Write, Revise, Evolve, Write Again

I’ve been revising my memoir, and finally turned back to it after some time apart. I’ve made some strides in clarifying things and understanding it a bit better. And, also how many more scenes I need to thread it together. It’s definitely a circular structure, coming back again and again to a few themes: being alone, writing and letting go. Writing something while going through it is a whole different ballgame–you never know what thread is going to pull you in or out.

A few weeks ago, I dreamt of Daryl. I was talking to him about the memoir and writing about him. He asked, “Which Daryl?” This question has haunted me. It reminded me of an interview with Courtney Love and Marc Maron a few years ago. She talked about how Kurt Cobain dying at the height of his fame and genius has meant that version of him will never tarnish, or evolve, or make mistakes. Of course, she has evolved and crashed and burned and returned, but not him.

How strange the relationship we have with the dead long after they are gone is still a relationship, a negotiation between what was and now, what is. Sometimes, I worry I am forgetting Daryl’s sharp edges and things that drove me crazy, that the version I am remembering is a hologram, only the best parts and best moments.

I hope that I can capture the dimensions of our relationship and who he was to me and to his friends and family, that what I’m writing is not just about our worst moments.

A new friend, who never met Daryl, said she enjoyed watching me light up every time I talk about him. As much as my writing is a memorial to Daryl, I am a memorial to him as well. Every time I walk into a room, or see an old friend of his, I bring his memory.

Photo courtesy of Adriane Lord circa 2014(?)

What I’ve come to realize about writing this memoir is that it’s as much about my connection to writing as it is about grief; writing is the thread that has pulled me through the last several years. A version of me exists at the beginning of the memoir, another version of me is writing and there’s even yet another version of me now, who is going back and revising.

I recently had the opportunity to hear the author Geraldine Brooks give a talk in Richmond. In 2019, while in the middle of working on her latest book, Horse, her husband (also a writer) Tony Horwitz dropped dead on the sidewalk while on his book tour. She shared how the shock and grief rearranged her, and the paperwork and bureaucracy of death drained her. It took her a couple of years to finish the book. A major reason she went back to it at all was because she knew her late husband would want her to finish. When a friend read it he told her he could tell what she wrote before her husband died and what she wrote after, that the grief she was carrying made it onto the page and into the characters, despite it being a work of fiction.

Over and over again, I keep learning we bring ourselves to whatever we write. The experiences might be universal, but how they pass through us is particular, and that’s the entire reason to bother writing anything at all.

As I continue to let memories pass through me to the page and then go back and revise and scrutinize for accuracy, I know I can only do so much. We are constantly evolving and changing, even if the people we write about no longer can.