Lovely and Brutal Memoir: An Essay

There is no right or wrong way to write memoir. My high school art teacher, William Phillips, instilled in me that to be a snob about anything, including art, was a sin. “Just do your art!”, he would say. So, now I write memoir, in the way I feel I need to write it, as a reaction against all the fake smiles and facades I have presented to the world, in my life, in an effort to be a “good woman”. I am compelled to write all the stories that seem to sneak in the back door of sometimes lovely little trips down memory lane. I never know when an unreported damage will appear, but I try to face it and write it in an effort to leave behind the true story of the life I believe I had.

The thing I finally realized after all the years of striving to be good is that…I AM a mostly good woman, but I didn’t really believe it until I was in my late forties. Until then I acted and pretended to be good until alcohol had the better of me and then I cracked from the strain of smiling when, really, I just wanted to die.

Now I try to recall and record the moments that shaped me, the lovely ones and the brutal ones, without over dramatization or frill, but with a clear eye.  I want my daughter and my granddaughters to remember me as more than the Facebook me. I want them to know that I glimmered and shone, that I loved, that I was afraid, that for many years I carried unreported damage, and that I was resilient, that I broke and got up to try again. I want them to know that I believed in hope. That hope is love. That life became beautiful, no matter what, when I finally gave myself, as best I could, to the demanding master: Love