Stepmother: Reflections on Writing a Memoir
It happened one night. Totally unplanned. We were standing in the comfortably furnished living room, nuts on the table and chips next to the dip. The four couples stood casually, holding our drinks and chatting politely as you do when you meet people for the first time.
The conversation was predictable.
“Wasn’t it a beautiful day?!”
“Did you grow up around here?”
“Kids?”
And then finally, “What do you do?”, the brother of the host turned to me.
“Well, I am actually writing a book.”
And there it was. Out in the open. A simple sentence.
But as a result of saying it out loud, it was now a real live entity. Even though I might never see this person again, the statement was out there. I could not take it back.
It took me another three and a half years to change that sentence from “I am writing” to “I am finished.” In total, seven years to complete my memoir, Stepmother.
I did not start out to write a book. I had been ruminating and stewing myself into a frozen tizzy to the point where I went to see a counselor to try and help me thaw. Listening and questioning me for fifty minutes, she asked me to bring one thing that would help to describe how I was feeling to our next meeting the following week. I went home and made a collage of greens and purples. Of winter trees and sitting birds. The picture showed faces with downcast eyes and dancing feet looking for a floor. And just like that, a creative door that had been tightly closed, creaked open and unleashed a floodgate of stories that ended up on my computer during the day and beside my bed in the middle of the night.
There was no structure in the beginning. These stories kept presenting themselves to me as I looked back behind me. Back to the day I had met this wonderful man and embarked on a relationship that included his two kids and eventually one of our own. A relationship that added a new chapter title to my biography.
Stepmother.
While the stories came to me fairly easily the act of presenting them in a manner that was readable was not! With about twenty thousand words all mixed into a pile, I joined a small writing group with four other women. I will not forget their generosity as they gently picked away at my first ten pages. While the pages sat brutally marked up in red ink, their smiles of encouragement for continuing forward were genuine. I went back to my computer.
A couple of years and one major car accident behind me, I got serious.
I reached out to Brooke Warner, co-founder of She Writes Press. I believe the first line in my email to her was along the lines of – “I am stuck and need some help!” And with that request, Annie Tucker, the extraordinary editor and so much more, came to the rescue. Annie took my then forty thousand words back to the beginning. And word by word, sentence by sentence, guided me to generate an additional twenty thousand plus words and an ending. It was a true gift.
Writing about myself was, for the most part, uncomplicated. It was just me, reading about me. Including the characters of people that I call family, and love very much, was much more difficult. I found myself often caught in mid-sentence. Stopped by a flurry of unsettledness mixed with a little bit of guilt and worry. I was caught in that dark space of trying to strike the right expression and emotion with honesty but without the betrayal of disclosure. I was not out to be vindictive or snarky. But to tell a story about a stepmother – me – meant I had to include my step kids. And that has been hard.
My desire from the beginning was to tell an honest story about my experience as a step mom. It was a story that I had searched for once upon a time when I was handed that label. Way back then I scoured the bookstore shelves for a book that described the same emotions that I was experiencing: messy, isolated and lonely. It is a book I never really found.
To move forward in my writing from that awkward and difficult space, I silently chanted my personal and simple mantra. These are my memories. This is my story. So the voice in my memoir is mine, not theirs.
The next hurdle on the road of the publishing process was taller. My step kids needed to read my story. My nerves were wrecked by the time they called to discuss it. But discuss we did. Over tears and over laughter and over all things passed. This conversation still continues and I am thankful for it.
The seven years and many hurdles to publication have been full of surprises. I have mentioned a few. One that I was not expecting was the huge sense of lightness I felt upon the completion of this memoir. It was as if I had truly thawed out. The heaviness of the deep freeze gone with the thoughts and emotions expressed within the pages. This has been an unforeseen gift and a very welcome one as I check off the calendar boxes until official publication day and the life of Stepmother takes off on her own
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Marianne Lile launched her debut memoir Stepmother in September 2016. She is a graduate of Colorado College and in a former life worked as a lobbyist for health related interests in Washington D.C. and Olympia. She put political issues aside to raise kids – her own and her husband’s. The culmination of that 20 year plus “project” resulted in a memoir, Stepmother. You can often find her in the neighborhood walking her 120 pound Bernese Mountain dog and her 13 pound Lapso Apso mix.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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