On Publishing My Mother’s Memoir

Two years ago, I broke. Crumbled. Oh, I struggled for a few months using whatever energy bursts I could muster to stay in the game, but by early 2022, no amount of priming could restart the flow and I prepared to step away from it all. After seven plus years of writing, publishing, promoting, volunteering for my local writers’ guild (three years as president), critique groups, and running an editing/author services business, topped off by a diagnosis of autoimmune hepatitis, I simply came undone.

I completed the editing work on two client projects, advised my critique groups I was taking a break, unplugged from almost all other commitments that didn’t involve doctors, and closed the file on my work in progress. And perhaps on my writing dreams forever.

For a while, each day consisted of learning all I could about my new illness and taking a non-optional two hour nap every day when a wave of exhaustion demanded I listen. When treatment began, a drug reaction caused a terrifying emotional meltdown that lingered for months.

Before this, when I was still in my “I can do anything” persona, I dug my mother’s manuscript from the files and began the painstaking process of scanning in the huge stack of typed pages. I’d inherited this tome—which I stored in a thick manilla folder wrapped in a brittle rubber band for nearly forty years—during one of her suicidal rages when she threatened to burn it all after yet another publisher turned her down.

Mom’s passions were writing and her work to help end child abuse. She gave up trying to publish her book after the last rejection letter said that “wanting to prevent child abuse was a poor reason for writing a book.” Her memoir, I Want to Live!, is the story of being an abused child, an abusive parent, then a parent doing everything in her power to stop the cycle of generational abuse. When she passed in 2012 without ever seeing her life’s work in print, I resolved to one day make her dream come true. I scanned the first page on Feb 26, 2021, and finished within a couple of days. I didn’t look at it again for almost a year-and-a-half. That project, along with so much more in my life, got caught in the storm of my burn-out.

I’m not good at sitting around doing nothing. I also believe that everything has a season. In between those mandatory naps in early 2022, I sought out no-stress projects. I finally transferred all our family videos to digital format. While one video churned in the background, I’d grab a PDF chapter of Mom’s book and convert it into MS Word format. OCR of a copied typed page isn’t a matter of “oh, here are your words…have fun.” The scanner picked up tiny folds in the paper and Word interpreted those as lines. Some pages included Mom’s handwritten edits, and Word failed miserably while attempting to convert those into something intelligible, sometimes adding absurd formats, such as continuous breaks or bizarre graphics in the middle of sentences. All this weirdness had to be corrected individually.

Since I had no deadline for completion and no expectations, I had no stress, even though this work required me to utilize everything I knew about formatting books in Word—as I’d done for many clients—and forced me to learn even more. I found I could work on Mom’s book when all other attempts at anything writing-related failed. But ask me to put something on my calendar with a due date and this once formidable project manager quaked.

2022 was mostly a writing desert. Other than a short story in January, I wrote almost nothing of my own. By the time I’d finished cleaning and editing the chapters in Mom’s memoir, and arranging them in a way that made sense, the leaves had turned. My creative brain began to reawaken with tiny sparks at first, a tickle in that place where ideas come alive. I wrote the foreword and epilogue and began my quest for a cover. At some point, I looked up and realized that Mom’s 90th birthday was fast approaching, and I set that as my publishing goal. My first true goal in nearly a year.

I’d only read Mom’s manuscript once, way back in the 80s. By now, I’ve read it a dozen times. I’ve also read many of Mom’s published articles and several of her journals, all of which live in boxes under the guestroom bed. What began as the fulfillment of a deathbed promise became a way back into creativity for me in a low-stress, low-commitment way—a way that did not reignite my sometimes destructive “I can do everything” nature. I did it for love. Love for my mom. Love for the craft of writing. Love of a job well done with no preconceived notions of where it might take me.

This journey has allowed me needed time to heal. My health has improved and I’ve been taken off one of my immunosuppressant medications. I have energy and more good days than bad. The icing is that I’ve begun thinking about my long-dormant work-in-process, my first crime thriller. I published Mom’s memoir, I Want to Live! almost exactly two years to the day after I scanned that first page, on what would have been her 90th birthday.

I’d thought publishing her book was my gift to her legacy. Instead, it was her gift to me. A path back…to the pure joy of writing.

—

Jeanne Felfe is the author of the sweet, second chances romance novel Bridge to Us, and standalone short stories Summer Song, Love at Sea, and Edge of Life. She’s had over 30 short stories, essays, and poems published in various anthologies. Jeanne is currently working on a new crime thriller series. She resides in St. Charles with her fiancé and two dogs who believe they are tiny humans. She served as the president of Saturday Writers from 2019-2021

Find out more about Jeanne on her website https://jeannefelfe.com/
Connect with her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/author.JeanneFelfe/
Connect with her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JFelfe
Connect with her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeannefelfe/

I Want to Live!: My Journey Beyond Generational Child Abuse, Helen Imagene (Jean) Jones Felfe and Jeanne Felfe

Raw. Brutally honest. Starkly emotional.

In I Want to Live! Helen Imagene “Jean” Jones Felfe bares her soul in her lifelong quest to end generational child abuse, and to stop future children from the suffering that she and her thirteen siblings endured. Her goal—that her book would lead one parent out of the cycle of abuse, and help just one child.

This is not an easy book to read, however it’s an eye-opening dive—from the viewpoint of a dual victim—into how child abuse still pervades society and is passed from parent to child, often for generations before someone finally finds a way out. Jean Felfe was both—abused (physically and psychologically), and an abuser (psychologically). She found a way out of the cycle, but not until she entered college in her early 40s and attended a lecture on child abuse.

This moment of realization set Jean on a course of self-recovery and a quest to help others that led her to write this book and to form a chapter of Parents Anonymous® in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1975. She also served on the Texas Parents Anonymous® board.

Born in Ross City, Texas in 1933, Jean’s writing career spanned decades and produced volumes of articles mostly published in small newspapers throughout Texas. A Cry of Pain, An Autobiographical Docudrama on Child Abuse won a Golden Pen award in 1980. Her passion was the prevention of child abuse and she spent much of her adult life writing and speaking on this topic.

Jean passed away in 2012 without realizing her dream of publishing her life’s work. Her daughter, Jeanne Felfe, preserved the manuscript when Jean threatened to “burn it all” in a suicidal rage after a literary agent told her that “wanting to prevent child abuse was a poor reason for writing a book.” Jeanne stored the book for over forty years, moving it from one home to the next, until finally, in 2021, she began the painstaking process of transferring the typed pages into digital form, editing, and preparing it for publication.

I Want to Live! is a labor of love from both mother and daughter. We hope it helps someone find their way beyond the cycle. There is a way out. A portion of each book sold will be donated to Parents Anonymous®.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing