Is it an uplifting story? Does it have a positive ending? How did you end up homeless as a young adult and how did you get out of it? And whatever happened to your son?
These are a few of the intriguing questions I am asked about my 2016 medical memoir, Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net. This is why, at least in part, I wrote my second book on trauma and homelessness, Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins (University of California Medical Humanities, 2018).
Meghan Daum, in her NYT book review “New Memoirs Show How the Other Half Lives” (October 10, 2016), included a review of my book, Catching Homelessness, along with J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and a much earlier memoir by a Southerner, Wilma Dykman’s Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood. In her review of my book, Daum assumes that I lost or gave up custody of my son and that I must be under a “gag order” because I do not write more about my son or my first marriage. Neither of these are true.
The truth is I maintained joint custody of my son, maintained a good relationship with my ex-husband, and I raised my son full time from the time he was ten—once I had a stable job and home for him here in Seattle. He now is finishing his PhD at the University of Washington, is happily married, and is an amazing father to my first grandchild. They are all very much a part of my current life. So yes—an uplifting story (in the end) and also a complex story. My life is not a neat and tidy Hallmark Moment sort of life. It is messy and complicated and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
This all came back to me this past week through a podcast interview with Janet Perry for Nonfiction4Life.
Great interview: intelligent, thoughtful questions, and same for the responses.