I’ve been wanting and intending to write a memoir for three or four years now, but as I mentioned a few posts ago, it took me until now to actually begin. Not because I didn’t have time. Not because I didn’t have material–if anything, I have too much  material. I could probably write three or four memoirs without even having to strain. The problem was that I couldn’t nail down a theme. It doesn’t fly to just sit and regurgitate your life story. A successful memoir must have the same elements of a novel: a character that begins one way, takes a journey (be it physical, spiritual, psychological, or whatever), and ends up changed. There must be conflict and challenges along the way that serve as catalysts to the character’s change. I knew this, and yet every time I thought about the memoir I would write, I found myself overwhelmed by the options. Do I write a coming-of-age memoir? (Oh, my childhood was fraught. There were certainly worse ones, but mine was both unusual and full of trauma.) A parenting memoir? (I have an Aspergers child, a gifted child with learning disabilities and ADD, and an internationally adopted child of a different race than the rest of us, AND I am no natural mother, let me tell you.) A humorous memoir about my transformation from a socially anxious, hardcore hippie chick with a 20-acre alpaca farm on a remote Northwest island to a fashionable, club-hopping urban corporate wife in New Jersey suburb just outside Manhattan? (That last one is going to be my next book, I just decided. Who wouldn’t buy that book, I ask you?)

Participating in NaNoWriMo took all the indecision and overwhelm out of the equation. I knew I’d procrastinated enough and if I ever wanted to have a book to sell, I needed to just write the damn thing. Because I was already two days late starting NaNoWriMo, I had to get on the horse and ride. So I just started writing and what came out was the childhood stuff. Ok then, I said to myself, that’s the memoir I’ll write first. There certainly were plenty of highs and lows (mostly lows, I’m sorry to say) so I’ve had no shortage of material. It’s been more or less like the proverbial released floodgates.

What I worried about, though, was how I would shape all these random stories. Sure, here’s my childhood. All these things happened to me, some related and some unrelated. Who cares? I had no idea what my theme was, or what would tie it all together. I had no idea how I actually changed as I grew through all these experiences and into young adulthood.

Well, surprise! I’m now about 30,000 words along, and I’m beginning to see things I didn’t see before. Patterns. Connections. I can see my theme taking shape. The fog is clearing, and the change is coming into focus. The story I’m telling is the story of a girl who had a fascinating and interesting childhood, and also a traumatic one in several ways, but through all that, it’s the story of a girl who was told over and over that she was inherently bad, that there was something deeply flawed about her that other people could see and she couldn’t. It’s about how she comes through the other side of self-hatred, depression, and suicidal fantasies to find the good in herself and learn how to nurture it. Yes, that old chestnut. Ok, maybe it’s not the most original theme in the world, but I’m pretty sure it’s universal. And if I can find a compelling way to tell this story that touches people, that makes people who have been told they suck realize that it’s about other people’s issues, not theirs, and that they can find something good in themselves, well…I think I might have something.