Spiral.

On circling the truth, and on saying it.

The big news is that I’ve finished not only a full draft of the book, but that I’ve revised it and been told by my advisor not to touch it anymore. I’m halfway heeding his demand. I have to do minor editing. I have to whisper it to myself. I have to change some names. But, I guess, it’s done. “Done” as only a piece of writing can ever be.

Which is to say, always under some kind of construction.

My final residency is this coming January. By then, I’ll have written something like 534985942398749257943 pages of feelings and scenes and dialogue exchanges and essays and things-I-think-are-something-but-are-really-not to get to this book which is, depending on how I format it, between 212 and 240 pages. I will hold my degree in May.

It’s now I think I should probably say something about what the book is about, and what the process of writing this has been like.

What it’s about: growing up. It’s really nothing special in terms of content. I write about my parents, my hometown of Jericho. I write about friends and romance and learning about my body and others’ bodies. I write about going to college and making mistakes, about moving to another country. But if you know me, then you know it’s also about loss and grief and secrecy and more loss and more grief and more secrecy and motherhood and not wanting to follow in my parents’ footsteps but also being somewhat compelled genetically to do so. And maybe it’s the same story as yours, or nothing like it. Trust me, it contains nothing more extraordinary than anyone else’s life. There are no Somali pirates in this book. (Although there could have been! There really could have been!)

The process: nothing more than my usual remembering. I think a product of losing one’s parent(s) early in life is that one’s ability to remember sharpens. My husband says this to me all the time, how he marvels at how sharp my memory is, how I can recall images and sounds and textures. But I know it’s intimately connected to having lost my parents. Do people who haven’t suffered such loss need to work their memories to muscle failure in order to reincarnate the people, places, and moments they love? I think, I think, no.

Thanks, PTSD, you’ve given me a super power.

My friend has a tattoo on her finger of a spiral. A few years ago, she explained that it symbolizes how we keep circling around and getting closer and closer to a truth. How we keep living and reliving the same stories and situations and each time have a chance to understand its essence more clearly. Groundhog’s Day, I guess. A little, or not at all. Idk.

Not my friend’s tattoo.

Anyway, writing this book has been a bit of a spiral for me. How many times have I remembered a painful experience from my childhood? How many times have I romanticized it, wrung it out for lessons, for blame or responsibility, for guilt or for anger? I have written each scene a hundred times, relived it a thousand more. Committing it to paper didn’t even make it a commitment. I sat with each memory, got back into my body for each one, wrote the easy way out of each one, gave it to someone to read, read the body language and tone of voice in their response, then went back in for something more truthful. Closer and closer. Harder. Nauseatingly difficult—because I had to face myself.

Most recently I gave this MS to my husband. I expected him to be proud of me. What he said instead was something like: “Yep, congratulations, I hated the ending, I can’t say this book was good.” To be clear, he said it was beautiful. But we also ended up having a conversation (debatable!) about what I had written and how, there on the page, were truths I’d been circling around for as long as we’d known each other. I have spent the past 10 months dredging up all these memories, all this regret, all this shame and sorrow. I’ve been in therapy during the entire time. I’ve had support from my MFA cohort, from my loving advisor, from a thousand authors who don’t know who I am but who are doing what I want to do and whose words and books are only comforting because of their honesty, their willingness to really take truth by the throat and shake it for all its got.

And then I gave the most truthful version of my memory to my husband, who is arguably the most important person in my world besides my daughter, and essentially, ESSENTIALLY, I hurt him with it. Or he hurt because of it.

So. There we are. That’s the update.