Recent Powells.com guest blogger Kelly Corrigan, author of The Middle Place, shared with us the four-part, up-and-down tale of how she managed to get her memoir published.

December 31, 2007:
From Housewife to Housewife-cum-Author, in Four Parts — Part One: The Hint of Death, Night School, and Keeping Myself Company

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 Powell's, 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?

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Bagheera counts the times he's seen either. Two: two times. "Really?" he asks.

All eyes turn to Oreo, who polls the room: "You ever met a wolf?"

They want to say they have. In theory, anyway.

(Zooey loves when Fup's friends talk about dogs. Sometimes they get it, and other times he'd swear they know as much about dolphins or dinosaurs.)

"It's got to depend on which Doberman and which wolf," Bear presumes. "The Doberman who used to live on 11th Avenue? He couldn't scare a squirrel out of a paper bag. He'd be doomed. But probably another Doberman could hold his own."

Shrugs all around.

Something jogs Oreo's memory, and he remembers the dog. "What was wrong with Popsie, anyway?" They didn't know the Doberman's name at first, so they called him "Popsie" because one time in the Park Blocks they saw him steal a Popsicle straight out of some man's hand.

"Meds?"

"Wait, what's wrong with nonviolence?" Bagheera wants to know.

Zooey reminds everyone, "Bandit was only one-quarter wolf."

When they digress like this, Chester gets fidgety. He starts to pace. And now he can't help reining them in. "Did the Doberman growling at Bandit beat Bandit up? Is that what you're saying, Bear?"

Bear shakes his head no.

And finally Chester boils over and barks, "What happened to Fup?"

"Dogfight?!"