How can you write about all
that stuff?
Doesn’t it feel weird to share
your secrets?
I couldn’t do it.
You’re so brave.
In one way or another I’ve heard
these questions and comments from readers since the publication of my first
memoir. My response has been, I’ll admit, a bit flippant, perhaps even rude at
times.
Such is the nature of memoir.
That’s why it’s called memoir.
But through the years I’ve
thought a lot about the truth behind both the questions/comments and my
responses. There is no doubt that memoir writing involves honesty, a bearing of
the soul in search of personal understanding and universal truth. It is the
telling of truth that readers connect with, the universal human experience that
truth touches.
I’ve come to understand that my
comfort with memoir lies in another, perhaps more deeply buried belief. We all
have buttons – expressions, comments, behaviors – that set us off. Understanding
where they come from or how they are formed is likely found in the field of
psychoanalysis. One of my buttons – or triggers, though I dislike that term –
is when someone says something along the lines of: That’s just the way he/she
is. People don’t change.
I don’t share that belief. I
never have. People can and do change when they mindfully make the decision to
do so. As Leonardo Shaw points out in this interview a friend shared with me recently:
“We all have within us, at any moment, the power
to transform the quality of our life.”
—Leonard Shaw
I am not the same
insecure girl I was in high school, or the same young woman making so many
mistakes, so many errors in judgement, or even the same young mother grappling
with first family tragedy while struggling to build a new family of her own.
We change when we
choose to be self-analytical, to question our past and work to build new
patterns of behavior. It’s hard, time-consuming, continuous work. The work of a
lifetime. But it is possible. So when people ask in ore form or another if I’m
not embarrassed to tell the secrets I share in my memoirs, my response has changed.
Now I say: I’m no longer that person. People change.
I feel compassion for
that younger me, but I am no longer her. She helped me become who I am today. She
gave me stories to share.
I hope you enjoy these stories of my years working as an undocumented teacher in Mexico City in the 1980s and
reconnecting with the women I knew during those turbulent years.
