Friends and
family puzzled over the announcement that I have written a memoir. “I thought memoirs are written by people who have already lived a life.”—was the general sentiment, and, “What have you done in your life to fill three-hundred pages?” Do my friends and family who are not writers live a life without drama? I think not. Mostly, I think, they don’t consider their experiences important beyond themselves.
Alcohol, drugs, sex, obsessions of the fatal kind and high profile people make it into the bookstores for readers to devour their rise and fall. But each one of us in our little world are struggling every day with all kinds of emotional and physical challenges. What is perceived as ordinary takes great patience and endurance to accomplish—The bakery that provides fresh bread every morning, a 9-5 job, or the old woman who carries her grandchild on her back.
My cousin, who was a judge, once chuckled at the jury process. When asked who were the people who made it to the jury box, she said they were the ones you saw standing in line in the DMV. An off-hand remark separating us and them for a good laugh, until my aunt said, “I was picked three times.” We are as ordinary and extraordinary as we want to be.
amen on the final line: “We are as ordinary and extraordinary as we want to be.”
I’ve read the memoir: Your life has been far from ordinary. And as poets from the seemingly mundane we mine the mythic.