Loss of identity On a recent plane ride I sat next to an elderly gentleman. He was friendly and pleasant, and he engaged me in conversation. The plane was noisy, and he asked me what I did and I replied, “I’m a writer.” He asked me how long I had been a waiter and I said since I was forty-eight. I caught on to his misunderstanding when he began to tell me about his favorite restaurant in Albany, but I didn’t correct him. When I asked him what he did, I thought he said he was an elevator engineer, but later I gathered that he was in elementary education—a principal, as it turned out. He had had a long and satisfying career.

  We had a pleasant journey. If I were writing fiction, I might have written a story about it.

  Write two pages of a mistake you didn’t bother to correct.

  Momentary loss of desire to be close to a creature you love My son Ralph recently installed a dog door for us, and today as I sat unraveling a knitting project gone wrong, Rosie hopped up on the pillow behind me. When I’d gotten all of what had started out as sweater back into one big ball of yarn, I turned to look at my dog and discovered to my horror that we were both covered with bird feathers.

  It took forever to get the feathers off us, off the chair, and off the floor. There was no other debris, thank god.

  Write two pages of the downside of something or someone you love.

  Write two pages in which you overreacted.

  Carolina, my third hound, had been carrying a dead squirrel around the yard for two days, like a child with a favorite toy. I was horrified, but my son said, “She’s so proud of it,” which changed my feelings, but only slightly. I approached her as she lay on the grass, the squirrel between her paws. She growled—a friendly growl, but a growl nonetheless.

  I am not stupid. When she came into the house for supper (sans squirrel) I went outside, found it, and tossed the poor dead thing into the bushes, out of reach. After supper she searched for a long time.

  Write two pages of someone you love holding something you don’t.

  Lost objects Recently I lost something that belongs to someone else, something precious. She has asked for it back and I haven’t told her yet that I can’t find it because I’m waiting to turn the house upside down. Until I’ve looked everywhere, there is still a chance it may turn up. I think I last saw it in a bag that contained a scarf I was knitting for my grandson Dan. That is lost too. Dan picked out the blue wool himself.

  What is wrong with me?

  If I were younger, I would probably turn against the person whose treasure disappeared. It’s her fault for loaning it to me in the first place. I would have thought. I didn’t ask to see it . . .

  So I suppose I’ve made progress. But I still can’t find it.

  Write two pages of blaming the injured party.

  Loss of a dream A red chicken coop is slowly falling apart in a corner of my yard. It’s still winter, so the red coop has white snow on its roof, but lacking the white chickens, not much depends on this. The windows are broken, the lattice that served some unknown purpose has sagged to the ground and is in the process of disintegrating. I’ve lived up here four years and been inside the chicken coop twice. I recall seeing a big sign for a real estate business, and a bunch of storm windows. Recently my son-in-law discovered an old suitcase full of pornography but he left it in the coop. There are flagstones in front of the low entrance to the place, and when it gets warm if you lift them up carefully you can find a few little newts underneath. In summer the forsythia is so dense and high that the coop is hard to get to—or hard to get to if you’re thinking about deer ticks or snakes, or other varmints wilder than my three dogs, who can spend hours barking at those bushes.

  In the old days I used to get that wonderful recurring dream where you stumble on a room in your house you didn’t know was there. It’s always a spare room, and you half-remember it, and you realize it is the perfect place to do the things or think the thoughts you’ve always meant to do or think, but lacked the right chair in the right room, with the right light—and here it is, in this room you’ve always had. I don’t have those dreams anymore, but I think it’s because I have a house with many rooms, and this real chicken coop I could fix up given some inspiration and a potful of found money. Sometimes I even think—briefly—of keeping a bunch of chickens. One street over someone has a rooster. We could get together.

  Write two pages of the perfect room for the perfect activity (or lack thereof).

  Write two pages of old dreams you miss.

  Loss of self-respect One summer years ago I was working alone in an office that was also somebody’s apartment. I was the only one there. The walls were dark green in the room where I worked, and I was lonely, so I called my sister Eliza in Boston every day, and we talked for hours. A small part of me felt uneasy, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, but I kept on anyway. When my boss got back she opened her telephone bill, and flabbergasted, she asked if I knew whose number had the 617 exchange. Cornered, I lied. “I don’t know,” I said. That night I went home and called all my children. It’s okay, Ma, it’s not so terrible, Ma, someday this will be a funny story, Ma, they all said. But it was clear to all of us that I needed to tell the truth and pay her back. I wrote a check for the money I’d talked away, and confessed.

  The worst was that I had failed to live up to my own expectations. I was not the person I’d taken myself to be—someone who would tell the truth no matter the consequences. I looked in the mirror and saw a coward. For some reason, the thieving part wasn’t nearly as humiliating. It is a funny story now, but only because I’ve forgiven myself, a process that took years. I had to come to the liberating realization that I was human.

