“GIRL NEXT DOOR” is “The Tender Bar” meets “Harriet the Spy” plus lyrical natural beauty. 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.
Playing music was the most beautiful way I’d watched people express connection and togetherness. I had a persistent fantasy of playing guitar and singing for someone I loved. I couldn’t have articulated that, and I wouldn’t have dared to anyway.
The scenarios I thought I confronted were:
1) Be erased by meeting the standards of a universe in which I can’t exist; or
2) Resist and prevent rites of passage that can neither be resisted nor prevented.
By the time I wanted to apply to college, which was after I’d already graduated from high school, I believed my mom had been wrong about me. I wasn’t extra smart, in fact I was unable to do what it took to really get somewhere.
The “Fran” character in my memoir goes from being a secure little girl whose boisterous, tomboy personality shines, to feeling as lost and frail as an abandoned baby animal, then through a meandering path of uncertain steps until she recognizes herself again as the smart, outspoken girl she was meant to be.
I built a fitness community around a popular brand. This time, in my writing, I don’t have a well-known brand. What do I have?
I researched a figure from my past, and when I found myself unexpectedly on the phone with her, I was ready to reach out about our shared memories. I was thrilled to have the chance to thank her for how she’d helped me in 1979.
My mom had shown me over and over again that it was my own responsibility not to be bored when there were so many things I could do alone, such as read or draw or talk with her, write in my journal, or write a letter to my aunt.
I’ll spend the weekend at a retreat with Motherless Daughters author (and support group creator) Hope Edelman and others. I don’t know what to expect to “get out of” it. I hear my inner eleven-year-old asking, “Will I cry?” because at Mom’s death, she did not.
