Grandma was in her 90s and more than 60 years had elapsed since the family left Cuba, but my mother was not making a point about the passage of time; she was showing me a family tree made not of DNA or birthdays but one made of stories, shared experiences, and memory. As my mother’s only daughter, someday I too would be my mother’s memory. Perhaps that was already underway. 

I did not intend to use my grandmother’s and mother’s stories in my travel memoir A Little Piece of Cuba: A Journey to Become Cubana-Americana. This book is about the five days in Cuba that changed my life and my view of myself as a Cuban-American woman. But, as a young child learns from the world around them, I learned about Cuba from the words and actions of my mother and grandmother.

They made a mysterious foreign embargoed land accessible: My mother showed me Cuba’s place on a world map and told me that our family’s presence in Cuba that dated back hundreds of years, and my grandmother demonstrated what a day looked like in Cuba by introducing me to Cuban food, speaking a little Spanish around me, and teaching me about Cuban customs, hobbies, and pastimes. When I asked questions, they answered and added a little story or two. Their perspectives wove together, complemented, and informed one another, giving me a starting point for exploration and curiosity.

As I grew up, my mother’s stories evolved not because she had learned something new or because she had eureka moments of sudden remembering, but because my mother realized that she had become the custodian of a collection of my grandmother’s memories. My mother told me stories from Cuba and those first few years in the United States that my grandmother was a part of but never told me herself. My mother vividly recalled struggles faced as they adjusted to life in a new country. Those early challenges compelled my mother to safeguard her story, so that for years all I knew was, “We left Cuba one day and never went back. The End.”

She was not being vague or secretive; she was learning how to tell both her own narrative and her mother’s. She has embraced all aspects of her story from the harrowing tales of a child growing into adolescence while stuck between two worlds to lighthearted tales threaded with humor and joy. Her relationship with and her stories about Cuba will always be hers alone, and so will my grandmother’s. No story is ever complete and I have to acknowledge and respect that there are likely other custodians holding other parts of their stories. Still, I am glad that “The End” has been abandoned in favor of a flowing continuum and layering of stories from my grandmother to my mother to my mother’s version of my grandmother’s story and finally to me.

When I traveled to Cuba as an adult, I unknowingly packed a carry-on bag of matrilineal oral history that came to life as I experienced Cuba myself. As I walked Havana’s famous sea wall the Malecon, I recalled both my own memories of beach days with my mother and my grandmother’s stories of her beach visits when she was a young girl in Cuba. As I tucked into a plate of arroz con frijoles, fragrant with garlic, I remembered my mother’s innovative adjustment of the classic recipe for a slow cooker so that weeknight dinner cooked itself and how my grandmother guided me through a recipe for the classic Cuban dish arroz con pollo.

My memories and my matrilineal narratives came to life and re-invented themselves in my Cuba, and I leaned into them as artifacts, no less solid than a fossil in a museum or a document in an archive, overindulging in detail in early working drafts of the memoir. A few years had elapsed between my trip to Cuba and my first drafts of the memoir, yet I could rely on photographs from my trip to Cuba to jog my memories of Cuba and of my childhood and earlier years. As I spelunked the cave of my own memories from my past and my experiences of Cuba to form the book’s arc, my mother’s and my grandmother’s stories surfaced and joined mine as the scaffold for my own Cuban narrative.

Because family narratives are handed down in images, snippets, stories, food, and tiny acts that seem insignificant, it’s easy to dismiss them as unimportant or lacking in meaning for others. But many women exist from day to day in the small spaces where barriers between cultures, customs, and languages dissolve. When readers start to tell me a story about their grandmother and her recipes and stories from her country of origin, I see the universality in my experience. What I have found in sharing my story built from my matrilineal line is that women seek a custodian for their stories, someone who can dust off the artifacts, make meaning by bringing an experience from long ago into the present day, and mark the individual swirls of fingerprints left on this world.

Check out Barbara Caver’s A Little Piece of Cuba here:

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(Writing Scenes With Your Senses.)

And yet, I also discovered something surprising. Once I gave myself permission to be bold, I was able to draw on my multi-genre writing experience to create a memoir that was uniquely mine.

When starting a memoir, there’s documenting, and then there’s The Truth—which, depending on point of view, distance from the events, and a hundred other variables, can be squishy and subjective. Writing Wayfinding meant hours and hours of fact-checking. But once you’ve done that hard work and drafted your story (or stories), you eventually get to the fun part: polishing the vignettes.

Still, even after polishing, one big question remains: How do you know if the structure is right?

My Accidental Memoirist Story

A few years ago, I set out to write a poetry collection—a chapbook about my father. I had already published several poems on this topic in literary magazines, and I wanted to go deeper. Our relationship had been complicated, and I needed space to explore. I planned to build a 48-page chapbook from four or five foundational poems.

Here’s the thing about great writing plans: They often fall apart once the words start flowing. That’s exactly what happened. After a couple of weeks, I realized what I was writing wasn’t poetry. It wasn’t a chapbook. And it wasn’t even entirely about my father.

The poetic form felt too constricting for what I wanted to say. Within weeks, I had already surpassed the limits of a chapbook. I was excavating, discovering, questioning. Writing Wayfinding became a journey of its own.

