My Memoir is 11 Years Old This Week!
And, it's still a good story.
Hey friend,
It’s a significant day in a significant week. Did you know I wrote a memoir? Eleven years ago this week Dear Boy: An Epistolary Memoir was released to the world. And today, November 15, is the day my brother (the “boy” in Dear Boy) would have been fifty-three years old.
He’s been gone for sixteen years, and this day is so much easier than it used to be. But I wrote a story that I think is still worth talking about—because it’s about so much more than a young woman losing a brother.
It’s about how mental illness shapes and then shatters a family.
It’s about about the jaws of longing that yawn open at the skies in search of connection with those we’ve lost.
And about grieving the loss of people still living, of things we can’t fix this side of heaven.
And domestic violence and divorce. Munchausen syndrome by proxy, 80s skate culture, and tattoos.
But, it’s also about hope.
And faith and belief and beauty.
And laughing when you could cry (and vice versa).
And rebuilding and recovery.
If you’re looking for a good book to read, I humbly recommend this one. You can find it here, or if you’re in Iowa City, at Prairie Lights Books.
⬇️Check out this excerpt below ⬇️
Dear Boy,
There are nights I lie in bed and think of Lazarus. You might remember from your days in Sunday School that Lazarus’s everything—not just the brainstem—was dead three days before he came back to life. “If you’d been here,” Lazarus’s sister had chastised their friend, Jesus, “my brother would not have died.” I think about raising the dead, or even a dead brainstem, in an early morning hospital room. How hard could that be, compared to Lazarus, who was decaying and entombed by the time of his resurrection?
Before the rest of the family entered the viewing room, I stood alone next to the table where you lay dressed in a pale-print hospital gown, a white sheet respectably pulled up to your chest. I knew they had taken away your brain by now—probably your heart and kidneys, too. I knew from the way your tattooed arms swelled that they had siphoned out your blood and pumped you with too much formaldehyde.
There I thought of raising you and of Martha and her indictment of Jesus: If only you’d been here. But the indictment was altered in my head: If only I’d been there as you lay dying. I have faith for hospital-room prayers, brother. I have faith for machine-living prayers and faith for brainstems and lungs when brainstems and lungs are still in the body. But funeral-home faith? I would need more time to muster it—more time than I’m allowed in a few brief minutes—for a new brain, new heart, new kidneys to grow.
“Wake up,” I whispered. Because I wanted you back: “Wake up,” less prayer than command. I half-expected your corpse’s eyelids to flutter open, the pale freckles on your cheeks to liven with color, the stitching on your skull to fade into tender, new skin. I could almost see fresh cells smoothing over gravel’s abrasions, fresh cells pushing shards of glass out of the pores of your forearms, making them fall like broken miniscule stars to the carpeted floor.
--Dear Boy,: An Epistolary Memoir