Memoir Can Be a Time Capsule by Sharon Dukett
I spent many years writing a memoir. Back when I started in the 1980s, I didn’t even know what to call it. I wrote several chapters on lined paper in cursive because I didn’t own a computer yet. I had a typewriter, but based on my typing skills, I would never complete a book unless I hired someone who didn’t make all the typos I made.
Fortunately, in the early 1990s, I finally bought my first PC where I stored my chapters on floppy disks.
Back then, I believed I was writing a book about the 1970s. In 1971, when I was sixteen years old, I ran away from home in Connecticut to join the hippies in Southern California. For the next several years, those times lived in my mind as vividly as a motion picture. By 1991, I wasn’t sure that I still remembered everything until I started putting it on paper. I began by handwriting many of my scenes to start, then continued on the computer once the memories flowed. I often played songs I had listened to during those years, and they invoked strong images of the times, the people, and the experiences.
By then, I was working as a contract computer programmer and had young children. I timed my contracts to have summers off to spend with my family. This also provided the opportunity for me to write after the children were in bed at night or napping, because I wasn’t mentally exhausted from my job. But most importantly, I attended a nearby workshop and signed up for a first chapter manuscript review with a guest author. She gave me excellent advice that disappointed me at the time.
“Take some writing classes.”
These did not exist online. Instead, I attended the annual International Women’s Writing Guild summer conference that was held in Saratoga Springs, and a world opened to me. This organization focused on memoirs, which I now knew I was writing, and I walked away with new tools, skills, and found a local critique group. I continued to take classes and attend workshops, eventually doing so online. I put the work aside, sometimes for years, then picked it up again later. In 2020, my memoir No Rules: A Memoir was published, a book about awakening to feminism and finding my own strength against the backdrop of the early 1970s.
What I hadn’t realized until later, when reactions by readers started pouring in through reviews and in person, was how little had been written about this time period, particularly from the point of view of a young girl coming of age and experiencing life as a hippie. My original goal of writing a book about the 1970s was a significant part of my memoir and reading about an era they knew little about riveted readers. I had expected it to appeal to baby boomers interested in reliving those years, but at book fairs, I discovered young women were a large part of my audience. They wanted to learn about a time that was foreign to them.
Three years ago, I joined a Facebook group for a documentary film in progress about the Watkins Glen Summer Jam, a massive concert bigger than Woodstock that was held in 1973. While it was originally part of my memoir, I had cut it when I needed to shorten the book by 80,000 words. My entire commune lived thirty miles away and attended the event that summer. As a result of my comments on the page, the producer read No Rules, then asked to interview me for the movie. He said I did such a great job capturing the era that he wanted me to provide some historical and cultural background around the event. They interviewed me for an hour where I discussed everything from birth control, to the Vietnam War, to New York State’s extreme drug laws.
The film is still being finalized, so I have no idea if I will end up on the cutting room floor. But I realized how invaluable it is for authors to capture their history and share it with readers.
Memoirs are always about the past, and for some, providing insight into the lived experience during their times adds another level of interest that we, the authors, can share. One young reader told me my memoir gave him hope that his generation would make it through these current difficult times because mine did. Feedback like that reminds me of why I wrote No Rules.
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Sharon Dukett is an award-winning author who writes thrillers and memoirs. Her memoir, No Rules: A Memoir, won a gold medal in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards in Memoirs (Historical/Legacy), and was a finalist in several other writing contests. Her novel, The Shutdown List, won 1st Runner-up for an Eric Hoffer Award for Mystery/Crime, and several finalist awards.
Sharon is a member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. She is vice-president of the Connecticut chapter of Sisters in Crime.
She is currently working on another thriller.
https://www.facebook.com/sharondukettauthor/
https://www.instagram.com/sharon.dukett/
NO RULES
In this coming-of-age memoir, Sharon takes you with her on a nail-biting adventure through the early 1970s after leaving her sheltered home life at sixteen years old to join the hippies. Yearning for freedom, she lands in an adult world for which she is unprepared, and must learn quickly in order to survive.
As Sharon navigates the US and Canada—whether by hitchhiking, bicycle, or the back of a motorcycle—she experiences love and heartbreak, discovers whom she can and cannot trust, and awakens to the growing women’s liberation movement while living in a rural off-grid commune. In this colorful memoir, she reflects upon the changes that reshaped her during that decade, and how the ways in which she and her peers threw off the rules meant to keep women in their place has transformed and empowered the lives of girls and women today.
Buy No Rules here: https://books2read.com/NoRules
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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