He was silent as he waited there while I circled, muttering, until I snapped up and looked at him. We were under the bow of a large maple tree in our driveway, and I would not go so far as to leave the bowl of its shade. We made cookies.” Now I was muttering and shaking my head, staring at the pavement, walking in a small circle next to him. Where is she?” I was searching his face, and then the yard behind us. “We have lost Susannah,” he said simply, and I felt his firm grip on my shoulder, his arm securely behind me, his right hand tightening, pulling me in. And I thought to myself, oh, he needs me. He gestured to come to where he is, and as I got out he raised his eyebrows the way he does when he is in pain. He looked at me and did this thing with his lips he does when he is thinking before he speaks. I slid out of my car only enough to shout over the roof. The babysitter disappeared into the house with our child. And now I did not want to get out of the car. When I had the car in park, she simply opened the backseat door of the car and removed our child. That’s why he was there: He was afraid that someone else might call and tell me the news that he, himself, needed to deliver.Īnd as I slowed down, eyeing him from behind the steering, the babysitter, who also should not have been there, came out of the house, making no eye contact with me, and head down. He is a newspaperman through and through, part of a breed that believes news must be conveyed by the fastest and most truthful delivery system possible. I tell them that it was an otherwise promising May afternoon.Īs I pulled into the driveway, our child strapped into her car seat, I knew two things: that if my husband was in the driveway in his shirtsleeves, that something about my life was about to change forever, and that I would not like it. And nearly every time I say that in a class, I follow it with the story of the day I found my husband standing in our driveway in his shirtsleeves when I knew he was supposed to be at his office. I do not know how I feel about anyone or anything until I write it down. I have written and published all of them, as have my thousands of clients and students.Īs I always say at the outset of my online memoir classes, memoir writing is the single greatest portal to self-discovery. I will not speak for fiction writers, but I come to this challenge with a lot of experience on the topic of writing what you know, whether those writings be blog posts, short essays, op-eds, long-form essays or books. In all, you will create a world we want to enter and explore. Instead, if you loosen that grip a bit and see where you are led, you will be magnificently rewarded with knowledge and language - and, in the end, a piece that takes us somewhere we need to go. It’s surely a mistake, and one the reader can smell right at the outset. Gripping the handlebars too tightly and demanding that a piece remain as you imagined it is a sin, or maybe just a crime. And this is perhaps the most difficult thing for me to teach. Why? Because if you are not learning about yourself as you write memoir, you are not really writing memoir. Equally true is that the writing of each began with some sentence or phrase that entered my head that I probably thought was brilliant and true and perfect, and that later got knackered a bit, or edited heavily or even thrown out entirely. If I looked at all the pieces I’ve written and published, I am quite sure I would be reminded that almost none of them got published with the opening line that first topped the piece. So let me walk you through my approach, so you can learn how to write the perfect first sentence to a memoir. But note that word “world.” That opening sentence of your memoir must suggest what world we are about to enter, as well as who is the guide to that world. As the great Ursula Le Guin has written, “First sentences are doors to the world,” and in that offering she precisely prescribes the task before you: You must create a portal through which a reader agrees to walk. What it is, though, is work - but wondrous work, indeed. It is not something that you can force, nor is it the least bit mystical. KNOWING HOW TO WRITE THE PERFECT first sentence to a memoir is not a magical process.
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