I wrote a memoir, Space, about growing up in Florida during the moon race. I promised myself I would never write another one. I wrote Space hunched over at my desk. It is, notoriously, hard to remember physical pain. But having my son hurt. Writing that book hurt. I don’t think I would have been able to finish it if it hadn’t been under contract. I had a deadline. I kept remembering the tour I’d taken of the notorious Civil War POW camp in Andersonville, Georgia, where 12,920 Union soldiers died. There, if a prisoner crossed the Dead Line, they were shot.
I finished it. It was published. People read it. It won an award from the American Library Association for an adult book suitable for young adults and ended up on summer reading lists—and stayed there. Five years later, I was driving our van full of my daughter’s middle school friends, listening to my daughter listing her favorite potential pet names, Blueberry, Broccoli, Meatball, Bug. When I was a kid, I said to them, there’d been a beagle in our neighborhood named Jeeves Archibald Chatterton the Third. “I know,” said one of her friends, “it’s in your book.”
Several of them nodded. Jeeves Archibald Chatterton was in the book. In the story of my life when I was their age. So were stories I had not thought about middle schoolers reading—my mother becoming addicted to Valium was in the book. My sister almost dying was in the book. When I told my husband, he just shook his head. “When you were writing it, you didn’t really think anyone was going to read that book, did you?” You know, he was right.
Then, after all that, I wrote another memoir. Or drew one, a graphic memoir this time, French Girl.
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