Here’s the thing. At first, I played it safe. I “reported the news.” The draft of the book was good—but not great. I hadn’t been vulnerable enough. I hadn’t fully shared the questioning, the pain, or the insights I uncovered.

Then I got an editor. That’s when the real work began—and how I ended up with a nonlinear-hybrid-quest/journey-epistolary memoir. Could it fit neatly into one category? Sure. But the point is this: You, the writer, get to choose the format and structure. If you can’t find a structure that works, invent your own. Be bold. Why should fiction writers have all the fun?

Why Structure Matters

There’s another side to this: the reader. Books don’t live in a vacuum. If you’ve come this far in your memoir journey, you’re likely hoping for others to read it. You want them to engage, connect, and feel. The foundation for that intimacy begins with structure. I’ve created a framework to help you get started and remove some of the guesswork.

Memoir has no single magic formula. Structure isn’t just about order—it’s about meaning. Your story may need a linear backbone, a braided weave, or something entirely different. Experiment until the structure reflects both your truth and the experience you want your reader to have.

Memoir Structure Types

• Chronological/Linear: Start-to-finish, such as childhood to adulthood. I began Wayfinding this way, but later found that other structures better captured the fractured nature of my journey and better served the story.
• Nonlinear/Fragmented: Moves around in time and space, often circling a central theme. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.
• Braided/Threads: Weaves two or more storylines together. H Is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald.
• Themed/Topical: Built around a single theme (e.g., addiction, trauma, travel). Wayfinding ultimately took this form, organized by forms such as letters, themes like redemption, and geography. It is a complex structure, and it took trial and error to get it right.
• Hybrid: Mixes forms—essays, lists, poems, fragments. Wayfinding incorporates essays, prose poems, and letters.
• Epistolary: Told through letters, texts, diary entries, emails, etc. Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker.
• Quest/Journey: Centers on a physical, emotional, or metaphorical journey. Wild by Cheryl Strayed.
• Circular/Returning: Begins and ends in the same place (geographically or emotionally). Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

5 Tips to Help You Find Your Memoir’s Structure

1. Identify your memoir’s core theme(s).
If you’re unsure, ask for input. Common themes include trauma, relationships, resilience, and personal growth. Your theme often suggests a structure: A lifelong journey may suit chronology, while a series of linked events may work better in a nonlinear or themed format.

2. Define your memoir’s scope or timeframe.
Does your story cover decades or a short period? Solito by Javier Zamora focuses tightly on his two-month migration journey, while Becoming by Michelle Obama spans a lifetime.

3. Shape your story arc.
Like fiction, memoirs need emotional arcs. You might start a chronological memoir in the middle of a dramatic moment, or group stories by geography or theme instead of adhering to strict chronological order.

4. Be brave and explore possibilities.
Most memoirs default to a linear structure: “I was born, I lived, now I’m older.” I thought that would work for Wayfinding, too. But early readers challenged me. Eventually, I dismantled the book and rebuilt it in a nonlinear, thematic way—closer to how I experienced the events themselves. Masterful examples of nonlinear memoirs include Inheritance by Dani Shapiro and Mean by Myriam Gurba.

5. Leverage your storytelling tools.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. For some of the toughest material in Wayfinding, I shifted from narrative to epistolary—writing letters to characters and even an apology letter to my own body. At first, rewriting finished sections felt strange, but it turned out to be exactly what the book needed.

Your memoir deserves a structure that carries its deepest truth. Be bold. Experiment. Let the form not only serve your story but also foster meaningful engagement and connection with your reader.

Check out Renee Gilmore’s Wayfinding here:

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(The Messy House of Memoir.)

Throughout that time, if either of us saw something that reminded us of the other person, we’d DM or email. Once we both got cell phones, we’d text occasionally. He sent me a lovely note when I got remarried telling me how happy I seemed in my wedding photos, and how happy it made him to know that. Every six or seven months, I’d write him to say, “Hey. I’m still working on this book project about our marriage. Are you still okay with it?”

Maybe because I did that so often and no publication was forthcoming, I often felt like The Girl Who Cried Book. I wondered if he even believed I was writing anything at all as the years dragged on and on. Sometimes I wondered that same thing as I navigated parenting a young child with a full-time job with this elusive dream of a book always hanging over my head. No matter how real it felt to him, though, my ex-husband always said the same thing when I asked, “For the rest of my life, I promise you can say anything you want about me.”

Now, after more than 20 years of stalled attempts, that book is finally coming out. And once it became clear that the book would be published, I started to talk to my ex-husband more. I sent him the manuscript. We chatted about it, which eventually led to comfortable chatting about the rest of our lives. When I was in Chicago last year, we had dinner. When I was back in Chicago recently, we had brunch. We talk fairly often now, over email and text—sometimes about the book but mostly just about life: Movies we’ve watched lately, documentaries, podcasts, TV shows, songs we like, updates on family and friends.

During that long time I was writing our story, it was easy for him to feel like a character I’d invented. But I knew I’d be sharing stories about intimate moments of our life together. I knew in order for my story to make sense I’d have to include details of his life that it had taken him years to be able to say out loud: among other things, the fact that he’d spent his adolescence in conversion therapy and then not shared the full details of that with me until several years into our marriage.

