste time on trivial matches.

Ninety-Nine Emails Don’t Make an Essay

If you rightfully believe a year-long pursuit of a man with narcissistic tendencies nine years my junior who is ambivalent about all women is an unproductive and demoralizing exercise in seeking intimacy while chipping away at one of the last baby-making years I have left, wait until you get a load of this. The second essay I submit for workshop in 2011 is about an even younger male with whom an unlikely connection leads to pointless pining and an unhealthy obsession. That this twenty-five-year-old, long-haired, larger-than-life bartender/roadie and self-diagnosed “failed musician” happens to be one of my former students is (somewhat) beside the point. The crux is I’m thirty-five in 2008 when I run into him at his restaurant when I am at my peak post-relationship-trauma hotness, having cried myself into a size four. I have not fully processed the years with my recent fiancé and former husband. I am free, emotionally beatdown, and eager for any dalliance without a future. Enter a depressed, vodka-swilling, wily sweetheart who is hellbent on self-destruction: my midthirties kryptonite.

In “It’s Still Me,” I curate an ample chunk of the ninety-nine emails he and I volley back and forth for the next few weeks after reconnecting—a flirty, humorous dance that leads to one memorable in-person get-together. In the original draft, I incorporate too many emails, unable to decide which ones to toss. In later versions, while I cut some, I don’t edit out enough before I get to the face-to-face main event—even in the published essay eventually nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In the original, the emails constitute almost six pages double-spaced. So what if the emails are amusing? What propels the action forward?

What My Instructor Gets Right

“This is probably my favorite of everything I’ve seen from you,” my instructor says, but “the emails are too much,” and she’s not wrong.

Her next comment is one I will hear again and again in future workshops from fellow writers and teachers alike: “I want much more about you.” Sure, I write scenes about our magical night together when he says, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” our subsequent correspondence via Facebook messenger, and the months in which I observe on social media from afar as the young man’s life descends into chaos. But what of it? What does this needless preoccupation say about my mental state, and why, again, do I devote so much emotional energy toward someone who contributes nothing in return?

The 2011 draft is fourteen double-spaced pages, and like “Mock Intimacy in a Fake House,” it encompasses the entirety of our brief liaison, including everything we wrote and said to each other, a tour of his tattoos on his friend’s couch, a trip to the grocery store for condoms, a postcoital conversation in what I later determined wasn’t even his bed, descriptions of the videos he posted to Facebook, and online conversations with his friends after he dies.

Both essays initially have similar problems: I do a decent job of writing scenes, but I don’t make decisions about what scenes are crucial, nor do I scrutinize the reasons for my actions and what my choices mean in the grand scheme.

Nothing takes the place of time to gain insight. An essay often takes years of revision before it achieves its proper weightiness, and in both cases, that’s what happens.

Feedback as a Personal Attack

Up to this point, I agree with the instructor’s comments. I am on board with her prudent advice, but her remarks and tone take an upsetting turn. After suggesting I read “The Fourth State of Matter” by Joanne Beard (cool!), she launches into a critique beyond what’s on the page:

“WHY? Why on earth did you get so hung up on someone ten years younger who went on the road all the time?”

The undeveloped—but true—motive for my behavior stipulated in the essay doesn’t sit well with her: something about people-pleasing and wanting to “fix” unavailable men—you know, garden-variety codependent shit.

“I don’t buy it,” she writes.

Say what?

She says she’s the “queen” of comparable conduct and lumps me into a generic category based on her own childhood experiences. (I read her memoir; our backgrounds are entirely different.) She calls me “honey” in a condescending manner and says I “avoid real intimacy,” which is fair, but then she says, “He didn’t care about you.” Even if that’s accurate, why is it necessary to state it while evaluating a person’s writing? What effect does that have on a vulnerable writer who already feels enough shame and lack of self-confidence as it is?

She scrutinizes my character, rather than my work, ending with this: “I hope you’re not feeling too psychoanalyzed, but this is what happens in memoir writing!”

Is it?

