Chicago Style Guide’s 18th Edition Shows How Language Evolves

If you’re writing a book, you should know The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) is the standard editorial guide in book publishing. All professional editors refer to it as they create a unique style sheet for each book that lists a publisher’s and author’s preferences (e.g., spell out “okay” or just use “OK”? Show possession as “Charles’ house” or “Charles’s house”? Put an author’s Acknowledgments page at the front of a book or at the back?).

On September 19, 2024, CMOS (pronounced “sea moss”) officially releases its 18th Edition with many updates and additions that reflect how language constantly evolves. For copyeditors like me, familiarizing myself with any changes related to grammar, punctuation, spelling, usage, and formatting is part of my job. For writers like you who rely on editors like me, keeping up with the latest changes to a large style book isn’t necessary. Still, I’d like to break down ten updates that might interest you as you self-edit your writing before sending it to a professional editor.

Aside from the obvious canary yellow book cover—previously blue—the 18th Edition of CMOS stands out for accepting modern-day communication and empathy:

1. For instance, if a person’s gender is “unknown, unspecified, or concealed for reasons of privacy,” CMOS now officially accepts the singular use of “they” as a pronoun to describe one person. For years, many of us have been using “they” instead of “him” or “her.” CMOS has taken an important step forward by formally endorsing the use of “they” as a nonbinary singular pronoun.

2. CMOS now capitalizes both “Indigenous” and “Black” when referring to people. Capitalizing “white,” however, is a judgment call. That means it depends on the content of a manuscript and whether the author and/or publisher decides to use “white woman” or “White woman”—then being consistent throughout the book.

3. Unlike AP Stylebook, which is more often used for magazines and newspapers, CMOS has never capitalized prepositions in titles before. Now the guide recommends capitalizing prepositions of five letters or more for titles written in title case—previously called “headline style.” For example, Much Ado About Nothing would have been Much Ado about Nothing in the 17th Edition, but A Room with a View stands because the preposition “with” is only four letters.

4. In the term “french fries,” “french” is no longer capitalized. In the case of “French dressing,” however, it is. Go figure!

5. Whereas “email” used to be “e-mail,” the hyphen is no longer necessary. Same goes for “ebook” and “esports,” which are both on the official list. Other “e” words are still hyphenated: e-bike, e-commerce, etc. (Exception: proper nouns like “eBay.”)

6. Apparently for sticklers of “correct” English language usage, “overly” was “frowned upon” before, but it’s now considered “unexceptional,” as in “I’m overly tired.”

7. When discussing the plural for giving students letter grades in school, instead of a parent boasting, “My daughter got all As!” CMOS now says, “My daughter got all A’s!”

8. You’ll be happy to learn you can now start a sentence with a numerical year without feeling bad about yourself, so go ahead and write, “1996 was a great year!” No need to reword the sentence to “The year 1996 was great.”

9. In citations, “ibid.” has been put out to pasture. This Latin word meaning “in the same place” used to be a quick way to say, “Check the last citation; this one is the same!” Now CMOS recommends providing a shortened citation in notes and bibliographies with the author’s last name, title of the work, and page number(s).

10. Believe it or not, CMOS now has guidance for emojis and their surrounding punctuation and spaces, as well as hashtags, for which capital letters are encouraged: #AmWriting instead of #amwriting. (It all comes down to clarity!) Also, the Bitcoin symbol (₿) has been added to the currency examples, whether you ever plan to purchase cryptocurrency or not.

If the 18th Edition of The Chicago Manual of Style indicates anything, the future is now, and the ways writers express themselves on the page can be malleable to fit the times while still sticking to a thoughtful set of rules governing book publishing. And if you’re ever unsure how to spell or hyphenate a word, look it up in the style guide’s first cousin: Merriam-Webster! You can’t go wrong there, as both Chicago and AP now rely on the same well-respected dictionary. (It’s about time!)

A Tale of Two Trade Book Copyediting Tests

I recently completed two copyediting tests for traditional publishing houses to earn a spot in their freelance pools: one for a Big Five publisher and one for an independent press. I only “passed” one of them. Here’s what happened.

In January I sent a cold email to an editor at a Big Five imprint, not expecting a response. I introduced myself, mentioned a couple authors I’m a fan of, provided a brief background on my skills, and shared topics of specific manuscripts I’d recently worked on. As I knew there’d be a test before I was approved as a vendor, I mentioned I’d be happy to take it.

Big Five Copyediting Instructions

A different staff member replied and asked if I wanted to take their copyediting test or their proofreading test. I chose the copyediting test. I had five business days to take it once I received this form email:

“Thank you for your interest in freelancing for [BIG FIVE PUB]. Please copyedit the accompanying manuscript in Microsoft Word with Track Changes on and return by [DATE].