When we’d chat, though, I’d be reminded of the stakes of what I was attempting—the reality that this was a living, complex, sacred human being with whom I’d shared seven years of living, complex, sacred human time. I hope that the gravity of that responsibility comes through in the way I wrote about the two of us. It’s meant more than I can say to hear from readers and writers who’ve already read the book that they think it does.

About a year ago, in order to finalize the plans for the manuscript, the legal department at my publisher needed my ex-husband to sign a waiver that read, “I agree that I have been fairly represented in the manuscript, and I give my consent to publication of the material relating to me.” He immediately did so and returned it to me before I’d even closed out of my email.

I’d never been worried he would refuse at the last minute to sign off on the manuscript. I knew he knew enough about it and about me to trust that I wasn’t going to betray or exploit him. So, it wasn’t necessarily relief or at least it wasn’t only relief I felt to know he was signing off on the final project. I think the more accurate way to describe how I felt would be validation.

He was the only other person in that marriage I’d been excavating for two decades. Because of all this, no matter how the book is ultimately received or reviewed, there’s no endorsement that will ever mean more to me than that signed waiver. And no love letter I ever received from him meant more.

Because you doubt yourself constantly when you attempt to write anything at all, especially a story that really happened. So, to have the other person involved in the story say, “This really happened—not just the facts, but the emotional truth of it. The depiction of me feels honest and accurate. I agree to let this person who used to be married to me share these details of our life together,” undid me for several days in ways that not even my most effusive endorsement has done since.

I don’t know that there are any universally applicable rules to how best to write about someone else’s life, especially if that person is alive and able to contradict or refute what you might say or worse, to be wounded by the way you might say it. In my particular case, I constantly wrestled with how much of anyone else’s story to share in telling mine. I knew I didn’t want to center myself in his story or to share anything I felt was only his to tell. I knew I wanted to tell my own story and have that be the focus of the narrative.

But here’s the thing: None of us live a life in which there are no other people. If we’re going to write about our own lives, then other people will always be implicated in those stories. One approach I took to ethical treatment of others in my work was that before publishing anything that included someone else, I showed them what I’d written: my college roommate, my parents, my brothers, etc. I could do that because I love and trust all those people, and they are all safe people for me. I know that’s often not an option for other writers telling stories that involve unsafe people.

No matter what, I think it’s important to constantly interrogate your own memory and motivations. I’ve read several memoirists who said they’d never write unless they felt they could do it from a place of love. I’ve heard others who say that particularity is the key. Both those approaches—love and particularity—resonate with me deeply.

Ultimately, maybe it’s only in remembering how wrong you can get it that we can ever be right when we attempt to put a 3D human being onto 2D paper. It makes me feel connected to adherents of religions that never attempt to draw the Divine. We will never get all of it right—the entirety of any holy mystery—but maybe if we keep that in our minds, we can get closer.

Check out Kelly Foster Lundquist’s Beard here:

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(Dyslexia Is a Writer’s Superpower.)

I did not grow up believing I would write a book. I grew up with spatial dyslexia, which meant lines could tilt off the page, paragraphs blurred into brick walls, and sequences—left to right, up to down—refused to behave. But I also grew up with a father who believed the point of writing wasn’t to look smart; it was to be understood. When I finally sat down to write my memoir, Nobody’s Girl: Mother, Model, CEO On My Own Terms, I leaned hard on his newsroom rules and found my way through the maze—one clean, true sentence at a time.

Phrases and ideas fly in and out of my head on an ongoing basis, and the trick is to make note of them when it happens. Ultimately, I had an editorial village, too, but gathering your thoughts and crafting cohesive communication is quite a solitary process.

The lead is a lifeline

Writers talk about “finding the heartbeat” of a book. My dad called it the lead. “If you can’t tell me the story in one sentence,” Bill would say, “you don’t know it yet.” Because spatial dyslexia makes large outlines feel like quicksand, I wrote a one-sentence lead for every chapter before I wrote the chapter, starting with: WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY, WHEN.

Those five words were my compass. When a paragraph wandered, I held it against the lead. If it didn’t serve the sentence, it didn’t survive. That discipline kept me from drowning in backstory and helped me write with the forward momentum a memoir needs.

Writing out loud

Spatial difficulties make tracking lines of text exhausting, so I drafted much of the book by speaking. I recorded scenes. Later, I transcribed the audio and edited on the page. That two-step process gave me three gifts:

• Voice. When you speak your story, you hear your rhythms, your humor, your silences. The page sounds more like you.
• Honesty. It’s harder to posture out loud. Whispered details found their way into the manuscript because I heard myself reach for them.
• Stamina. Talking let me cover emotional ground without simultaneously fighting the mechanics of reading.

For revision, I flipped the process and used text-to-speech to listen back. Hearing each line read aloud made clunky phrasing obvious and highlighted where I’d lost the thread of a scene.

Short lines, strong verbs

The newsroom taught me to trust short sentences. Spatial dyslexia reinforced it. I pared paragraphs to their bones, then added only what clarified or revealed. Strong verbs did the heavy lifting—”confessed” instead of “said sheepishly,” “bolted” instead of “ran quickly.” I broke long blocks with subheads and white space, both to help me track ideas and to welcome readers who read the way I do: in focused bursts, with frequent breathers.

Fact-check the feelings

Memoir isn’t journalism, but journalistic values serve it well. My father’s second-favorite question (after “What’s the lead?”) was “Who says?”