I Quit

My reaction to being the target of a borderline tirade from the person I trust with an extremely personal story is defensiveness, anger, and despair. Not only am I not eager to revise the essay, I quit altogether. I don’t write anything for the next two years.

When I recently located the email with the instructor’s twelve-year-old feedback—after having forgiven her long ago—I wonder if I overreacted. Maybe her comments weren’t as harsh as I remember. Maybe I wasn’t ready for the brutal truth. Maybe I was too sensitive. Then I read them again.

Even today, her email is jarring.

Editing as an Act of Empathy

As a developmental editor of other writers’ memoir manuscripts now, I am cognizant of providing constructive feedback while considering the real, fragile human on the other side of the computer screen. An editor’s job isn’t to analyze a person’s choices outside of the story. It’s a judgment-free zone. Editing is an act of empathy. There are plenty of ways to kindly nudge a writer toward self-discovery. Ask pertinent questions, for instance. Contemptuous condemnations aren’t warranted.

Fortunately, in 2013, when I’m pushing forty, I seek a gentle mentor who nurtures me like a delicate plant in need of watering. In her UCLA Extension personal essay class on campus, I hand out “It’s Still Me” to twenty new strangers, my hands shaking, terrified of judgment, only to be met with support, constructive criticism about my writing, and encouragement to revise, publish, and reimagine the piece for my future memoir. Thankfully, the essay that temporarily ends my writing career is the catalyst for my pursuit to complete an entire book.

Crossroads and Structure: A Dreadful Haircut, a Trip to the Mall, and a Life-Changing Decision

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part VII

Write it now. Organize it later.

Whenever anyone asks me, “When did you start writing your book?” I always cite January 2014. But that’s only when I started writing my manuscript in earnest—an essay collection at the time. If the short pieces I wrote for a Gotham Writers Workshop Memoir II class in late 2008 are any indication, I really started writing my book then; I just didn’t realize I was writing a book. Portions of two assignments in particular provided the basis for one of the chapters that would end up in my memoir manuscript—organized differently, written differently, and in nowhere near their current form. Yet, writing them was an integral precursor to writing a lengthier, better connected, more sophisticated work.

One of the pieces starts with a scene I tried so hard to incorporate beyond what I turned into my workshop instructor. It was a turning point. However, I relegated it to the “reject” file because it functions in exactly the same way as another scene that did end up in the manuscript.

The Haircut from Hell

In spring 2008, while planning my second wedding, I had an appointment with my fifth hairdresser in a year-and-a-half near Atlanta. My longtime stylist was in Orange County, California, and I couldn’t seem to find one in Georgia who didn’t screw up my hair while charging exorbitant rates. Highlights were either nonexistent within a few weeks, or my hair was bleached until it was canary yellow. There was no in-between. The stylist I visited while planning my wedding was my first repeat appointment since I’d moved there. She’d done a passable job on my hair the first time. The second time, however, she was having an off day, and that’s being kind.

“Are you growing your hair out for the wedding?” she asked.

“Yes. I just need a trim,” I said.

She stood between me and the mirror cutting layers, which she later called “blending.” Only, these weren’t “layers,” and I didn’t need them because my hair is extremely thin. When she was finished, and I saw myself in the mirror, I was shocked into silence. She had completely hacked off one side of my hair.

“This debacle cost me my resolve to make Georgia my home.”

I called my fiancé to pick me up and said, “I’m done.” I wasn’t only done with my appointment; I was done in a much more final way. I cried all the way home while he tried to reassure me it wasn’t “that bad.” Only, it was worse than I initially thought.

“When I got home and brushed it out, it was as uneven as if she’d cut it with pruning shears. I wasn’t a shrub in the backyard. I was a person supposed to be married in eight weeks.”

It took a year for my hair to grow out again. While this was a devastating, defining moment, it wasn’t necessary to include it in the book because I wrote about another crucial moment when I was considering whether or not to call off my wedding and move back to California. I didn’t need two. What came next in the disjointed 2008 piece, though, did make it into the book in an adjusted form.

Finding the Structure

One of the main differences between that early essay and what appears in my memoir now is the way in which the Georgia story is organized. In my earlier work, only months after the incident occurred, I was still trying to figure out what the story was. I wrote the salon scene and then a wedding planning scene that occurred before the inept stylist chopped off my hair. The order doesn’t make sense. I wrote them out of chronological order because I didn’t consciously choose what should come first; I wrote what came next in my brain as I was putting words on the page.

Portions of my current manuscript are nonchronological, but I made organizational decisions with forethought and a purpose after multiple drafts—with help from an astute editor who advised, in some cases, figuring out what elements don’t go together and deciding why they do.

In the manuscript, the wedding planning follows the proposal, and the revelatory alternative to the salon catastrophe follows the wedding planning—because that’s the order in which they transpired. There is no need to make it more complicated than it needs to be.

In the fifteen-year-old version, after an argument resulted in my fiancé telling me to “do what you want. It’s your wedding,” I include a paragraph about the first time I visited him “when we were merely clandestine pen pals,” which is a head-scratcher. I don’t incorporate any noticeable transition or reasonable page break between beats that would signify why they appear in that order.

I return to wedding planning after a flashback consisting of a list of cities and romantic encounters we had during our honeymoon phase when we were in a long-distance relationship, both of which make it into the manuscript, but, again, in a more logical sequence and with new surrounding material that delves deeper into what was really going on—the “what does this all mean?” part.

A Trip to the Mall with My Would-Be Stepdaughter

The second, related piece from my Memoir II workshop details a trip to the mall with my fiancé’s seven-year-old daughter, where I bought her hot chocolate, a giant pretzel, and a furry yellow stuffed duck because I felt guilty I was about to leave her, which she didn’t know yet.

I was reminded of how much I was not her mom, however, when she didn’t thank me for the treats, instead asking me to buy her Crocs too. I reminded her, “Your mom buys your shoes, sweetie.” Then she begged while I kept saying no.

After likening myself to a “hip aunt you only see on holidays,” I transition into a description of the moms who perpetually sit in the driveway across the street from my fiancé’s house while their children stumble around in the grass, toys strewn about: “a suburban housewife nightmare.”

I return to the mall scene before we inform the children I’m leaving: another odd organizational tactic. Dropping the news on my fiancé’s ten-year-old son crushes him “like a tin can.” Then we’re back in the mall, where I tell his sister we have to leave so we can make it to his Little League game. The scenes are all over the place.

Facing the Big Questions

Here’s what’s missing from that first attempt at writing the story, aside from a conscientious structure: What do I really want? Approaching thirty-five, is being a stepmom in Georgia enough? Do I want to be part of the “housewife nightmare” across the street (read: Am I jealous?), or is being only a “real” mom not enough either? If I leave this readymade family, is it worth it if I never have another family of my own again?

These are questions I grapple with in the manuscript, in addition to fleshing out and tightening the scenes from 2008—in a much more cogent arrangement. If I hadn’t jotted the details of my experiences as a pseudo-Southern stepmom in the same year in which they occurred, however, I would not have remembered the specifics when, in 2014, I sat down to “write a book.”

Write the material while still emotionally invested, and edit it when there’s temporal and sentimental distance—when the gut-level impact wanes.

One Last Online Writing Workshop Before I Quit

After three creative writing workshops—one through UCI Extension and two through Gotham Writers Workshop—I noodled with a few essays on my own, including one I worked on for seven years that I never quite figured out, nor tried to publish. Not having instructor-imposed deadlines proved to be a detriment to my writing in my late thirties, as I did not accomplish nearly as much as I wanted to when no one was awaiting pages. A stifling fear of failure hindered my progress—hooray, anxiety!—which is why, in spring 2011, I signed up for another online memoir writing workshop, following my previous instructor to her new venture with her then husband. The feedback I received on two long essays I wrote during that class would send me into a tailspin that led to a two-year break from writing anything. That’s next time.