Post #80 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing Prompt – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
MEMOIR WRITING PROMPT: What Happens When You Rediscover Your Life?
Recently, while waiting in the Albany, Oregon station for the Cascades train to Portland, I noticed a poster for the Coast Starlight. The text jumped out at me. Rediscover the Coast Starlight.
When you write memoir, you are rediscovering your life. You come back to places, events or people and take a second look. How you perform this can impact how you tell the stories in your memoir. The first time you were so busy with life that you may not have had time to reflect or to think about consequences for you and for others. Even a well-considered choice will look different when you rediscover it in the context of writing about your life’s story in your memoir.
If you have documents — journals or letters — from the earlier times in your life, they may help you in your rediscovery. Forty-five years ago, I was on a three month trip outside the US with my parents. My husband was still in school, finishing his MBA at Stanford. Job offers were coming in and he wrote me about them. The pace of life was slower then so I had time to receive international mail, read his letter and respond. Of the several offers he was considering, one seemed completely out of the question, and I told him so. I didn’t want to live in Chicago and said this plainly, leaving him free to choose among the other offers. I discussed the pros and cons of each. That was all. I no longer remember the details of my list of reasons for not wanting to move to Chicago, but I still recall the strong negative emotion. It was 1966 and I knew I wanted to have a career even though I was probably unsure about its shape. I had received my masters degree a few months before (the trip was my graduation present from my parents) and I felt my advisor could help me find a position. I thought it was a settled matter and awaited the next letter to see where we would be living so that I could begin planning my professional life. (That’s what it was like back then.)
Over the years, I remember only that my husband (at the time), gave the nod to the job in Chicago and told me about it in his letter that followed mine. I remember all of this so vividly that I even wrote about it in the collective memoir that Kendra and I co-authored, Rosie’s Daughters: The “First Woman To” Generation Tells Its Story. To me, it is a story that represents the times. In the 21st century, a man (or at least most men) wouldn’t make a decision like that. Yet in the mid-1960s, no one thought it unusual that the husband chose what he thought was the best opportunity for him. End of story.
Well not exactly. When packing for our move from California to Oregon, I found some long-forgotten letters. We had decided to reduce the number of our belongings prior to boxing everything and I was eyeing every drawer carefully. Before tossing one pile of miscellaneous papers, I decided to look through them. Amazingly, I found the infamous letter, the one where my ex-husband told me that he had chosen the job in Chicago…the one I referred to in our memoir. I seemed to have entered a parallel world. As I read the letter, I found that my ex acknowledged that he was choosing a job in a place where I didn’t want to move. He went through not only the reasons why this job would be better for his career, but also why he thought Chicago would be a good place for me to pursue a career. He was logical and clearly felt he had my best interests at heart.
All these years, I’ve felt hurt by his decision. In truth, and I’ve acknowledged this for decades, it was a good decision. Through an introduction from a professor at Stanford, I secured a research assistantship at Northwestern University with the eminent social scientist Donald Campbell and the following year, with his letter of recommendation, got an NIMH fellowship that paid for my Ph.D. That really did launch my career.
The move to Chicago was not just another move, but a pivotal event that put me on the path I pursue today — quite literally. The chapters I’m working on for our Writing Alchemy book take a provocative look at how findings from the social sciences can contribute significantly to a writer’s toolkit. These draw on research that I first studied at Northwestern and that I have continued to explore across my career in both academe and business following me now into my career as an author and memoir coach.
Memoir writing, with or without journals and letters as backup, give us the opportunity to rediscover our lives.
MEMOIR WRITING PROMPT:
1. If you have journals or letters, take one day from your past and read about it. It doesn’t need to be a turning point or major life shift. Read the details in that day’s journal entry or in the letter you choose to reread. Does the entry or letter bring back memories of what else was going on in your life? Has your memory of that day changed over the years? Compare the two. Write for 10 minutes about this rediscovery of one day in your life. Focus on as many micro details as possible.
2. If you don’t have a paper trail for your past, choose a day from a previous decade in your life. Go online and read about the events of that date. You can always find news stories from major newspapers and you may be able to find stories from your hometown newspaper. Let those details help spark your time of rediscovering that day in your life. Write for 10 minutes.
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