When I wrote about a pivotal conversation from years ago, I felt in my gut it was the truth, which doesn’t necessarily have corresponding documentation. If two memories conflicted, I wrote that conflict into the scene. Paradox belongs in memoir. Confirmation through intuition gave me the courage to tell how it felt without hedging.

Build a reporter’s kit for your life

Reporters carry notebooks or index cards. Each card can hold a scene: where it took place, who was present, and the sensory specifics that tether memory to the body. In my case, this “reporter’s kit” was so burned in my memory and my upbringing I had no need to keep a physical card. I’ve lived my life with the phrases as a steady and repetitive understanding of how to approach many situations: Who? What? Where? Why? When?

When my brain was tired, I could still sort notes into a timeline. Moving the story physically helped me see the arc when the screen would not. That was another of Bill’s lessons: If the copy won’t behave, change the format, not the truth.

What my book set out to prove

We are more than our test results or advanced degrees, and we have many untapped resources within us. In addition to my innate problem-solving skills, I was blessed with a sharp tenacity and bundles of energy. I also had a profound instinctive awareness that I didn’t fit any traditional mold, either in academia or jobs, and had to amass the skills to be my own woman. Penning my memoir took an extraordinary effort. My mission of helping others do great things with their lives against sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds kept me going page to page.

Find editors who see you

In a newsroom, copy doesn’t go to print without an editor. Neither did my chapters. Because spatial dyslexia makes it easy to miss a missing word—I “see” what I meant, not what’s there—I recruited a small, steady crew for structure, continuity, a bit of cheerleading, and the ultimate finish.

In truth, I wrote a book about potential and belonging—to my own voice, to the people who held me accountable, and to a lineage of journalists who believe the truth can stand up to questions. Bill Crago didn’t make me a writer; he made me a reporter of my own life. The lead of Nobody’s Girl is simple: I learned to stop letting the shape of my brain be an apology and started letting it be a method.

If you are rigorous with facts and generous with feelings, others will feel your experiences. Hopefully, they will be inspired to live life on their own terms.

Check out Amber M. Brookman’s Nobody’s Girl here:

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(In Defense of Research for Writing.)

It began as an essay. I wanted to write about a phenomenon so typical of current Baby Boomer relationships in recent years. Many of us in the freewheeling 1970s had sidestepped traditional marriage and lifestyles and opted instead for informal live-in relationships.  (We didn’t have the term “domestic partner” back then.) We were committed to one another, but our relationship had no legal anchor or even a name. Now, many of us in our 60s and 70s are coping with our partners’ health problems. While we may not be their “next of kin” in writing, our emotional ties bind us to them in sickness just as they did in health.

I had hoped to submit the essay to the New York Times “Modern Love” column, but as I neared the finish line of the final draft, my relationship in real time took a dramatic turn. It changed the course of my essay (not to mention the course of my life) and I felt that I now had a deeper message for readers. In fact, to best communicate that message, I would need to expand the essay and tell the story in a full-length memoir. That would mean writing about individuals I met along the way and their roles in my life.

In any work of memoir or autobiography or creative nonfiction, as responsible writers we’re always mindful of the need to protect the identities and privacy of the people in our story. It’s more than simply changing names and locations. We’ll include a clearly worded disclaimer, avoid disclosing sensitive or embarrassing material, we might ask permission from those we write about. But in the case of a story that covers this span of time, in my memoir some of the individuals had passed away and their survivors didn’t know me or about me, certainly some had forgotten, there were many with whom I had lost touch and probably wouldn’t be able to find. Since the story ends with a mystery, I was afraid readers might be tempted to search out and approach these individuals in a misguided attempt to solve the puzzle. So how would I remain faithful to the story without compromising the privacy of the characters on my pages?

I grappled with the conundrum for many long hours. And then, once I knew I had taken all the necessary precautions, and the publisher had approved my disclaimer, I thought about my typical reading audience. I know them as mature and responsible. They don’t follow the lives of media or entertainment personalities, and I didn’t think they would be tempted to track down any of the individuals in my story. Instead of prying, they would accept my invitation to step back and take an honest look at how they themselves cope with life’s mysteries and their own searches for the truth. I felt that this invitation would provide an additional layer of privacy for the individuals in my story.

Another more curious phenomenon faces us. It’s the possibility that some of our readers may believe they see themselves represented in our story when, in fact, they’re not. It can happen whether we’re writing fiction, fact, memoir, or even science fiction! My mentor, Marion Roach Smith (The Memoir Project) believes it’s almost inevitable that someone reading our work will think we’re writing about them or someone they know. They’re not stalkers, just average people who misidentify a character we introduce. I’m reminded of an especially harrowing incident when a former friend from college contacted me about a novel I had written and excitedly claimed that the entire book was about her, when in fact she hadn’t crossed my mind in years! At some point, we need to remember that once we’ve been responsible with our writing, we have no control over what our readers read into our words.

Instead of seeing A Version Of the Truth as a story about my relationship and the people in it, I believe readers will accept my encouragement to see that we all face mysteries at some point in our lives, and we need to decide how we’ll cope. Do we go on searching in vain, do we cling to denial, or do we get a version of the truth we can live with, and live with it? The key to my own peace of mind was the realization that some truths will never be known, and I needed to find a version I could accept. When the memoir was published, I felt satisfied that I had safeguarded the privacy of everyone in it.

