lidia writes that the act of writing a memory is different from remembering it. and that writing allows us to re-author our lives. which is what i love about writing. so a lot of my stories start at a true and maybe painful place, but then with humor or craft if i am lucky, i can turn that into something that transcends my own experience.

@Emily – you have some strange classmates. But that’s cool too. I mean, I was laughing when my dentist was giving me several shots of lidocaine. To each his own.

Also, Ashley C. Ford, I really loved your comment! It’s a really sweet story.

I suspect a part of it is relate-ability–it’s sort of why public displays of affection are considered rude–those who can’t relate to sitting in the sunshine with their soul mate aren’t interested in reading about someone else indulging, unless there is a prior investment in said person. There’s jealousy, at the core, for a love lost or a lack of deep-seated personal satisfaction. And those who can relate are busy sitting in the sunshine with their soul mate. They might still read such a book and find satisfaction in the echo of their own sentiment, but it’s not as lasting a connection, because sometimes we have to get out of the sun, or our soul mate is lost to us, and that’s ultimately what bonds us in any lasting way.

It’s need and want that we relate to, not satisfaction and contentedness. The latter lacks conflict, heat, and it’s not because blissful stories are bereft of meaning, it’s because the meaning feels, to most of us, more foreign. It’s actually a greater challenge to find purpose and conflict in a story about someone doing well or having a good life than to detail something that sucked. The things that suck are what change us, and are inherently endowed with complexity. We don’t tend to think of happy things as much more than surface, and I wonder if one could find a way to successfully tell a story about someone who is utterly contended and satisfied and make it interesting without having him/her fall from grace or exposing that they are in imminent danger.

Where’s the want? The desire? The conflict? In that way, if we find ourselves happy, can we stay there without mourning the loss of complication that drives us to create?

I think it’s fascinating how we (humans) impose narratives on our memories. The self isn’t something we grow into–it’s something we create. The absences, the subconscious embellishments, the unending drive to have a beginning, middle, and end. We are some crazybeautiful creatures, aren’t we?

I don’t really write about my childhood at all. There’s probably plenty of stuff there to use, both good and bad, but I don’t find it works very well when I put it down on the page. Maybe one day.