How Little We Know: A Memoir

On Writing Out Loud I’m posting my memoir-in-progress about my experience of mother/daughterhood, and here you’ll find out what I’m doing and why. By now I’ve pretty much finished writing the first draft of the first half, and I’ve decided to post a Table of Contents on this blog, so readers can click from here to read selected chapters. In addition to the chapters themselves, I’ve posted a few essays and poems relevant to the subject of mothers and daughters. I’ve also put up a few entries from my process journal–a kind of meta writing where I explore issues and feelings raised by the material.

In making my work public at such an early stage of its development, I’m taking a big risk. I’m doing so in order to break through the loneliness of the long-distance writer–after two years of almost daily blogging, I just couldn’t bear to go back to writing in isolation. A novel or memoir or any book-length project can take years to complete, and doing it alone makes me feel like I’m groping through silent darkness. Even though I haven’t gotten much feedback on the memoir, just knowing it’s being read, no matter if it’s only by a few people, helps to overcome that feeling.

Please, do consider using those comment boxes to let me know what you think of this memoir.