Check out Marsh Rose’s A Version of the Truth here:

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(Don’t Scrimp on an Editor.)

If I did it, I knew I had to do it honestly. No smoothing the rough edges. No skipping the messy middle. Because it’s the complex parts—the cracks in the foundation—that readers connect with. That’s where the truth lies, and I had a lot of truth to share.

However, when I looked back at my childhood diaries, stories, and poems, I slipped into a kind of emotional fog. That numb nostalgia—the kind that coats everything in gauze—made the memories feel blurry and just out of reach. I needed to write about things that were murky, confusing, and not entirely resolved in that time. It wasn’t easy.

To write a book that would keep the reader turning pages, I had to do more than recall. I had to focus those memories into moments and describe them with clarity and momentum. I had to stop passively reporting what had happened—and start actively showing it.

This is the story of how I learned the difference between active and passive voice.

Or, to show you the passive version: This article was written by me to show the difference between active and passive voice.

See the difference? One has me rolling up my sleeves, engaging with you directly. The other sounds like I left the room and let my computer type it.

I’ve wrestled with this idea of active vs. passive voice for most of my writing life—which, to be honest, hasn’t been that long. I dreamed of writing for decades, earned a degree in English Literature (which, let’s face it, doesn’t automatically make anyone a writer), and wrote a boatload of papers. But that was a lifetime ago. By the time I finally sat down to write my memoir, I realized I’d been so busy living that I’d forgotten some of the most basic writing rules.

Here’s one I had to relearn the hard way: Use active voice—no matter if you’re writing in past or present tense.

I recently read a friend’s forthcoming memoir written in present active voice. The author captured her younger self’s point of view so vividly that I forgot I was reading about the past. It was as if the story were unfolding right before our eyes, happening in real time. Her use of active voice made it raw, moving, and unforgettable.

Writing in past tense, especially when recalling emotional or traumatic memories, can be a trapdoor to passive voice. We slip into explanation mode. We describe instead of evoke. It’s natural, maybe even necessary in early drafts. But in revision, we must breathe life into the retelling. We must turn passive explanations into active remembrances.

In my early drafts, I wrote lines like: “I was looking at the dolphin as it swam by.”

It’s not technically wrong, but it meanders. The emotional current is weak. I’ve learned to write instead: “I saw the dolphin swim by.”

Same moment. Sharper image. Stronger sentence. I’m no longer observing from a distance—I’m in it. The verb is doing the work.

Over time, I developed a radar for passivity. If a sentence leans too heavily on “to be” verbs—was, were, is, are—it’s often a clue I’ve drifted into passive waters. Not always, but often enough to matter. “To be” verbs aren’t evil, but they’re slippery little lifeboats when we’re afraid to swim into the emotional depths.

Another flag for me is the use of -ing words, such as “looking,” from the example above.

Active voice gives the reader something to grab onto. It’s grounded, assertive, alive. Passive voice, while sometimes useful—like when the actor is unknown or irrelevant—tends to blur the edges and slow things down. And memoir can’t afford to be blurry. It demands intimacy. Urgency. Truth in motion.

So if you’re writing your truth—your survival, your reckoning, your hard-won healing—don’t let your sentences whisper from the sidelines—step inside them. Be the subject. Own the verb.

Passive voice distances the reader. Active voice hands them the oars and says, Come with me.

Check out Leslie Johansen Nack’s Nineteen here:

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(How to Write Better Titles.)

In a Writer Unboxed article, author Barbara Linn Probst explores the art of crafting compelling book titles. Her reflections primarily draw from fiction. However, her insights prompted me to revisit the often-circuitous journey I experienced in naming my two memoirs. Unlike fiction, memoirs often carry the weight of personal significance. My memoir Open Turns: From Dutch Girl to New Australian, a story about being a young immigrant swimmer in Australia, demanded a deep dive into my adolescence. Finding its name proved to be almost as daunting.

Naming my first memoir When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew, about my childhood in WWII Amsterdam, was a breeze in comparison. I was a little girl whose adoring daddy was deported to a German labor camp, and whose mother joined the Resistance and hid a Jewish girl, who became like an older sister.

Allowing that little girl’s voice to guide the telling of my story felt like a gift. Who could not love a five-year-old who witnesses her foster sister being dragged out of her home, her mother held at gunpoint, suffers near starvation, and almost loses her life in a mass shooting when celebrating freedom? 

I cried as I wrote her story. She reminded me of the imagination and belief in miracles that helped me survive the darkness––when my father and I imagined that a toy dog could become a wolf, and when a “miracle moon” lit up the icy path along the canals to guide my mother and me home before the Nazi curfew might get us shot. The story named itself. 

When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew ends with my family boarding the immigrant ship that will take us to our new life in Australia. It won many awards. Readers demanded a sequel. And I wrote Open Turns: From Dutch Girl to New Australian. The ship has set sail.

At first, I wondered how a memoir about a teenage immigrant girl in the 1950s could be of interest to readers today. I was 13 years old when I left behind my friends and the swimming club where I belonged. Traumatized by war experiences, but armed with big plans and dreams, my younger teenage self would challenge me as I began to write her story. But I recognized and liked her willful strength and resilience.

