Finding my Lane….

My memoir-in-essays is out on submission, and after eight months of working on shorter essays and stories, I decided I wanted to tackle a long form again.

Recently I read a craft essay on memoir about finding your lane and staying there. The author’s words stuck with me because my essay collection deals with a variety of subjects, including parenting my daughter while she struggled with anorexia, writing about belonging, my relationships with my family, and a lot of them are about domestic violence.
So, what’s my lane? I wondered. Does trauma count as a lane?

But it got me thinking about my first marriage, the one that changed me, the one I’ve written about over and over again. It was a violent marriage, and if I have a lane, then intimate partner violence is probably it.
Years ago, I’d tried to fictionalize my experience of that marriage. It hadn’t worked. I’d felt like a liar and quit halfway through. I’d also written the whole thing in epistolary form as a series of letters to my daughter. Although I completed it that time, the book still didn’t work.

But now, finally, I think I can write it properly (whatever that means.) I have a wealth of written material to draw from, but in plotting out my scenes on a beat sheet, I can see where there are things I’ve never written about.

And surprisingly, it isn’t the violence I avoided. It’s the hope. I never wrote about my wedding day, me in a white cotton dress that my mom made for me, with flowers in my hair. Marrying this man twenty years older than me, I never described the optimism I felt. I never recorded how sincerely I believed I was making the right choice.

Until now, it was the innocence of my eighteen-year-old self I hadn’t been able to revisit.

This time the writing is going well, and I feel like finally I can tell my story.