if only life were as pretty as a picture…
Kamela Cody: How did you arrive at the episodic structure of your memoir? Do you think the structure of your book is telling about how people retain memories?
Me: This is a terrific question – one I get quite often because my book doesn’t follow a traditional linear (Chapter 1 is day one, Chapter 10 is the present) structure and it disorients people at first. From the onset, I knew I could never write this book and the events that happened in my life in chronological order. The past is very much the present for me and vice versa. I keep recalling Virgina Woolf in when she says, “If life then is a ‘bowl which one fills and fills and fills’, each new experience added to the existing ones displaces them ever so slightly and alters their previous meaning by forcing them into new combinations. The present moment is enriched by the past but the past is also enriched by the present,” realizing the impact her words had on me as I embarked writing this book.
My mother is still very much a presence in my life, and sometimes I shiver when I look in the mirror because I resemble her more with each day’s passing. I’ll remember a certain word she always used—brazen, a certain tick of hers—smoothing flyaways—while I’m at dinner or on the subway coming home from work.
Additionally, the structure speaks to memory fracture, disorientation, and the constant feeling of unrest—all the things I’ve felt for the great period of my life and feel sometimes still. Since a book is a conversation between author and reader, the author delivering a story, I wanted the reader to feel my confusion, disorientation – all of these frightening things, firsthand. Also, on a pratical level, shifting through time gives the book some breathing room. If you read chapter after chapter of my childhood abuse, you might very well pass out. The story of my life is a great puzzle and this book was about trying to assemble the pieces in a way that makes sense to me.
Click here to read my interview with the uber fox, Kamela Cody of Modern Girl Style. Also, check out my various postings on The Publishing Spot.
Apologies for the radio silence, friends. It’s exhausting on the home front, but some wonderful publicity news is on the horizon. Stay tuned for book updates as well as a return to the Kitchen Aid.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Gorgeous!!! Brown is your color.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Love the portrait. Seriously.. Love it.
February 23rd, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Great interview, and lovely pic. I really like what you say about love being unconditional and conditional. It has made me look at my own (very new!) parenting style in a critical way. Don’t toy with love, for sure. I also found the structure of the book fit with the life you lived — fractured memories, fractured relationships, fractured self.
Oh, and I LOVE chocolate chip pumpkin muffins, btw!
February 23rd, 2008 at 10:52 pm
This is the most gorgeous picture of you I’ve seen yet — very glamorous!
February 24th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
I have to say that this is one of the FEW photos of myself that I actually like. Because:
a. I’m not doing the squinty thing with my eyes that I so often do
b. I don’t look like SHAMU
c. I wasn’t made to smile (I am not able to smile in pictures unless you throw me down the floor and tickle me or you make me laugh as you’re about to take the picture).
Anyway, thanks for your sweet comments, and ERIN - I’m so tickled that you dug Sky’s structure.
xoxox, f.
February 25th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Excellent interview and what a fabulous photo of you! You look stunning.