Book Number Three in the Making

I have written every day of my life for twenty-seven years.

Writing is both job and art, work and passion.

Writing is a way for me to explore my own questions. Some people are verbal processers. They talk and talk. I process more slowly. When I write, I know what I think.

I began writing my first book with a thousand questions.

Why had we worked in Zambia?

Did we accomplish anything after all those years?

Living with multiple languages in an African culture while being married to a man from the Netherlands was complicated to say the least. I wrote searching for myself. Who had I been? Who had I become?

When the book was published, something surprising happened.

Readers began to write to me saying, “I’ve never been to Zambia, but I’ve “had my own Africa“. They wrote of hardships, unexpected loss, how they learned to live when life wasn’t what they expected or wanted. One woman in a class I was teaching to female inmates at a local jail said, “If you can do Zambia, I can do jail.”

Writing memoir isn’t about the author, the ‘I’ writing the book.

Good memoir writes into the human condition, into love and loss, betrayal and joy.

By reading about others, we learn about ourselves.

I wrote my second book while searching to understand the Netherlands, the land where my husband had grown up.

What did it mean to build a family across cultures and languages?

What did it mean to be a daughter-in-law?

What role did WWII play in my father-in-law’s demanding personality? Why euthanasia when he was still healthy?

I needed to explore these questions because they wouldn’t leave me be. Writing became my way into understanding, which then allowed me to let go and move on.

The journey back to writing, after my surgery, has been long and full of potholes.

I did vision therapy every day for six months, and got new glasses (twice) with prisms to help my double vision. I went from not being able to read, to reading large print slowly, and am finally back to regular books.

For twenty-three months, after my surgery, I barely wrote. Working on the computer was just too much. My monthly blog post was all I could conjure up. That and some journal writing.

When friends asked, “What will you write next? Will you write about brain injury?”

I responded with a definite, “No!”

I wasn’t interested at all. The subject scared me and I was sick and tired of living with it. Brain injury was the last thing I wanted to write about. I’d rather just forget about it, pretend it hadn’t happened. Look the other way.

Then about a month ago, I woke up with the need to understand what happened.

What went wrong after my surgery?

My memories are mostly non-existent. I only have a few fleeting memories of the next three months of my life. That gap, that hole, called to me and wanted to be filled in with facts, with details, with information.

When I sat down and began to type, it flowed. The first pages complete. So, I kept on. What surprised me most is how little I understood about my own surgery and its aftereffects.

This past month, I’ve spent three or four hours a day looking back at journal entries, doctor’s notes, asking questions, listening to my husband’s side of the story, researching brain injury.

Writing and researching is opening a Pandora’s Box of my own questions.

I am reminded of Yusef Komunyakaa’s words,

“Don’t write what you know. Write what you are willing to discover.”

It takes a kind of bravery to wade into the unknown. To be willing to discover what you might not want to find. But here we go!

It looks like Book Number Three is in the making.

It feels wonderful to be really writing again. It’s another big step. Oddly, it makes me feel more like the old me and more like the new me at the same time.

Here’s to big steps, and to going backward in order to find a way forward.

Happiest of Holidays to you and yours.

Thank you for being a part of my long journey.

Love always,

Jill