October 22, 2020
Reread some stuff from 2013. Good. Why did I abandon it? No confidence. A series of letters from a woman to a man named Timothy. Unhinged. Ecstatic. Then the lollipop flash fiction piece that CG. said was perfect.
I did something to piss him off. To be fair, he began to bother me. He wanted disciples. I was too old. He intrigued me as well, and I did ask questions about him to other people. These conversations could have reached him. All that, and I once edited some of his stories (he asked me to).
Book Interview questions:
- Have you elided these subjects: sex and childbirth?
- “my reactionary parenting was invisible to me.”
- “I was desperate without knowing it.”
- How did you end up in the ward?
- “What I couldn’t let go of and what couldn’t let go of me.”
I came to believe I lived in a redemptive story arc. A Hollywood movie that would necessarily work out for the audience whose presence I could feel at the boundaries of my vision. The other movie I loved to live within was the coming-of-age (bildungsroman).
The memoir: one way forward: that I’m not remarkable and it’s my banality which is of interest.
Another way: Investigations of memoir and auto-fiction forms.
And yet another: Plans. I always made plans. Accounts of my dreams and aspirations leaving the reader to guess or deduce the person who created them.
