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Amy Selwyn's avatar

This is what I needed to read this morning. Well, I've probably needed to hear this for far, far longer. But today is the day I can read this and get it. It's picturing that book on a shelf someplace and thinking, That is a work I put out into this world. So that rules out the "How to Escape the Dick Head Douche Bag Boss You Despise". And it also rules out sarcastic reactions to depression. It pushes all of that right out the window and out into the pouring rain and the Sullivan Tire parking lot. Good. Gone. What your words help me uncover is the desire to share the most beautiful, hard fought, rewarding and amazing lesson I've learned. So, today's the day. Eighty thousand words, here I come. Thank you.

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Carolita Johnson's avatar

I sometimes literally feel like I’m “dying” to tell a story, in that there’s a sort of building ache, achey-ness, discomfort in this very long period of gestation and it’s making me feel like yes, I’ll die if I don’t tell it, but I’m still not quite sure what it is. But I do know that coming back to Queens to take care of my mother and getting her to tell me her very unreliable stories about her past (she is not only basically senile, blending many stories into each other, but also has never been great at memory, often building stories that seem plausible to her out of fragments of memories, then believing them and repeating them). I’m beginning to resign myself to writing a sort of fictional autobiography built on my childhood memories of my own, memories I have of her stories before she forgot them and modified them fifty years later, and my own constructions built from a childlike understanding of things I was too young to actually understand. It’s like I need to tell the story of how I ended up without a story, without a place, without a race, without real memories or family history.

The good thing is that others are finally beginning to write such stories, themselves, and being taken seriously. It’s like I’ve waited all my life to read them. And now I’m still dying to write my own.

The one good thing that came of this pandemic, and the shutdown, and my widowhood, and my solitude and my coming back to take care of my mother is all the reading I’ve been able to do. For years I’ve been craving a long, long residency somewhere, where I could do nothing but read. This has been the closest thing to it, and may I honor the suffering and misfortunes that came along with it by doing something good and beautiful with it.

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