Mirriam: There were a few times I wanted to stop this whole project. I was fed up with all of J’s questions. “No, I don’t remember that name, or that face, or the weather, or what I was thinking long ago. How do you expect me to remember what it smelled like?!” Not to mention returning to certain memories is uncomfortable. There are times of stress and uncertainty that are best left in the past. I had moved on from those moments and the last thing I wanted was to go back and try to recreate them for anyone to read.
For J’s parts, he was writing from his head, journals, and other materials. There were no free-flowing discussions with me about what memories or key moments of his life that should be included or discarded. But that would have just slowed us down. J was writing to meet deadlines set by his MFA course and then the Pottersfield contest. Our second child was born at the start of his last semester, so it was hard enough to find any time and motivation to devote to my part in the book project.
My firm belief in telling our story kept me going, but it wasn’t easy. J would start a voice memo on his Iphone while we were driving with the kids napping in the back, or late at night after they finally fell asleep. I would do my best to forget I was being recorded. On our wedding anniversary at White Point Lodge on the South Shore of Nova Scotia in 2023, I talked for hours as we sat by the wood-burning fireplace in a nice little cabin, trying to remember.
It was strange to see my thoughts on paper in his first drafts a few days or weeks later. J assured me I would have final editorial say over my own words. That didn’t stop us from fighting about sentences or paragraphs he had transcribed and edited and felt would work well in the book. Maybe “fight” is the wrong word, but it did lead to heated arguments when J thought a certain section included a rich description of an emotional scene that would captivate readers, but I insisted it be cut.
Some details are just too personal, even for a memoir, at least for me. I leave it to readers to use their imaginations to fill in any blanks and draw their own conclusions.
