The hardest times to live through are the hardest times to write about. Balancing how much of an impact the hard thing made upon you with the fact that you’re probably writing in a more ordinary time to an ordinary person means you might have to employ special strategies.
While writing How to Plant a Billion Trees, which is about the essay I wrote for The New York Times, “My Abortion at 11 Wasn’t a Choice,” I had to turn to my imagination rather than the facts. I remembered the facts, but what I thought at the time and what was happening at the time didn’t quite mesh. To convey my confusion, I had to explain that back then I watched a lot of General Hospital. I didn’t know how wrong it was that my babysitter had molested me for over a year. I didn’t quite get what it meant to be eleven years old and pregnant. So, I had to reimagine where I thought I stood. I used the third person, in part to make it easier to write, in part because then I could see more acutely the character/narrator on the page, doing things that I had done. I wrote,