My Husband and I Didn't Have a "Meet-Cute" Moment. So of course, I wrote about it.

Personal nonfiction writers often ponder the delicate issue of writing about loved ones, in particular spouses, a subject I once spent months researching. What I found, and have observed, is that most contemporary memoir and personal essay writers fall into (or straddle) three categories:

- show work to a spouse while it's still in very early draft form, giving him/her full veto power to delete anything

- share it only in late stages of editing, with either (a) a willingness to discuss cuts, but no guarantees; or (b) just as a heads-up

- stay mum until publication

I'm mostly in the second category - b - *Honey, FYI, this piece is coming out next week, and you're in it.* But sometimes I slip into the third. Why? Because I can. Because my husband, bless him, has a sense of humor about himself and us; because after 27 years of marriage he knows to pick his battles; and (maybe best of all) because he is almost completely isolated from social media (his choice).

Seven years ago, I began a narrative essay about how we met, fell apart and come back together multiple times over 12 years. In its various incarnations, the piece grew, deepened, languished, shrank, came back to life in varying forms. 

Once, I showed a draft to a writing friend for input and -- because we had dinner planned with this friend and her fiance -- I let Frank read it, mostly so that if the topic of what my friend and I were each writing came up, he wouldn't be in the dark. He shrugged. That was four years ago. I brought the drafts out to play with a few times since, then buried it again.

Finally, last fall, something shifted. I started with a blank screen, and after only a few hours (and 7 years) of rewriting, out it went on the submission trail.

Happily, Blue Lyra Review liked it and "Not Quite Meet-Cute" is part of their newest issue, now live. Which is why, last week, I told Frank, in a by-the-way moment, "A piece I wrote about how we met and dated is going to be published." He shrugged. 

I titled this one after a line in the film The Holiday, when the lovely actor Eli Wallach (who plays a now-elderly but once famously productive screenwriter from the golden age of Hollywood), explains that the magical, sweet, sometimes comical moment when fated lovers in a film first encounter one another, is called the "meet-cute."

My husband and I didn't have one of those. 

Here's how my story begins: 

People often ask how my husband and I met, confusing meeting with meaning.I tell them the meet-cute version: it happened at a New York Giants football game, two teenagers who forgot umbrellas and shared an improvised over-sized black trash-bag poncho. It is true, this story, and you can get by with this story, entertain and please people who want to know it is still possible to be sleeping beside the love of your life some thirty-eight years after he first made you swoon. 

But it’s not that simple. 

I first saw and heard my future husband when I was twelve and he sixteen, filling multiple roles in a high school production of My Fair Lady: dreamy looks, a swath of dark curly hair, and that last name – Frank Romeo. When we finally met at that football game three years later, I was with my best friend Anne, and he with his best friend Jeff. About five weeks of double dates followed, but I failed to notice Frank’s distracted twitch. I had forgotten that I first encountered him as an actor...

I hope you will read the rest here. And, if you're inclined, give it a boost with the Facebook Like button at the bottom of the essay on the BLR site

The Situation, the Spouse, and the Story

Yesterday, among other Christmas gifts, I gave my husband the same small item he has received from me 28 times before. The story why, which includes candy, dashed teenage dreams, manipulative gift-giving, marriage, tradition, and enduring love, made it into a seasonal essay this year.  

Often, nonfiction writers discuss handling the intricacies of writing about loved ones. To let them read drafts or not? Make editing suggestions? Vote with a red pen? Do they get to veto certain subjects? Does it depend on the intended publication/readership? Use real names or made-up ones? 

As my children became teenagers, my own *rules* changed, and now I check in with them before I write about them, while I am writing about them, and before I publish anything about them. They get to read, react, refuse. (Selfish reasons, really; I still want them to talk to me.)

I have a different arrangement with my husband, who only chimes in before publication if I'm unsure of a piece of our shared history, or if I want to know what he really thought about something. This is partly because as an essayist, I want to stay inside my own head when writing, hear my own voice most clearly. But I also suspect it has to do with him being an infrequent reader, one who can appreciate a finished piece of prose, but finds drafts and revisions tedious. (Perhaps he also sees a different bargain: I write what I want, he watches as much football as humanly possible.) Which means he generally doesn't read anything until it's published and others are reading it too. 

I do hold my breath a little, hoping he'll like what I've written (which usually happens with the short personal essays in mainstream media) or at least understand why I've written it and what it means to me (more often a concern with my longer essays that appear in literary journals). Either way, it doesn't alter our system the next time around--I write, publish, then he reads--which often strikes other writers as both freeing and slightly dangerous. It works for us.

Frank did not read "The Gift I Keep on Giving" until it appeared on Christmas Eve. I was able to quickly exhale. 

