Second draft completed

I finished the second draft of my memoir! That warrants an exclamation point, right? I was so happy when I typed END on the last page.

I’m giving myself until the end of February to make simple revisions and cuts, and then I’ll send it to a few friends and beta readers for feedback. Here’s the pitch:

GIRL NEXT DOOR: A Coming-of-Age Memoir of Early Loss

A mom who dies in her 40s leaves her little girl with inner strength to get through the hardest of times, and to make a safe-enough path to adulthood. An eleven-year-old only child in Chicago, alone with her feelings, Fran resolves to have the life she thinks her mom intended for her: a life with her mom’s family in their beloved, beautiful rural Arkansas.

Reality erases this childhood vision, but to Fran’s surprise, happiness trickles into her real world. Journal-writing, bike rides, and well-chosen neighborhood friends ultimately help teenaged Fran appreciate the real life that is uniquely hers, and she begins to integrate her loss into her memories and her pathfinding.

This is “The Tender Bar” meets “Harriet the Spy” plus lyrical natural beauty.

Sound like something you would like? Want to be a beta reader of a high-quality draft? Let me know. Oh and tell me if you like the title, versus former working title ENOUGH SOLID GROUND, which refers to a metaphor in the book.

Why did I write this book?

I wanted to draw a picture of how the strength of character I got from my mother allowed me to grow up safely, despite not having a therapist or any other place to talk about my feelings when she died. My mother’s enthusiastic love and support of me when I was ten and under allowed me never to really lose my self-belief. Loss of confidence did diminish the whole trajectory of my outward life and my career — but writing this book let me discover so many things I did well enough, and that my father did well enough, so that I wasn’t permanently derailed. 

I didn’t even have siblings. My father and I lived alone together with no one to buffer our isolation, our expectations, our lack of understanding. Realizing the profound difference in being an only child gave me a new look at, and a new appreciation for, the friends who were with me then.

I also wanted to sift through my journal entries and memories to figure out where my intense grief went. I thought, when I was growing up, that because I had not cried, because I had continued to function normally, that I didn’t experience grief and wasn’t normal. Creating this story from among my many stories showed me that I experienced grief. I experienced it through feelings of longing, anger, wounded entitlement, envy, and desperation. I was never able to recognize them as grief.