All Those Tender Spots

On choosing whether to excavate your past or not.

Hi friends.

I did a book club last week here in New Orleans for “The Middlesteins.” I wrote that book in 2010, and it came out in 2012. It was the book that changed my life, and I have written about it in my memoir and processed it and loved that book and mostly put it to bed in my memory, if only because I had to make room to write seven other books after that. Every once in a while a lesson from it pops up, but mostly I have just gotten busier and older and time has moved on. There has always just been more work to do.

It was fun, though, to go and revisit it, even though some of the specifics of the book were hazy. Sure there were some character names I could no longer remember, but I certainly remembered the why and about of it all. I enjoyed the same old conversations coming up, people disagreeing about a certain character’s actions, for example, or people appreciating the particular kind of Jewishness of it, or the story of its setting. Talking about food and eating with strangers is always interesting. I left thinking, “The old girl’s still got it.” (I meant the book, not me.) (But also I am still pretty cute.)

This is a past moment that’s nice to remember but in general I don’t do a lot of digging around in my personal history anymore. Perhaps it’s because I’ve already written the memoir and am hesitant to write another, though I’ve been taking notes on a particular topic for years. I’m fascinated by how some people can repeatedly mine their lives in a book-length fashion, again and again.

And then having to talk about it in public! Talk about themselves. I did not enjoy touring for my memoir. In the end I found it all too strange. I love it when people appreciate the book, if it has meaning for them. But also I sometimes feel foolish about it all, as in, “I can’t believe I did the thing I said I would never do (write a memoir) and then it turned out exactly as expected.”

But I know plenty of writers who continue to go back to that well, writing multiple memoirs, and they feel comfortable presenting their full selves to the world. Maybe they have more confidence in every part of them. The only thing I really have confidence in talking about is writing and creativity. And I think many of these writers must see memoir as their true art form, the full extension of their creative selves. For me, it was a limb dangling from the main form of the body of my work.