The Accidental Memoirist Lisa Braxton

April 4, 2024 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

The Accidental Memoirist

Lisa Braxton

I became fascinated with memoirs when I was a teenager. I voraciously read the first-person stories of Hollywood royalty, like Elizabeth Taylor, Sydney Poitier, Paul Newman, and Sammy Davis Jr. I enjoyed learning about their lives on and off the big screen, what motivated them to pursue acting, the training they obtained to learn their craft, their successes, disappointments, and flaws.

As I got older, I moved beyond celebrity memoirs and read the accounts of people who weren’t in the limelight but had extraordinary stories to tell. Frank McCourt who wrote Angela’s Ashes, Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Jeanette Walls who wrote The Glass Castle, among others.

More recently my interest in memoir has gone beyond reading to teaching. For the past few years, I’ve been an instructor at Grub Street Creative Writing Center in Boston, Massachusetts. One of my courses is “Crafting the 5-minute Memoir,” a 5-minute memoir being defined as a brief memoir, an essay-length work that weaves together life experiences around a central theme that can be read within a few minutes and could become part of a larger work.

But I never saw myself writing a memoir, a 5-minute version or any other kind. From my creative writing professors, I got the idea that memoirs in general are a hard sell to publishers.

Outside of my community very few people know me. My life hadn’t been filled with drama or extraordinary experiences. I thought it would be boring for me to write a memoir and boring to the reader.

Then in 2019 my life took a hard pivot. My mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Within a few weeks I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I got laid off from my job just before the Covid-19 shutdown. My husband was laid off from his job. My father’s Parkinson’s disease and dementia worsened. A year and a half after Mom got her diagnosis, she passed away. My father caught Covid and my sister and I had to sue him to get possession of the family home to pay for his extended care. Less than two years later, he passed away. It was one of the lowest points in my life.

I attended grief support groups, where I talked with others who had also faced loss. I had several sessions with a therapist provided through my job. But I found that I was able to process my emotions best through writing. I wrote about the slumber party I hosted for just my mother and me weeks before she died. I wrote about my 89-year-old dad directing me to bring pen and paper to my next visit with him at the assisted living center so that I would take notes about his next business venture. I wrote about the beautiful letter my mother had written to me that I discovered among her papers as my sister and I were cleaning out the house to sell it. I experimented with my writing, creating some poems and lyric essays. I chose family photos to go along with the essays.

I’d write for a while and then flop face down on the bed emotionally exhausted, wiping tears off my face. Sometimes I’d laugh out loud reminiscing as I wrote. I enrolled in grief writing workshops to help me tap into more memories that I could write about. I began to think that others who were grieving might want to read what I’d written. I realized that I was living experiences possibly worthy of a memoir.

I contacted about a dozen small presses pitching my 70 pages as a chapbook. Within days I got a response from Sea Crow Press, an award-winning woman-run independent publisher based on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Publisher Mary Petiet said that she wasn’t interested in a chapbook, but a full-length book and if I thought I could hand in a manuscript of at least 100 pages, she’d send me a contract. I, of course, said yes. And that’s how my memoir in essays, Dancing Between the Raindrops: A Daughter’s Reflections on Love and Loss became a spring 2024 release with Sea Crow Press. That’s how I became an accidental memoirist.

People who’ve read my book have told me they were deeply touched by it. The editor who proofread and edited the manuscript said this: “Let me congratulate you on your beautiful book. It was a joy to read. Your parents leap off the page as does your esteem and love for
them.”

I hope that anyone who reads Dancing Between the Raindrops will find joy and comfort in the stories as they handle the complicated emotions that accompany grief. I hope that they are reminded that in their grief they are not alone.

—

Lisa Braxton is the author of the memoir in essays, Dancing Between the Raindrops: A Daughter’s Reflections on Love and Loss and the novel, The Talking Drum, winner of a 2021 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards Gold Medal, overall winner of Shelf Unbound book review magazine’s 2020 Independently Published Book Award, and winner of a 2020 Outstanding Literary Award from the National Association of Black Journalists and a Finalist for the International Book Awards. She is also an Emmy-nominated former television journalist, an essayist, and short story writer.

She is on the executive board of the Writers Room of Boston and a writing instructor at Grub Street Boston, and currently serves as President of the Greater Boston Section of the National Council of Negro Women and is a member of the Psi Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

She lives in the Boston, Massachusetts area.

DANCING BETWEEN THE RAINDROPS: A DAUGHTER’S REFLECTION ON LOVE AND LOSS, Lisa Braxton

A powerful meditation on grief, a deeply personal mosaic of a daughter’s remembrances of beautiful, challenging and heartbreaking moments of life with her family. It speaks to anyone who has lost a loved one and is trying to navigate the world without them while coming to terms with complicated emotions. Lisa Braxton’s parents died within two years of each other-her mother from ovarian cancer, her father from prostate cancer. While caring for her mother she was stunned to find out that she, herself, had a life-threatening illness—breast cancer. In this intimate, lyrical memoir-in-essays, Lisa Braxton takes us to the core of her loss and extends a lifeline of comfort to anyone who needs to be reminded that in their grief they are not alone.