Posts Tagged "memoir"

Last month, I had the honor of read­ing in “The Mama Mono­logues” at Corte Madera Book Pas­sage, along with NY Times best-selling author Kelly Cor­ri­gan and many other tal­ented Writ­ing Mamas. Spe­cial thanks to Dawn Yun, founder of The Writ­ing Mamas, for mak­ing this laugh­ter and tear-filled event pos­si­ble. We raised over $5,000 for Abelina Mag­ana, a North­ern Cal­i­for­nia mother of three who was shot 15 times and lived to tell. If you would like to make a con­tri­bu­tion to Abelina and her chil­dren, all of whom are still very much in need of our help, please send a check to: Attn: The Mag­ana Fam­ily Fund, Bank of Marin, 1450 Grant Avenue, Novato, 94945. Please enjoy this video of my piece, “You Think You Know,”...

    My dad is Lutheran, my mom is Jew­ish. My child­hood exposed me to tra­di­tions from both denom­i­na­tions, but I cer­tainly wouldn’t describe myself as religious. Spir­i­tual, yes. Reli­gious, no. In fact, if there is a god, I’m still pretty pissed off at him. Today, though, I can’t help but con­tem­plate the reli­gious mean­ing in both Easter and Passover. Seven years ago, on Easter Sun­day, my hus­band, Erik, and I admired our 17-month-old daugh­ter, Tatiana, as she care­fully grasped pur­ple and pink polka-dotted eggs in the grass. “Do you think about how lucky we are,” I said to Erik. He rubbed my ripe, preg­nant belly. “Yeah, I think about it at least five times a day.” Erik was a rising-star...

The red taxi drove away, leav­ing me there, alone, for three days of writ­ing, lec­tures, read-and-critique work­shops, author pan­els, edi­tor insights, net­work­ing, and the nerve-wracking one-on-ones with lit­er­ary agents. Already, I wanted to board the plane back to San Francisco. Only days before, my mem­oir, DROP DEAD LIFE, a preg­nant widow’s poignant, heart­felt, and often comic jour­ney through death, birth, and rebirth, had been rejected, via email, by yet another lit­er­ary agent. Like most rejec­tions, there wasn’t much com­men­tary on the actual writ­ing, but I con­jured up plenty of imag­i­nary bash­ing on my own. Not feel­ing very poignant or comic, I dragged my horse-sized brown suit­case up to the hotel lobby...

DROP DEAD LIFE, the blog, must make a shift. Despite my own inse­cu­ri­ties as an intel­lec­tu­ally under-stimulated mommy of four wild chil­dren, ages 2 through 12, my mem­oir, DROP DEAD LIFE, a preg­nant widow’s poignant, heart­felt, and often comic jour­ney through death, birth, and rebirth, has recently sparked enthu­si­as­tic lit­er­ary agent interest. So, what this means, I imag­ine, is that my book will even­tu­ally end up in your local stores. Still dif­fi­cult for me to believe, but it is going to hap­pen. In other words, I can no longer post chapters-in-progress on my blog, for fear that you will not want to stand in line to pur­chase the actual book. A solu­tion? Sug­ges­tions? The best I’ve come up with is to...

Erik told me about his dad, Hay­den, when we first started dat­ing. We were both 20, both stu­dents at Florida State Uni­ver­sity. Erik majored in com­puter sci­ence while I stud­ied cre­ative writ­ing. Within days of know­ing one another, it was obvi­ous that Erik’s ratio­nal, orga­nized side would com­pli­ment the artist in me. Erik spoke slowly, with quiet inten­sity. “We were on vacation.” I sat cross-legged, on Erik’s bed­room floor, soak­ing in the mas­cu­line whis­per of his words. My atten­tion was focused entirely on him. He stretched out on his back and put his head in my lap, his eyes directed at the cir­cu­lat­ing ceil­ing fan. “We were on vaca­tion, at the beach … I was eleven. It was just me, my mom,...