Prologue
July 2005
Catherine placed her laptop on the desk and pulled several books from her briefcase. She slid into the massive swivel chair and opened the cavernous bottom drawer, now empty. Secrets told. Conflicts resolved.
The Autobiographical Impulse in Literature, she typed into the syllabus. She’d have to explain the title in the first class. She smiled as she typed the tedious objectives for the course. All she really wanted was for the students to enjoy reading a few good stories, poems, and essays and, maybe, begin to believe that their own stories were worth telling.
The stories we tell, first to ourselves and then in a form that others can understand. Why do some writers feel comfortable—or is it compelled—to tell their stories as memoirs, anxious to get them down on paper before forgetfulness obscures the details? Others need the veil of fiction, constructing their reality so readers can see the character as a whole, not as a fragmented life in progress.
Catherine leafed through her notes on each text, thinking about the themes she would emphasize in class. Virginia Woolf, traumatized by the sexual assaults of her older half-brothers. James Baldwin, fighting against the impact of racism on his father’s mental health. Sylvia Plath, slipping into madness at such a young age. Tim O’Brien, a self-proclaimed coward for going to Vietnam; then, writing his way to peace of mind. She pulled Dreams from My Father from her briefcase, a powerful memoir written by a little-known senator from Illinois. It might be good to include something so recent.
Would she ever have the courage to tell her own story of what happened at Franklin College last year? Would Chelsea or any of the students who had been impacted? A riveting novel or a tell-all memoir?
Would the nightmares end? She looked at her hands, at the nails that had scratched his face as she escaped his grip.
Catherine closed the laptop and walked the two blocks to the boardwalk. She watched the surf roll in, massive white caps dominating blue water. Grief over her father’s death tugged at her heart as she watched an elderly man hobble to a bench and sit down. She hadn’t buried the tangled story of her parents’ loveless marriage with her father, but maybe that story wasn’t hers to tell.
She ran the two-mile length of the boardwalk, letting the memories go and thinking instead about Woolf’s “Sketch of the Past” and its fragmented structure.