it didn't bleed? That's what I'd done, cut too deep to even cry. I just drove, abandoning my wispy-haired, short-armed baby girl, the child who'd walked into her first day of Just for Kix, all belly and knees in her black leotard, clapped her hands to get everyone's attention, and in her high, precious voice thanked all the other little girls' parents for taking time out of their busy day to come watch her dance, the first true love of my life, Zoë Rayn.
I ran out on her because I feared what I would do if I stayed.
It took just past the end of the driveway for my prefrontal lobe to calm the animal in me. My daughter was three years old and alone in our house. I don't think she'd ever been alone in a room before. She was frightened of the dark and the entire basement, would grab my hand with her chubby fingers when strangers talked to her, was as defenseless as a newborn fawn.
My fear bowed to nausea. I tried to turn the car around, but the snow was too high, only a single lane plowed on my back country road. I had to drive one more icy mile before there was enough space to change direction, and by then, I was sobbing so hard that I was gagging. I'd seen the look of betrayal on her face in the forever-moment before I'd raced out of the house. It had been ringed with terror.
I pulled into the driveway and leapt out of the car without turning it off.
I'd been gone for six minutes, a lifetime to a three-year-old.
I raced into the house.
Zoë was exactly where I'd left her, on the floor, boots lying beside her. Potty-trained for well over a year, she had wet herself in fear. The dark stain flowered on the front of her elastic-waisted jeans. A puddle had formed underneath her. She was staring at the ceiling, shuddering.
She'd seen that awful thing in my eyes, and then she'd heard me drive away.
I picked her up. I held her until she stopped shaking and the weeping came, that heaving gale of the shattered child. If my heart wasn't already broken, it would have cracked when she stuttered, “I'm sorry, Mommy. I'm sorry about my shoes.”
I cried with her, told her she hadn't done anything wrong. I apologized, but I knew there would never be enough sorries. I cleaned her up, me up. I wanted to stay at home and hold her all day, shut out the world, but sometimes you catch a glimpse of unbending Truth and I knew that if I didn't step back into the stream of life that day, I wouldn't ever again.
I drove to day care. I confessed.
When I arrived at work, I called her dad, Lance, and told him, too, what I'd done. I'll never forget how kind he was in that phone call. I expected him to take her away from me, for day care to call the authorities. They would have been well within their rights. Instead, everyone supported me with that peculiar aching sadness, like they knew something I didn't.
I started writing May Day that night, after Zoë fell asleep.
Compiling journal entries wouldn't have worked for me. I couldn't survive reliving the pain, not then, not on my own. I needed to convert it, package it, and ship it off. All those mysteries I'd been devouring offered me a glimpse of the potential order I could bring to my own story, a way to rewrite my life. Based on the number of people who line up after my writing workshops for a private word, or who contact me online, I know I'm not alone. There are many of us who need to reprocess our garbage, but who can't bear the idea of writing memoir, whether it's because we are too close to the trauma, don't want to hurt or be hurt by those we're writing about, or simply prefer the vehicle of fiction.
I kept up writing May Day, rubbing it like a worrystone, afraid to relapse into that gaping darkness where I was the monster. I wrote about laughter, the unexpected, a woman startled by the death of someone she loves. She thinks she's responsible but is held up by unexpected allies. In the end, she solves the mystery of his death.
May Day is an uneven book, my first real novel.
It's entirely fictional and was deeply therapeutic to write.
When I typed the last word of that book, I knew the darkness would never return, not at the level that I'd experienced that day with Zoë, not in a way that had the power to obliterate me.
The research would tell you that I was externalizing the story, habituating myself to it, inoculating myself against deep grief by exposing myself to it in small, controlled doses. All I knew was that my brain wasn't spinning as much and I was beginning to feel again, even if it was the emotions of fictional characters. Little by little, I was carving out new space for thoughts that were not about death or depression. Through the gentle but challenging exercise of writing a novel, I was learning how to control stories, which is what our lives are—stories.
I'm not the first writer to discover this healing process.
Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is his public grappling with some of his more haunting childhood experiences, including a complicated, troubled relationship with his father. In addition to Dickens declaring David Copperfield his most autobiographical and favorite of all the novels he wrote, The Guardian places it at number fifteen in a list of the one hundred best novels in history.
Tim O'Brien is a Vietnam War veteran whose The Things They Carried is about a Vietnam War veteran named Tim O'Brien. The work is fiction. He coalesces something fundamental, something almost mystical at the heart of rewriting your life, when he writes in his most famous book, “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple.
Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep.
Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.”
Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did.
Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked by a friend why she must make everything a story. Her answer speaks directly to the power of rewriting your life: “Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.”