  Is there a moment when you failed yourself? I have many shameful moments, but most of them were instances in which I failed other people. Moments, no, years, when I had no clear idea who I was hoping to be, just that I was a miserable failure. (What is a mother, anyway?)

  Write two pages of lies.

  Write two pages of a lie you were told.

  At a loss for words I was watching Prime Suspect last night, and Helen Mirren has to break the news of a boy’s suicide to his parents. I wonder how can she bear to do this, and even though this is only television, I can hardly watch. And then it hits me. There are these three things in her office: the boy’s parents, Helen herself, and the awful truth. And the truth has its rights. Poor Helen has no respectable choice, she can’t shirk this responsibility. The truth is there, stark, irrefutable, and there is no way to make it change its shape.

  Does this make the bad news easier to deliver? I’m trying to remember delivering bad news, but my mind goes blank. I only remember hearing it, so I can’t vouch for the comfort.

  The other day I received a piece of unpleasant news from a young man who was lighting a cigarette. I took the damn thing from his hand, had a drag, then lit my own. Amazing how easily the great dark god of nicotine wakes up in my bloodstream. I can see him lying lazily on one side, beckoning. Where have you been?, I hear him say. What took you so long? He is a constant lover.

  Write two pages of bad news.

  Write two pages of wrong comfort.

  Loss of a clear definition of heaven and hell My friend Sarah sent me a list of hells she found in an old book in the library at Notre Dame University. It included the following version of hell: “slipping and falling on a path of well-oiled beans.” I must remember to ask her when the book was last taken out.

  Write two pages of your version of hell.

  Write two pages of your childhood version of hell.

  I don’t know when I realized that you couldn’t fly to heaven on a plane. I had assumed that if the plane could get high enough, there it would be. Clouds had a lot to do with this, because that’s where I pictured God and his angels hanging out. This was before anyone I knew died, so I didn’t have the general public up there. At this moment I am flying above some fluffy clouds, imagining a few old friends waving to me as the plane goes by. They are wearing their civilian clothes. My father is among them. He is wearing a suit and tie. I can’t see Rich.

  Write two pages of a wave that signifies both hello and good-bye.

  Loss of strength I’ve had three private Pilates lessons. Last night I used my abdominal muscles to get me out of a tight spot—I was wedged crookedly between three dogs, and experiencing a searing pain in my back. My abdomen used to be as tight as a drum; it was the source of all my strength. It occurs to me that I gave away more money when my stomach muscles worked, although I can’t explain that. My neck is killing me and I can’t turn my head from side to side without screaming. I find it hard to reach my shoulder blades. This is due to my sleeping habits, not my new exercise regime. If you lie down with dogs, sometimes you can’t get up at all.

  Write two pages entitled “The Source of My Strength.”

  I have arthritis in one hip, and sometimes it is hard to walk. The word arthritis stunned me. This was not part of the plan.

  Write two pages about the loss of mobility.

  Loss of serenity I don’t know why bad news always comes as a surprise. By now we should know better. There you are, pleasantly floating in the blue water on a summer day, not a blip on the horizon, and then, suddenly, an oil tanker is bearing down on you and your flimsy little pair of water wings.

  Write two pages of what comes next, and how to like it.

  Loss of humor Sometimes I lose my sense of humor. My children are usually the first to point this out, which doesn’t help restore it.

  Write two pages of what you no longer find funny.

  Loss of control Ah, happiness. It comes and goes unbidden—one day there it is, wafting through the open window, and then one day there it isn’t. I don’t know what our founding fathers were thinking. You can’t pursue happiness.

  Write two pages of baiting a trap.

  Write two pages of being caught in a trap.

  Loss of regime I don’t drink, and I don’t drink for good reason, but tonight I had two glasses of red wine. It was my son’s wine, not mine. I didn’t buy it. He drank his with the lamb stew I made. I drank mine with a pint of chocolate ice cream. We watched The Bourne Conspiracy. I’m awake now, and it’s two-thirty in the morning. I can go downstairs and look for the cigarette I’ve got hidden and smoke it.

  Okay. Did that. Now I have several choices. The first is to decide that a couple of glasses of wine have already started me down the slippery slope and I might as well finish the bottle. The second is that since I only had two glasses I can now drink moderately (and might as well finish the bottle). The third is that I can jump in my car and drive to Cumberland Farms and buy a pack of cigarettes and come back and finish the bottle. The last is okay I enjoyed the stuff, now let’s move on.

  I think I will regard tonight as a pleasant interlude in a long life of sobriety that stretches ahead. Or a short one, you never know.

  Write two pages of what you didn’t plan to do.

  Write two pages of the vices you no longer have.

  Death I’ve caught two glimpses of my father, dead these many years, once crossing a street in Midtown, once through the window of a magazine store, and both times I suffered the shock of his death all over again. My old friend Quin told me he hadn’t really understood his father was dead until he started to see him in subways.

