I just thought it was important that people knew right from the jump that I've got problems. But in all seriousness, that's a huge part of my writing process.
Memoir is a unique opportunity to revisit yourself. I don't mean by memory. I mean in the revision process. You don't just write a chapter and that's it. You must constantly return to it. You must dote on it. And even if it's saying something ugly about who you are, you have to find the poetry in it. You have to find the poetry in yourself.
It's important to write like your readers are brilliant.
I never wanted/expected to write a memoir, but this life thing, it has a way of sideswiping our worlds, scaring us so thoroughly that our past lenses of contextualizing events don't work - they cease to matter.
If Dante was writing The Divine Comedy in 2013, he might very well have set part of it in the suburbs.