As a family therapist, I have witnessed many clients face major life changes. Whether brought on by death, divorce, physical ailments, or loss of home through fire or flood, they needed that same human resilience and courage to hope in their effort to adapt to a new reality. I saw that my story was not just the narrative of an adolescent displaced girl, but the story of each one of us trying to navigate our way in a complex world. What inner hopes and intentions do we draw on as we face the inevitable twists and turns in our life journeys?

I devote a chapter in my book to a powerful memory of my father taking me for a walk in the Mallee scrub desert shortly after our arrival in Australia. I was angry and confused, suffering from nightmares. But under a darkening evening sky the stars had begun to flicker and a million lights formed a sparkling dome. With my hand in his, I found myself in a cosmic cathedral. And in that deep stillness, I heard the voice of that timeless land. Then, “Look,” my dad said pointing to the Southern Cross I had wanted to see. “We are all part of this. It’s all interconnected.”

His awe and reverence for the vast mystery of nature and the cosmos opened a traumatized teenager’s heart, and I, the older writer of her story, searched for a title that would reflect the power of that opening that helped her adapt to her totally new life. 

I ran different titles by friends and colleagues, even family in Australia, who said, “I don’t think you are quite there yet.” My editor Krissa at She Writes Press sent me suggestions that included terms used in swimming.

As a young state champion swimmer in Australia my strongest strokes were the butterfly and breaststroke, which demanded that at the end of each length of the pool, I place both hands firmly on the wall, tuck my knees under, turn and push off with all my strength. It is called an “Open Turn” in the swimming world, and it’s the way I have envisioned many a challenging turning point in my own long life. Those transitions, those times when we must take a breath and access the inner strength and resilience to face the next length, the unknown future, with hope and determination.

My book found its name. Open Turns: From Dutch Girl to New Australian. What’s in a name? Well, a whole story, of course.

Check out Hendrika de Vries’ Open Turns here:

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(Writing With Immediacy in Memoir.)

But now Grandpa—we’ve been on terms of endearment for three decades and counting—knows that my traditional Cuban father tried to ban me from playing baseball after I got my first period. That’s what you get for becoming a señorita.

I doubt my athletic exploits will stick in Grandpa’s mind. But will he be thinking about that first period the next time I visit him in Florida?

And he hasn’t even made it to the major depression I went through when our daughter turned six, the same age I’d been when we were kicked out of our home in Cuba. One night a guard arrived unexpectedly with our exit papers. We’d been waiting three years as gusanos, worms, the revolution’s term for people like us who were trying to leave the country. We suffered insults, turned over our house and what little else we owned to the revolution, and left friends and family behind we knew we’d never see again.

Will my father-in-law’s still-sharp mind focus on that part of the story or the parts where I reveal more than he and, let’s face it, even I expected? Will he think I’m weak for having suffered from depression? Stupid for telling the world how my ovaries impacted my baseball career? Will he feel embarrassed for his son and grandchildren, whose privacy has taken a hit because of my writing affliction?

I worked on Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town for many years, off and on, and nonstop for the last three. I thought carefully about my goals for the book, what to put in, what to leave out, story structure, chapter titles, Cuban history, US politics, quotations vs italics, and, of course, commas.

What never crossed my mind was that my menstruation history would one day end up somewhere in Grandpa’s head. That doesn’t seem fair to either of us.

Grandpa isn’t the only reader I’m worried about. I have neighbors, acquaintances, and friends who are quite analytical, private, introverted, and measured. They’re also super punctual, by the way. Some of them have gone out of their way to tell me how much they loved the book. Behind their praise, I sometimes hear the faintest question: Why would you reveal those things?

No one ever told me to think about those questions prior to publication. During the writing years, I was asking other questions, like, would the book ever be finished, would it ever see the inside of a bookstore? I felt entirely alone, as if I were groping my way through an unlit house in search of something vital—a word, an idea, a memory—that might or might not even exist. Those worries kept me far from the reality of how naked I’d feel one day when the book was in front of readers—real human beings.

When I started, I didn’t even want to write a memoir. I had wanted to write a novel based on our family’s experiences as refugees and fledgling Cuban Americans. But an acquaintance with years of experience in the publishing world told me, back when the idea of writing a book first started toying with me, that a memoir would be easier to write and possibly easier to sell. She was wrong.

I didn’t know many people in publishing then, so I set off to write a memoir. I realized early on that telling truths that I’d kept hidden from myself most of my life—not just my own truths but my family’s—and respecting historical facts were going to clobber me. I also knew those challenges might even make an author out of me, if I could pull it off.

As a journalist, I was comfortable anchoring our family’s story in historical events, the 1959 revolution, The Bay of Pigs Invasion, The Missile Crisis, the Mariel Boatlift, the Elián González controversy, etc. But I wanted readers to understand how those events impacted us personally. I wanted them to feel what we felt when the nightly news jumped out of the television set and landed on our sofa.

To bring them into that intimate space, I needed to earn their trust. I think that’s why I wrote about the dicey truths that another writer might have omitted. My reader, I hoped, would recognize the difficulty of sharing deeply personal moments and value my story even more as a result.

