I wrote a memoir. It's the only book I've ever written and it comes out in a week. O Magazine and Elle really liked it. So did Powells, I guess. That there is any book, bad or good, for sale with my name on it is ? well ? highly improbable.
I'm 40 with two kids that I can still pick up and carry around if I need to and a nice husband who works in Silicon Valley at this company called VUDU. Before all this book stuff happened, I was a housewife. And that was going well. I was happy.
But then, in November 2004, it looked like my dad was dying and I found myself in my office typing. Just seven pages about growing up. Something to give him because he'd always thought of me as a writer. That he would say "Lovey, you're gonna write a great book one day" was silly, really, since anyone could see I was both too lazy and too practical to be an artist. Mind you, I had visions. I was quick to think up perfect first lines and titles for movies and isolated fragments of comic dialogue. Those sorts of things popped into my mind all the time. But my nose and the grindstone had never touched. And I was busy. I had fifteen pounds to lose and a '70s kitchen to rehab and those kids I mentioned.
But I liked what I wrote, those seven pages. It was more or less a download of a hundred conversations I'd had with myself on long car rides over the years. My husband liked the pages too. That really threw me. (He's slow to compliment.) I sent the document to his sister in NY. She's a bona fide creative. And her husband is a working screenwriter. They run around with people like John Hodgman and Darin Strauss and Jonathan Coulton, people who are written up in the New York Times and get Guggenheim fellowships and appear on Jon Stewart. Anyway, my sister-in-law loved my pages and called me up to tell me. Still though, it seemed silly. I mean, what was I doing? Did anyone honestly think I was going to write a book? Why bother?
After a couple months, mostly because it was cheap and convenient, I signed up for a Creative Non-fiction class through our local adult education program. I was curious about memoirs. I liked reading them (who didn't like Angela's Ashes, or Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions, and more recently, Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty?) and I had just finished four months of chemotherapy for late stage cancer with two girls in diapers. It seemed dramatic.
On the first night of class (January 2005), I sat down next to a woman about my age. She looked normal. We had a similar haircut. The teacher showed off some books she had helped "mid-wife," mostly self-published, vanity-press stuff. Then she asked each of us to introduce ourselves and talk about our "project."
Someone had adopted a baby from China. A guy had remodeled a two hundred year-old house. The woman across from me had been a man for most of her life. Then the woman right next to me with the cool hair said, "Hi, I'm Tracy. I have three kids and six months ago, I finished my third round of treatment for breast cancer." The class gasped.
So did I. What was I thinking? That I was the first young mother ever diagnosed with cancer?
After muddling through class, I came home and said to my husband, "I'm such a fool. I'm an idiot. I'm a total ass! I mean, of course! Everyone who's ever been through this shit ? and all kinds of other shit ? thinks it'd make a great book!"
Of course they do. That's how traumas become tolerable: we make them into stories. We trap them and contain them. We reduce and reshape.
So, yeah, my "project" looked to be an abject bust ? hopelessly unoriginal. Except for one thing. I liked writing. It was solitaire at its most engaging. From the meta stuff to the tinkering, I liked writing. If the sequence of things was confounding me, I'd switch to decisions like pitiful or pathetic? Or I'd sit back and run a private brainstorm for metaphors ? what was this certain fear just like? This pain? This comfort? I liked skipping around online to find the etymology of leniency or the exact line of that Shawn Colvin song I heard in New Zealand in 1992. I liked being in a café from the moment I dropped my kids off to the moment it was time to pick them up. Me, Google, and that crazy, sprawling, quasi-legit thing called Wikipedia. My iPod, my laptop, and my tea ? all tucked into a purple chair with muffin crumbs in every seam, the one by the front door at A Cuppa Tea on College Avenue in Berkeley. I liked printing out the pages once a week and sitting in bed with a pencil and paper clips and sticky notes. I liked making piles. I liked reading more than ever, wondering why the author started here or switched narrators there and then, just as I was trying to break the work apart, I liked getting completely blindsided with some beautiful phrase or thought and thinking, Oh, I could never do that. Words, sometimes they make you purr.
So I kept at it. It's only now that I see that the reason I stayed in the seat and kept typing was because the game had changed from something preposterous (publication) to something utterly achievable (amusing myself, and maybe my family). And that's where the new routine began, the routine that led to more pages, hundreds of them in fact, the pages that became, against all reason or expectation, The Middle Place.
Tomorrow: About those seven pages.
For more about Kelly Corrigan or her memoir, The Middle Place, please visit www.kellycorrigan.com