Is it shameful that I have never outgrown my tolerance for if not adoration of reality television, started in the 1970s with the people on An American Family.
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Writing exists in my life free of neurosis or attachment. It has brought me a little fame and money but mainly it has given me purpose, a way to process what sometimes seems impossible to accept or forgive. It has also given me a way to help others. As a writing teacher and coach, I have witnessed students discovering their stories whether based on fact or conjured from dreams and imagination. Writing was a way to change the realities of my childhood. While my parents were brilliant, funny and loving they were also narcissistic and self-destructive. My father’s dedication to his writing and to the writing of others as a respected literary critic made several things clear to me when I was very young. The importance of books was manifest while the writing of them was potentially a form of torture. Witnessing my father’s disappearance into his own writing with the subsequent publishing and frequent frustration when his novels were remaindered convinced me that the life of a writer was a life I wanted to avoid.
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The worst year of my life was the year I was in eighth grade. I was fourteen, had braces on my teeth, and was, according to our grumpy and insensitive doctor, “chubby.” I found boys baffling and icky, and had lost my best friend who had moved to Ohio while I languished in New Jersey. I was attending one of the worst public schools in the country staffed by right wing lunatics who were out to get me because both my older sisters had protested against the Vietnam War. The only person I liked in my grade was having an affair with our social studies teacher. The only boy who talked to me was dropping acid in algebra class. Home wasn’t much better. My oldest sister was in her second year at college living with a boy my parents found alarming while my next oldest sister was beautiful and annoying. No one paid any attention to me except to suggest I work harder in school or clean up the kitchen.
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