It’s a calculus all writers make, consciously or not. We are peeling away the layers of our soul with each word. Our ideas, our values, our mistakes and idiosyncrasies are all up for analysis, ridicule, and, with luck, appreciation for offering something that makes a reader feel human, see the world differently, or takes them somewhere they’ve never been and won’t want to leave.

That’s what some readers have told me my memoir did for them. Hearing their reactions makes the years of work, the doubts and frustrations, the sacrificed privacy, the all-nighters, the no shower days, the tears—because who doesn’t cry when they’re writing a book—worth it.

Those moments have reminded me again of the battle cry my mother taught me when I was young. Ponte guapa. Make yourself brave. I write about the motto’s impact on my life in my memoir, and I talk about the phrase when I do presentations. Recently, in a high school Spanish class, a student asked if I thought the meaning of the phrase had changed over the course of my life. Did ponte guapa mean the same thing to me now as it did when I was a young, confused, refugee surrounded by uncertainty and loss?

I know, right? He was only 17 years old. His question made me realize that ponte guapa, when I was young, inspired me to be tough, to not cry, to not look at the hard or ugly things that were happening to me, to us.

Today, ponte guapa inspires me to look at the hard and ugly things that happened to me, to us, to cry if need be, and to not be afraid of sharing any of it with readers, including Grandpa. I am a memoirist. That’s what we do. That’s how we’re brave.

Check out Ana Hebra Flaster’s Property of the Revolution here:

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(The Art of Imagination and Finding Voice in Memoir.)

I knew all of this and still, writing Flood—a memoir that aimed to act as a house that could hold the story of my husband’s affair, the birth of our twins, and the clownish care I received in response to an aggressive tumor in my right breast—I fell prey to doubt. Doubt was delivered through other people’s opinions in writers’ workshops that I charged on my credit card and also in graduate school where earning an MFA required producing an effective manuscript. The stakes felt high. I could not fail in the telling of my own story.

The overwhelming advice I received was to write the entire memoir in past tense. But I wrote it in present tense. This isn’t happening now an advisor wrote on my manuscript with a red pen.

There is nothing more immediate than bad news about your health. Far less immediate is writing about that news and having it become a book. Or not having it become a book. What I did have were two legal-sized boxes filled with past-tense drafts. Each was a natural evolution of the one before and also not right. Immediacy—that elemental thing that keeps a reader turning pages—was missing, like a house without a foundation.

Immediacy, urgency, and pacing are sometimes used interchangeably when describing a piece of writing, but they are different. The pacing of a story is the speed in which it travels. Urgency is the engine that drives it. Immediacy is akin to prioritizing. In a moment of crisis, there is no time for reflection. There is only do this now. For me, this was whatever the moment required: couples counseling, caring for two babies, chemotherapy—crying.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard had a great deal to say about immediacy. The entirety of his Intuition of the Instant from 1932 is devoted to unpicking Gaston Roupnel’s dramatic novel Siloë. Specifically Roupnel’s idea that “time has but one reality, the reality of the instant.”

The reality I was working so hard to describe was a series of instants lived underwater. But first I had to see the waves.

The following is a three-step blueprint that I developed for Flood:

1. I printed the complete manuscript and laid it out, chapter by chapter, on the floor.
2. Reading the last paragraph of chapter one followed by the first paragraph of chapter two, I asked myself are these paragraphs in conversation with each other.
3. When they were, immediacy was present. When they weren’t, I considered the penultimate paragraph of chapter one. I often found that the last paragraph of any chapter could be eliminated.

With my manuscript spilled all over the living room, I dug through a diary I’d written contemporaneously. What was remarkable was the effusion of exclamation points: Things are great! I shaved my head! The babies cried all day! I rarely use exclamation points. Their presence in the diary was like a series of red flags around a construction site.

I excavated those exclamation points as if I was digging for the first time. Rewriting the series of medical events in present tense and letting flashbacks remain in past tense resulted in the manuscript reading organically. The wave of one event led to another. A house appeared before my eyes.

Bachelard’s understanding of Roupnel’s novel is concerned with the sensation of immediate comprehension, “a moment when we suddenly understand our own message.” It’s in these flashes of insight that we know how to behave. Why when we cut our thumb slicing cucumbers for dinner, we don’t keep slicing cucumbers but instantly determine what’s appropriate: bandage in the bathroom or stitches at the hospital.

When I adopted past tense, something vital was lost. It was as if I was writing my way out instead of writing my way in. As Roupnel wrote in Siloë, “It is in the virtue of this present alone—in it and through it—that we become aware of existence. There is an absolute identity between the feeling of the present and the feeling of life.”

As the authority on our own work—even if it means going against the advice of seasoned writers we admire and respect—we have to be willing to swim. Past tense or present tense, fast or slow pacing, sustained or relaxed urgency, all of these are secondary to the immediate.

When Flood was accepted for publication, I burned the boxes of wholly past-tense drafts in my backyard. Then the rain came.

Check out Christine Kalafus’ Flood here:

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(Using Magic as Metaphor in Fantasy Novels.)

When we started opening the crates holding the old props and equipment, I flashed back on being backstage—walking through its fluid darkness, the humming crowds through the curtain, and my mother in black sequins smelling of hair spray and fresh lipstick. Then we rolled out the big gold top hat; I had jumped out of it in the opening number. It was a large stylish prop of ribbed wire and shiny gold plaster. And there she was—my stage-struck 14-year-old self in her first high heels jumping out of that hat to a round of applause. I viscerally felt her excitement and dewy optimism. Everywhere she looked was the promise of magic.  