Photo: Flickr/Creative Commons-Dan Taylor

Women Writing on Family: Always topical here, and now - it's a book!

When your work is occasionally published in essay collections or other anthologies, a fun day is when the ARC (advanced reading copy) arrives, and you get to see, often for the first time, what other writers and topics will be in that same book, and how the issues are treated across hundreds of pages.

Yesterday the ARC arrived of the forthcoming book Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing (edited by Carol Smallwood and Suzann Holland – Key Publishing/Canada, Jan 2012). I have two contributions in it, both on the topic of writing about one's spouse in nonfiction. One is a round-up of tips and techniques used by other contemporary women nonfiction writers, and the other is an interview with writer Meredith Hall, about the absence of the spouse in her memoir, Without A Map.

Since the book arrived yesterday, I've been delighted to find within its pages, contributions from one other writer who is a good personal friend – Christin Geall; from writers I've come to communicate with online – Kate Hopper, Cassie Premo Steele, and Caroline Grant; from a writer whose memoir I loved – Catherine Gildiner; and from one whose teaching ideas I admire – Sheila Bender. Together, they've written on such diverse issues as narrative voice, non-paid writing, journaling, writing about memories, writing conferences, confidence, making time to write, and working with editors.

And there are so many other articles and essays from talented, thoughtful and resourceful women writers in the U.S. and Canada. I can tell, from the titles alone, so much of it will be worth reading -- pieces on: voice, marketing and market research, web writing pros and cons, organizing critique groups, personal essay craft, writing about childhood and about one's children, character development, research, writing about grandparents, the MFA and PhD, rattling family skeletons, writing about illness in the family, moving between fiction and memoir, seeing family members as characters, lines between history and imagination, avoiding sentimentality, and so much more. It's packed, at 320 pages.

Timing is everything, right? I worked on my two pieces for this book back in 2008, but just this week, I am concluding teaching an online creative nonfiction class, which has focused each week on a different aspect of writing about family, about our memories, about difficult personal issues. Yet, for the nonfiction writer who focuses on crafting personal narratives, writing essays based on personal experiences, and envisioning memoirs which, of necessity, includes as characters others who are important in one's life, these issues are also timeless.

You can preorder the book now here (I won't earn any commission.) I hope you'll consider getting yourself a copy, and also passing the information/link along to your writing friends.

Guest Blogger Lisa Catherine Harper on revisions and her new book, A Double Life, Discovering Motherhood

A few weeks ago, while prepping an online lecture on the tangled topic of writing about people we know and love (or have known and loved), Lisa Harper pointed me to a post she'd written for the Poetry Foundation blog. In that post, she describes discovering she was the subject of several poems in a book by a former lover. Lisa teaches in the University of San Francisco's MFA program, and in more of the writer community coincidences I love, Lisa grew up only a few miles from where I live and has written a new book about motherhood (a favorite writing subject of mine).

Please welcome Lisa Catherine Harper.

A Double Life, Discovering Motherhood, tells my personal story against the backdrop of science, focusing on how the physical changes of motherhood give rise to its profound emotional and psychological transformations. The book was informed equally by personal experience and the kind of research available only in medical textbooks and journals.

From the get-go, I aimed to write a nonfiction narrative about motherhood which looked beyond a personal story to something universal. But this posed problems for some agents and editors who told me it was “too quiet”; neither “self-help” nor “straightforward personal narrative.”

My book didn’t focus simply on pregnancy or on baby’s first year, but spanned the period of tumultuous change between conception and my daughter’s first nine months—a time that defined for me my transition to motherhood. Editors didn’t know what to do with the book, how to sell it, or where it would find its home in bookstores. I responded by working hard on two aspects of my manuscript: 1) Dramatizing the personal story; and 2) Ensuring the research emerged organically from the narrative.

To bring out the narrative I added more scene, increased the use of direct dialogue, and made setting more vivid. I also included significant character development of my husband. Early readers had asked for that, and I responded, and the result has been constant feedback about how much my readers now appreciate his presence. I cut whole chapters that didn’t relate to the larger story of change, and I completely rewrote a few that were cast in more lyric modes—which were lovely on their own but defied the structure of the book.

To integrate the research I worked very hard to translate medical language for a lay reader. Right up through the copyediting stage my editor and I continued to make sure the tone, diction, voice, and syntax of the medical language was consistent with the story. Also—I cut details and facts that, while interesting, did not have direct bearing on the story. So there was significant development, refining, and cutting, as well as some structural revision.

The passage that follows is a good example of a strategy that I urge my students to employ: the speedy anecdote, which is a summary that has the force of scene. The lists of food came later, and both were a way for me to show just how greedily and omnivorously hungry nursing made me. In the passage I try to move swiftly through a period of time that lasted a few weeks, but to give the episode immediate and urgent presence through the details (sweat soaked bedclothes, the showers, the lists of food.)

