(Sabbatical, day 21)
Last week, on the third day of a much-needed vacation to Vancouver Island, I sat across from my husband underneath a blue umbrella at an outdoor restaurant. The server had just poured me glass of white and Bruce a glass of red. We clinked […]
As you no doubt know, memoirs emerge from the ashes of life’s most painful and unexpected events. Cruelty from others. Illness. Abuse. Addiction. The death of a loved one. These wrenching, upside-down events hit all of us at one time or another. They are the fires that change […]
This past weekend, I was at the California coast with a group of women I lived with in the dorms during college. We hadn’t seen each other since before the pandemic and there was a lot of catching up to do.
At one point, one of the […]
Last summer, I started writing a book about living with intention so that I didn’t die with regrets. My working title: Not Dead Yet.
The writing was going well. I was exchanging pages regularly with another coach. I was starting to believe that maybe, just maybe, I might see this […]
There was a time in my early forties when I once spent the better part of a day shopping for a soap dish and toothbrush holder that would perfectly match the brushed nickel faucets in my newly remodeled spa bathroom. Back then, I was extremely proud of my just-spicy-enough jambalaya […]
Last weekend, I attended my first post-Covid party—a warm, summer night gathering held in a friend’s leafy yard.
I arrived excited. There were people–lots of them! And all seemed to be smiling. The collective vibe: Covid is over!
After grabbing a glass of rose, I launched into conversations with a swirl of […]
I contemplated writing a memoir for four years before I started writing one in earnest. During those years, I took notes, wrote some scenes, created a list of memories, read other memoirs, played with structure. But I didn’t write consistently. Instead, I wrote when I felt like it, when I […]
When I was eleven years old, still flat-chested and shaggy-haired, I wrote my father a note explaining in painstaking detail the hurt I felt over some favoritism he’d shown my younger sister. The specific incident is lost to memory, but I remember writing and rewriting that note several times until […]
I have no scientific data to back this up, but I would say—based on experience and observation—that it takes an average of four years to write a memoir, and by that I mean the kind of well-crafted story others would want to read.
In the process, memoirists not only […]
One of the great privileges of coaching authors is that I get to work with people motivated by a deep sense of purpose. But often, when I start working with a new client, they can’t easily articulate why it is they must write a book. Often, they’ll attribute their desire to […]
