How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XVI
A Tale of Four Endings: Real Talk at the Birthday Party, Mourning My Unborn Children, Nocturnal Upstairs Neighbors, and 2-D Dating Profiles
I wrote several endings for my manuscript in a nine-year period, including an early one about a conversation I had at a backyard birthday party with a lovely woman who was happily married, her four-year-old daughter dancing in the living room to The Go-Go’s. I was envious of what I perceived she had. She said she never planned to marry, but here she was. I wanted to marry (again) and have a daughter like hers who danced to The Go-Go’s in the living room—the way I did in the eighties. I felt like a forty-year-old disappointment because I hadn’t checked all the boxes on an arbitrary timeline.
How did she end up with what I wanted when she didn’t even want it? I thought. Jealousy serves no one, but at the time, I couldn’t squash the negative thoughts. Nevertheless, it was a deeper conversation than most backyard birthday party chats. At a fragile juncture when I was mourning my unborn children, I didn’t shed one tear on the drive home. Hashtag goals.
That conversation launched a culminating piece that attempted to answer the question, “How does a writer write a book about romantic love when it still eludes her?” I didn’t have a satisfactory conclusion, but I did my best. As time passed, this particular ending no longer fit my fluctuating state of mind, so I began again.
The Too-Tragic Ending
Next I wrote a chapter detailing a handful of terrible late-thirties decisions that sprung from grief and fear. Conceivably I could have been on The Jerry Springer Show if I hadn’t been responsible with birth control. Here I recount a fake televised scene with the illustrious guests I would have brought with me to the show if an ill-timed pregnancy had occurred. Jerry would have had an ominous manila envelope with blood test results; audience members would have called me vicious names; and none of the baby-daddy options would have been sensible.
In that same piece, I share emotions that consumed me when I realized it was too late to have biological children. I later revised these thoughts for an earlier chapter, but I originally wrote, “It came without warning, almost overnight. The remaining shred of hope I had about bearing children fell away, leaving me with the sensation of an empty, gaping uterus. Like one of those horrible wave dreams, a towering wall of water flooded the shore and sucked me out to sea.” Such cheerful, uplifting feelings to suggest a bright future ahead—a great way to end a memoir!
While this is no longer my manuscript’s ending, I cherry-picked various scenes and observations from the chapter to sprinkle throughout the current version. Thankfully, I didn’t stay in that precarious state of sorrow. At some point in my early forties, I quit sobbing after baby showers and sneering at happy mom posts on Instagram, and while I still wished I had children, I no longer wanted to make them. I was tired and old—and somehow I was fine. Biology is magical.
The Too-Transitory Ending
No one warns you sometime between thirty-eight and forty-four, you transform from a “younger person” into an “older person.” Something shifts, and it happened to me when I lived in a studio apartment alone in Long Beach, California, in an outdated building with multiple other studios on two floors. The lack of soundproofing suggested we all lived in the same house. I was on the bottom floor and was by far the oldest person in the building—a massive lapse in judgment when I signed the lease.
My first upstairs neighbor was a twentysomething with a new oblivious boyfriend, a giant headboard against the wall, and the work schedule of a food server. She let her lanky boyfriend with the gait of an elephant stay over every night, breaking the rules in the lease. They slept when I worked; I barely slept. The day my landlord evicted her, I danced around my apartment like a giddy toddler.
My second upstairs neighbor was a twentysomething with a new oblivious boyfriend, a giant headboard against the wall, and the work schedule of a bartender. You know the rest. The day I politely asked her to stop keeping me awake at night, she whined, “But I’m dating now.” I packed my car and never returned, opting instead to spend the next six months sleeping in my nephew’s toy room under the stairs at my sister’s house down the street.
One night, when I still lived under the bed of neighbor number two, I realized I had become the crotchety middle-aged single woman yelling, “Get off my lawn!” instead of the twentysomething who works in a restaurant and has a regular sex life. I wondered, When did this happen?
I wrote a chapter about the girls upstairs, combining them into one character, stating, “I’m not jealous of the girl upstairs. I’m her cautionary tale.” As angry as I was with the inconsiderate neighbors, I also identified with them: “She thinks she has plenty of time to be careless with a man who doesn’t love her. (She doesn’t.)” As much as I wanted to smack them in their smug little faces, I also worried about them: “Someday she could be me.”
An Offline Dating Profile
These endings weren’t positive enough, profound enough, or hopeful enough. A couple years later, I wondered, What if I treated the last chapter like a dating profile? I could highlight the humor people said I had and comment on what most dating profiles both reveal and hide from potential suitors.
Over the years, I was on multiple dating apps off and on—mostly off. I swiped left and right—mostly left. What I learned was I’m not a dating app person. I’m a meet-someone-face-to-face-like-we-did-in-the-nineties person, like a good little Gen-X Luddite. But I saved my Bumble profile offline, and I finagled it into the manuscript as a way to discuss how dating profiles aren’t three-dimensional because they are either too curated, or they don’t say much at all about the person behind them.
I wrote what I didn’t include in my dating profile and, at the same time, revisited topics from the rest of the manuscript about which the reader is already familiar. The section starts: “My profile expunged any hint of melancholy, lest I scare away possible mates in this video-game-like-fishing expedition. There was no hint of the ominous weight in my gut as I drove away from my wedding with the wrong husband . . .”
My now defunct dating profile provided “no hint” about several complicated emotions and choices. “In our Bumble profiles, like in life, we project a thin film of pretense to preserve our sanity and what’s left of hope.” People on dating apps—like me—were afraid of “vulnerability, loneliness, commitment, not finding the right person, not finding any person . . .”
I never went on one date as a result of being on a dating app. Where did that leave me?
No Therapy, No Satisfying Ending
In the latter half of the current ending, I share insights from my therapist and the observations of a Halloween party psychic from many years ago. I still have that so-called psychic’s business card, and I fully intended to drive to the Valley to visit her again, “but I don’t need a psychic; I have a therapist.” While they both provided “a-ha” moments, my therapist provided legitimate support.
I am not in a relationship at the end of the memoir, but I have more confidence and more acceptance of myself as a single person with a colorful past:
“Whenever I’m sad, I remember what my therapist said after our first few visits when she already knew my life story: ‘You’re attractive. You’re smart. You’re accomplished. You’re interesting.’ She said it again more slowly, so it would sink in while she counted the compliments on her fingers: ‘You’re attractive. You’re smart. You’re accomplished. You’re interesting.’”
The chapter ends with a more forthcoming dating profile than the one I put online—a realistic one I apparently would put in a book but never Bumble. It’s an assessment of who I really am, what I’m really open to, and how I really feel—not the glossy, filtered version—and I never would have been capable of writing it had I not gone to therapy.
So, to write a halfway decent memoir ending—and a decent memoir in general—I went to therapy, made myself and others three-dimensional on the page as much as possible, tried to choose the most stimulating, relevant images, and dusted the last few sentences with a pinch of hope—not for the future I envisioned but the one that’s still conceivable.