  My husband, Rich, died January 1, 2007. Months went by before it hit me. At first my sorrow was more for what had happened to his life than for his death. Sadness, yes, I was prepared for that, but not the kind of grief that clobbers you, the kind that ambushes you when you’re walking down the tea-and-coffee aisle at the market. I had the distinct feeling I was getting away with something—I wasn’t going to feel anything worse than what I had already gone through. Hadn’t I spent the last seven years grieving?

  I can’t remember the exact moment. At first there were little things that got to me. When I paid the bill for the ambulance service that took Rich to the hospital for what turned out to be the last time. When I went to gather the few things from Rich’s room at the nursing home, and signing in at the front desk I realized that in the space where you put the person you are visiting, I had no one to put. But even though I was crying, that huge grief was still at bay.

  Then one day I found myself looking at old photographs of Rich, really looking. I hadn’t allowed myself to remember who he had been, who we had been together, and there we were smiling at the camera a few weeks after we were married. There was the steady good man I’d fallen in love with years ago. I’d forgotten how handsome he was, and how happy we were, and the grief that had been eluding me (or that I had been eluding) finally arrived. The strange thing is that I am grateful for it. I realize what I lost.

  How are you doing?, a friend asks. I had taken care of Rich for so long, she said, what was I doing to fill that empty space? My friend didn’t mouth platitudes; she has suffered her own losses. I didn’t want to hear Everything happens for a reason. I didn’t want to hear His death must be a blessing. The space Rich occupied is empty. It will always be empty. Every time I come to the road that leads to the nursing home, my car automatically changes lanes to make the turn. We are creatures of habit.

  Write two pages of what waits in ambush.

  Write two pages of what you don’t want to hear.

  Use it or lose it Sometimes you wake up at four in the morning with all this energy and no cows to milk. So you just have to get up and figure out what it’s there for. Use it or lose it. If you’re lucky some part of you will know what to do, but it’s not the part that thinks it’s steering. Make sure you have your notebook and a pen.

  Who are we and why does it matter? If you are doing the exercises, you are going to have a larder full of material. If there is a common thread, follow it. If you return again and again to a specific time or place, set up a tent there. If you are still plagued by the question of who is going to find it interesting, please remember that most of us are curious about each other’s lives. My rule of thumb is that if you find something interesting, chances are good that it is interesting.

  Who are we? We are mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, sisters, brothers. We are plumbers, lawyers, homemakers. We have waited tables, we have worked in hospitals. We are masons and secretaries and middle managers and bank tellers. We have sold books, we have sold shoes, we have managed produce departments in big supermarkets, we are engineers and soldiers and police and musicians and scientists. We are teachers. We are comedians and volunteers. We are executives, customer service representatives, carpenters, clerks, babysitters, writers, editors, fishermen, inventors. We have worn high heels and construction boots and gray suits and overalls and pocket protectors.

  We have spoken from experience, we have talked through our hats. We have been thanked, we have been humiliated, we have gossiped and worried and gone to bed hungry for one thing or another. We have been paranoid, we have had faith. We have been frightened, we have given comfort. We have been unfairly blamed, we have been unjustly praised, we have protested and we have kept our mouths shut. We have bragged and we have sold ourselves short. We have believed lies, hidden our feelings, scrutinized our motives. We have followed every lead; we have turned our faces away. We have been generous to a fault, we have guarded our treasures. We have gone out on a limb and we have stayed on the porch.

  We are full of contradiction and conflict; we have played different roles at different times (or simultaneously); we have evolved out of many different selves. Writing memoir is one way to explore how you became the person you are. It’s the story of how you got here from there.

  Believe me. It’s a good story.

  six

  More Exercises

  Note: The two-page part is a tic, you can write more or less.

  Assignments:

  —Write two pages of apologies (I once mistyped this as twenty-two pages of apologies).

  —Write two pages of instructions to the child you once were.

  —Write two pages about a tic.

  —Write two pages about an unwelcome surprise.

  —Write two pages in which something is broken.

  —Write two pages about a stomachache.

  —Write two pages about homesickness for somewhere you never were.

  —Write two pages in which something is too small.

  —Write two pages that take place in the woods.

  —Write two pages about a proposal of marriage.

  —Write two pages about a jinx.

  —Write two pages of a tantrum you regret.

  —Write two pages of begging for something you don’t really need.

  —Write two pages of finding something awful in the cellar.

  —Write two pages of being afraid of the attic.

  —Write two pages about a bad haircut.

  —Write two pages in which a spider plays a prominent role.

  —Write two pages of a thank-you letter you don’t mean a word of.

  —Write two pages about a music lesson you didn’t want.

  —Write two pages about being discovered doing something you’d rather have had remain secret.

 

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