Spout, Ho!

(via)

I’m working toward starting the memoir.

Ooooh!  Did you feel that?  The chill that went from  the hairs on my head to the tip of my toes?

That’s because it scares the batshit out of me, yet it’s the thing I think I was meant to write, the work that I’ve been trying to get good enough to attempt my whole life.

I have a YA manuscript I want to finish, and then I want to go full steam ahead on the memoir.  Many of the small things I’m doing right now ~ essays, etc. ~ are work toward the memoir.

But the thing is:  a memoir that includes your family is nothing short of treason, isn’t it?  In order to write truthfully about the secrets of the family, you’re betraying them in the process?  See, that’s the part that scares the heck out of me.  Me being the youngest and the peacemaker, am I brave enough to be truthful about my take on things? 

Yet it’s a story that I feel HAS to be told.  You see, I want to focus on the 80s and 90s when my family had a whole Hatfields and  McCoys thing going ~ no one was ever shot but dogs were and gas tanks were sugared and there were fist fights and people tried to run over people with cars, legal battles.  I want to find the truth of it, to try to suss out my truth.  And interwoven through it is the whole gender thing ~ women in my culture are second-class citizens, something I struggled with for a lot of my life.

One of the reasons, though, I feel that it’s the story I was destined to tell is that I had no voice as a child and so this is the story that will vindicate that feeling of helplessness and ~ I’m just now realizing ~ rage.  I don’t want revenge.  I just want to understand.