The medical passage is a good example of one which made use of more graceful transitions (During this period…after birth) and more straightforward syntax than you might find in a medical text. In the passage, I cast the list of facts so that it tells the physical story about what happens in during this difficult postpartum time. In fact, this material was gathered from several different chapters of the texts I worked with, then synthesized into one cohesive “story.”

My persistence paid off: my book won the 2010 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, found a home at Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, and has been praised by Publishers Weekly as “universal, moving, and relevant.”

Below is a passage from “The Fourth Trimester,” which moves from story to research then back to story as it explores those impossibly hard first postpartum weeks.

After the pain [of labor], after the bone soaking fatigue, came the hunger. No one had prepared me for this. No one had warned me just how hungry I would become in the days after I gave birth. Even as the fluid left my body through urine and sweat—a horrible, cold sweat that soaked the bedclothes and necessitated two or three showers and two or three changes of pajamas each night—the milking left me ravenous, as if my stomach had been emptied along with my breast of every scrap of food and nutrient it might have possessed in reserve. I could never eat enough. Every few hours my blood sugar dropped precipitously, and it was all I could do to load myself with calories. I ate handfuls of nuts, chocolate, dried fruit, crackers, cheese, olives, meats, antipasto vegetables, cold pasta, cold pizza, salads gifted by friends. I was grateful to the point of speechlessness for the food my friends had dropped off, because even the ready-to-eat meals I had stored in our freezer took too much energy to prepare. Truly, it took Herculean effort to defrost and reheat and serve. Then, on day three of Ella’s life, an enormous, cement-heavy box arrived via FedEx from New York. I sliced it open and revealed a half dozen cheeses, olives, artichokes, flatbread, a loaf of dark rye, dolmas, roasted peppers, black olive tapenade, marinated mushrooms all slick with green olive oil and pungent with vinegar, and a large box of buttery, orange shortbread. Ravenous, I gazed at the bounty and wept. It was exactly what I needed. I could hardly believe my friend’s goodness. We ate our fill, and then, like the loaves and the fishes, the food sustained us for many days.

The first six weeks postpartum, often referred to as the fourth trimester, is a deceptively arduous time. During this period, the mother’s body must reverse all of the processes of pregnancy. Every system of her body, not simply her reproductive organs—from respiratory to gastrointestinal to hematologic to neuromuscular—has undergone dramatic physiological change in order to assume the additional functions and capacities of pregnancy. After birth, the mother’s blood volume, which has grown 30 to 50 percent, by up to a liter and a half, must decrease to pre-pregnancy levels. Her heart rate, which has increased progressively over the pregnancy until it beats fifteen to twenty times more per minute, will slow. The concentration of thyroid hormones, which have been elevated in order to support the altered metabolism of carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids, must return to normal. Placental hormones, like estrogen and progesterone, diminish rapidly. The mother’s uterus must shrink and resume its proper relation to the rest of her abdominal organs. The cervix, bruised and distended from delivery, must heal, or “form up” and shorten. The site of placental attachment also must heal (which it does, amazingly, without scarring). And, of course, breasts, under the influence of two powerful hormones, prolactin and oxytocin, must undergo the final transitions that will enable lactation. This is only the best case scenario: there are many complications—from surgery to depression to placental retention–that can make recovery even more arduous.

And then, there is the practical matter of the baby.

Notes from Lisa (Romeo): To learn more, visit Lisa Harper's website and watch the cool (and short) video book trailer. Her book is now available for pre-order. You can also follow Lisa Harper on Twitter.

If you'd like to win a free, signed copy of A Double Life, Discovering Motherhood, please leave a comment on this post by midnight, March 21 (must have a U.S. postal address). One commenter will be chosen at random.

Writing exercise -- use these four words in a sentence: Happy. Married. Happily Married.

For years I wrote about motherhood and avoided writing about my husband and/or my marriage. That began to change when I focused the research semester of my MFA program on exploring how contemporary women nonfiction writers represent the spouse in memoir and personal essay.

More recently, my regular personal essay writing gig over at Your Tango's LoveMom section more or less requires that I examine the marital relationship in the larger context of "the intersection of life, love and kids."  My piece over there today pivots on the difference (if there is one) between being happy and married, and being “happily married” (whatever that means!). It begins this way:

A decade ago, when one of my sons was still a preschooler, a friendly old gent in the grocery checkout line tried to make small talk with the boy, who was attired in a New York Yankees jacket.
"Oh, are you a real slugger?"
From the kid, silence.
"Are you a big strong boy?"
More silence.
Finally, winking, "Are you married?"
The boy spoke. “No, I’m happy.”

