Post #73 – Women’s Memoirs, Author Conversations – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Women’s Memoirs: Question #1. Betty Auchard, welcome again to Women’s Memoirs. Before you helped our readers by talking about effective memoir openings. Today, we want to congratulate you on the publication of your second memoir. Your first, Dancing in My Nightgown: The Rhythms of Widowhood
Betty Auchard: Matilda, here’s how it happened. When I first started writing my “widow” stories by hand I had no interest in being published. I was writing so I wouldn’t forget what widowhood was like. I would have nothing for comparison once I was no longer grieving. Now I’m able to look back and say, “Wow. I’ve come a long way.” Writing my way through the strange world of widowhood was like being a journalist in a foreign country that I would never visit again. I had to take notes and remind myself of how it was.
When I became computer literate, writing suddenly grew easier and I discovered email and the Internet. I was so in love with writing that I enrolled in an online memoir class called Life Lore. We were writing about our growing-up experiences with these topics: our hometown, school days, sweet 16, and young adulthood.
I was chronicling two completely different experiences at once: my adventures and misadventures of a widow AND growing up in my wacky family. I was addicted to jotting down my life stories which I saw as entertaining and enlightening. I rarely dressed, lived in nightgowns and wrote. At night after showering I just changed to a fresh nightie before going to bed.
By the way, I am the dancer in my nightgown on the cover of my first memoir, Dancing in My Nightgown: The Rhythms of Widowhood
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Women’s Memoirs: Question #2. What was your biggest challenge in writing this second book? I recall that your brother visited for a while and he became a valuable research resource for you. Did that help you? What else did you need to do to write Home for the Friendless: Finding hope love and family
Betty Auchard: My challenges were so numerous that it took ten years before the manuscript for The Home for the Friendless was ready to go. The stories cover the first 17 years of my life and even my brother and sister had to consult school report cards to remember what happened and where and why. My family moved and changed addresses and schools so often that my childhood memories were a jumble of events that had to be organized.
My brother and sister remembered critical events that I had forgotten. They helped me fill in the gaps. My brother provided accurate details that boggled my mind, and I had a feeling it was the kind of stuff that boys remembered and not girls. I once asked, “Bob, why did our whole family plus the dog take that all-day bike ride that just about wiped us out? He knew the answer– where we went and how many miles we had peddled. Because of Bob, the book is richer in true details. Because of Patty, I had to write a few stories differently than I remembered. As an adult she told me the real truth of some events that she had kept to herself all these years. Because of their help I discovered things about my brother and sister that I might never have known had I not been writing a memoir. And some things I wrote about were just as surprising to them because they never knew what all happened when they were little.
The more we reminisced, the faster stories came at me like bullets from a machine gun, but putting them in place and making sense of our family’s history was a labor-intensive activity. There were even more challenges.
With this book I had to learn even more about writing. I was an art teacher and elements such as scenes, themes, internal thoughts, feelings, showing and not telling, etc., were foreign to me. I just had fun telling stories. My writing coach (Bruce McAllister) got me through it. The hardest, most important thing he taught me was that I, as the narrator, was the main character in the book. It was a more important role than I realized. I needed to show my internal feelings and actions instead of just telling about events. It was grueling but at the same time, exciting stuff to learn. I didn’t know what the word “synopsis” meant, but I watched the Home for the Friendless manuscript grow from a synopsis into an award-winning book. It received recognition for content and book design from the National Indie Excellence Awards in 2010.
Join us next Wednesday when Betty Auchard responds to more questions from Women’s Memoirs.
Betty Auchard’s Home for the Friendless is also available as a Kindle book.