A magic I had not found in my adult life. I didn’t like my job or where I lived, and my romantic relationships always fizzled out. I felt a little lost and sad, and yet I’d had this incredible adventure in the big magic show. To see and touch again all the old props—the musty foulards, foam birds, wire lady, battered wardrobe trunks—reminded me I had once experienced something grand. I wanted to understand that and write about it. I didn’t know why exactly. I just hoped it would lift me out of my malaise.

There is something intrinsically entrancing about a magic show and it doesn’t matter what side of the curtain one is on. A woman rises off the ground in inky blue light. All the backstage maneuvering to make this happen cannot diminish the feeling we are being lured into another way of seeing. Even backstage, amid all the secret compartments and angled mirrors, I believed something extraordinary could happen at any moment, and it wasn’t just my youthful exuberance.

We innately want to be released from a narrow, predictable world. As I began writing the book, I started to see what I had found, lost, and wanted to find again.

In writing The Magician’s Daughter – A Memoir, I had to embody the young girl I once was. I began reading my journals from the road. I had filled two 200-page notebooks with my musings, and apparently, I believed my father’s show was going to make me a famous magician’s assistant. But before the magic show, I’d had another dream. Stashed in my kid’s bedroom closet, were still my old music albums. They were reminders of my biggest dream of all—I wanted to be a famous rock-n-roll star. When the fancy illusion show came along, I traded my dream for my father’s dream even though all I had to do on stage was dress up, hand him props, and jump out of boxes. That’s when I realized this memoir would be about my journey back to myself within the light and motion of a magic show. 

A magic show with plenty of mishaps and disappointments. 

My father’s one cherished dream inspired this tour. He wanted to be a Las Vegas headliner and hoped that tour would be a springboard to a casino booking. Before I was born, he had manned his own traveling illusion show, and now he wanted to revive it in a big way.

Click to continue.

In The Magician’s Daughter – A Memoir I share his excitement for a steady venue in neon-lit Las Vegas, and also his discouragement as difficulties mount on the road. Each time I’m so disillusioned. I assume my father will pack-up the show and sweep us all back home, yet each time he keeps on. As I wrote, I recalled his determination and great belief in himself, people, and life. It’s what sent him on that quest for glory in the first place. What a great example he was to me. At least when I was a kid.

My adult relationship with my father was strained. I had discounted all his best, most inspiring qualities and even the magic show had become tainted. That was one reason why I was in such a mess. I was determined to—do it on my own. Each time I sat in front of the computer screen, I had to be honest. I’d been handed magic on stage and off. It was time to journey back to myself again, and love and appreciate my father and his magic show once more.

I worked on the book for many years unable to complete it. Finally, I admitted I didn’t want my father to read it because I had revealed many of his tricks and illusions. Some of the illusions were so intertwined with the plot, I had no choice. Other times it was purely poetic ornamentation. I also revealed tricks to give my readers a true backstage view into the artificial innards of a magic show. But the main reason was this—in order for my young self to find real magic on the road, I had to first know what isn’t magic. And there is nothing very magical about a magician’s secrets—a clip on a boater hat, sliding doors, black thread, eyelids on a floating ball, an extra card in an inside pocket. So uninteresting and hush hush.

When I joined the magic show, I understood nothing about its inner workings. What better way to bring the reader into the story. I discover the secrets, wonders, curiosities of the magic show as the reader does. We both watch my father for the first time load his pockets behind his wardrobe trunk. We both see that little claw on his thumb—a  thumb-tip with a razor blade duct-taped to the top. And we wonder, what act does he use that in? 

I had told my father I was writing a book and offered no other details. Each time I thought of publication, I wondered: How would I break the news I had exposed his floating piano? And everything else? He was guarded and cautious regarding his illusion show. Secrets are the beating animal heart of every magic show. No way I’d get by unscathed.

Throughout all this, author and poet Mark Doty was on my mind. His memoir Firebird cost him his relationship with his father which he wrote about in the essay “Return to Sender.” This line always stayed with me: “I have told the truth, which may indeed set you free, but not without the price of betrayal.” Betrayal, as strong as the word is, feels right in this situation. I wasn’t a stranger but a daughter whom he had trusted as an assistant. 

I shared the dilemma with a few writers. Some sympathized, others were dismissive, and one writer was angry. “Are you kidding me? You’re going to let him stop you. You have a right to tell your story.” 

What I’ve learned is that only I know what to do. It’s a personal decision without a right or wrong. Despite the issues between my father and I, there was love. He’d been generous to me in many ways, and in exchange, knowing my memoir would upset and embarrass him, I decided, at the age of 40, not to publish it till he was dead. This wasn’t exactly going to be soon. At the time, he was a happy and active senior citizen galivanting around Las Vegas and Hollywood performing and attending professional magic functions with my mother. I waited 13 years. He died in 2015. And the memoir is publishing this year. 

I cannot explain how the magic show changed me, without explaining how writing this book changed me. I went back to the beginning and saved myself. Magic. If I really look, it’s everywhere.

Check out Katy Grabel’s The Magician’s Daughter here:

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