You can read the rest here.

Parenting: Win, Lose, Write.

I'm over at YourTango today, with a little piece about me, my husband, two small parenting battles, who won and who really benefited.

"When my husband and I hear a song on the radio and can't remember the artist, he's the first one online looking up the answer, then letting me know he's the one who got it right. Me, I'm usually content to wait out any disagreements, preferring to let him discover later on just how right I was..."

You can read the rest of the piece here.

Writing From the Home Front

I'm over at YourTango today, talking about the way I see certain parenting issues vs. the way my husband does:

"Why do I interpret my kids' diversity as a mandate to continually deconstruct and refashion my approach, while my husband strides confidently ahead, applying solution A to cause B?. . . I struggle not to blindly ascribe it to maternal instincts, just as I try not to credit tire-changing skills to the Y chromosome... I know my husband can out-parent me in several categories, and I'm more curious than upset when I notice the unequal ways we respond to our sons."

You can read the whole piece here.

Another online home for my writing

From the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion:

Motherhood and marriage at midlife – navigating the miserable and the marvelous – will be the subjects of my bi-weekly essays over at Your Tango’s new Love, Mom blog. My first piece looks at how fervently my husband yearned for fatherhood, while I was initially reluctant about motherhood. It begins like this:

“Other women had it. Even my husband had it: the desire to spawn. It's true: my husband wanted kids more than I did. Wanted them in the way it seemed other (normal?) women did, with a longing, a yearning, a confidence that parenthood was vital to adult life. Me? I figured we'd have a pretty good life either with children or without.
Then, I experienced three years of infertility, which made getting pregnant its own goal. I wanted it to work, which of course isn't the same as wanting to be a mother.
Still, a husband's heart's desire is something strong.”

You can read the rest here. I’ll be there every other Monday. Hope you’ll check in from time to time.

Friday Fridge Clean Out: January 15 Edition

• In a 1969 interview with E.B. White on the art of the essay from the archives of The Paris Review: “I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor—as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper.”

•Kudos to fellow Stonecoast MFA alumna Kim Dana Kupperman, whose essay collection, I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence, won the 2009 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize in Nonfiction, and will be published this summer by Graywolf Press

•GalleyCat, the popular publishing industry news blog at Mediabistro, will begin posting book reviews.

•You labor for years, writing, writing, writing. Finally a book's success brings in some decent money...and then do you give most of it away to charity, while inspiring others to make contributions too? Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind, did. "I thought, 'I've been poor my whole life,'" he recounted. "'I might as well be poor for a good reason.'" His story here.

•I liked memoirist Dani Shapiro’s post about publication anxieties. I like her whole blog, too.

•The slush pile is dead. I think most people pretty much know this already, but apparently the Wall Street Journal just got the memo. Still, it was sobering to read (yet again) about the marketing-over-literary value judgments in today’s publishing industry:

“A primary aim of the slush pile used to be to discover unpublished voices. But today, writing talent isn't necessarily enough. It helps to have a big-media affiliation, or be effective on TV. "We are being more selective in taking on clients because the publishers are demanding much more from the authors than ever before," says Laurence J. Kirshbaum, former CEO of Time Warner Book Group and now an agent.

"From a publisher's standpoint, the marketing considerations, especially on non-fiction, now often outweigh the editorial ones. "These days, you need to deliver not just the manuscript but the audience," says Mr. (Jim) Levine (of Levine Greenberg Literary Agency). "More and more, the mantra in publishing is 'Ask not what your publisher can do for you, ask what you can do for your publisher."

•Check out this meaty interview with novelist Tayari Jones.

•Not sure what wiki wart, mobile necking, and blog dodger mean? Get the deets on these and the rest of the latest social media buzzwords here.

•One writer’s take on the problem with the marriage memoir.

•Joyce Carol Oates, author of some 80 novels and short story collections, is to publish her first memoir. An article at WSJ Online, notes the book will cover,” the aftermath of her husband Raymond Smith's death in February 2008. She describes the book, "A Widow's Memoir," as practical and darkly funny (Ms. Oates says she plans to include a "widow's handbook" with advice on fundamentals such as how to pick out a grave plot).” Oates is legendary for her self-editing, the article explains: "She's an obsessive self-editor. She has rewritten short stories and revised a novel after publication for anthologies or updated editions of her books. She had a finished manuscript of her recent novel, "Little Bird of Heaven," but held onto it and rewrote it after her husband's death, in part to keep herself occupied, she said. During a reading in the fall at Barnes and Noble in New York, Ms. Oates told the audience that "Little Bird of Heaven" was "a life line" after her husband died, and the only thing that got her out of bed.”

•A Room of Her Own Foundation now has an online book club and blog.

Have a great weekend.