Please note the following:

• Review the copyediting instructions before you begin.

• Supply a style sheet when you deliver the manuscript.

• This manuscript includes trailing phrase endnotes (sometimes referred to as blind notes). Please leave the 000 page number markers, but check phrases as necessary.

• Use comment bubbles to flag material such as lyrics and/or poetry that might require permissions.

We follow Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Online Edition; Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Online Edition; and The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition, in matters of spelling and style.”

The attached documents included the first chapter of a historical nonfiction text about the Chinese Communist party, including a title page, a copyright page, an epigraph, footnotes, endnotes, and a bibliography—a total of sixteen pages. It looked intimidating at first glance but doable because it was relatively short, despite being longer than most copyediting tests. My first thought, though, was what the hell are trailing phrase endnotes?

The accompanying document was their standard two-page “Instructions for the Copyeditor,” including the manuscript title, author name, genre, ISBN, and a series of boxes, with the relevant ones marked with an X.

I was to track changes in Word and perform “light” editing: “fix bad grammar, typos, incorrect punctuation, capitalization, spelling repetitions, and ambiguities; do not rewrite, cut, or reparagraph; query inconsistencies.”

That I wasn’t allowed to rewrite or cut at all scared me a little. As a writer and copyeditor, that’s hard not to do.

Under “Fact Checking,” I was instructed to “check names and dates and other factual matter” and “check all foreign language words and phrases.” Not a problem!

Under “Punctuation,” the “yes” box next to “Serial comma?” was checked. Hallelujah. The document also stated the punctuation was already “about right, but correct any errors.” Sweet!

The document stated the language was appropriate for the audience and subject matter. At this point, I thought, How hard can copyediting sixteen pages and throwing together a style sheet be? The answer, I would learn, was “nearly impossible.”

The Big Five Copyediting Test Goes Well—at First

First I Googled “trailing phrase endnotes,” which are notes keyed to words or phrases instead of superscript numbers. In other words, quoted text in the endnotes corresponds to page numbers. My handy Chicago Manual of Style account showed me how to correctly format each one. Simple enough.

Next I started on the title page and praised myself for noticing immediately a very subtle change to the title and a missing apostrophe in the subtitle: “. . . the World’s Largest . . .” Below the publisher’s name was a list of cities from whence they hail: “New Delhi” was missing an “h.” I was on fire, and I hadn’t even started reading chapter one yet!

When I flipped to the copyright page, I reached for a couple nonfiction books on my shelf published by the same house to painstakingly compare them. At this point, I felt confident. I felt even more confident when the next page included song lyrics, and I remembered to leave a note for the author to request permission to print them. The band’s name was misspelled, and the song title needed quotation marks. I’m a rock star copyeditor! Let’s go! I thought as I flipped to the first page of chapter one.

Then shit got real.

The Urge to Revise When Asked to Query

A few changes on the first page were no-brainers: Change “30” to “thirty”; capitalize “mainland” in “Mainland China”; change “Party” to “party” in “member of the party”; fix a typo that made “in” “an” instead; change the “a” to an “e” in “effectiveness”; and remove the apostrophe in “1980’s.” (Major pet peeve!)

Here’s where it got trickier: I’d been instructed not to rewrite, but many sentences were in passive voice, so I called attention to each one in a comment box. “They were soon joined by other groups” sounds better as “Other groups soon joined them,” and “. . . the CCP responded to the protests by publishing . . .” sounds better if written, “The CCP published . . . to respond to the protests.”

Watch for Tone, Go with Your Gut

The textbook-like language was relatively formal. This was not a voice-driven memoir, so sentences like, “Everybody had something to gripe about” stood out—not in a great way. I suggested revising to fit the tone and voice of the rest of the chapter. I also noticed “protests . . . had discontent at their heart” seemed off because “protests” are plural, and “heart” is singular. For the most part, in the beginning, I fought my instincts to rewrite the text, but sometimes it’s easier to do it yourself than write a comment for someone else to do it later. For instance, I changed “. . . there had been very few political reforms to coincide with . . .” to “few political reforms coincided with . . .”

Damn their instructions! Sort of.

Fact-Check Names and Ask Author to Clarify

My eyes crossed as I double-checked each instance of the word “Tiananmen” because it was often spelled incorrectly and not always in the same way. I listed it as one of the names on the style sheet I created. Another name I added was “Deng Xiaoping” and noted the author didn’t explain who Deng was at the beginning of the chapter. There was no context for anyone who didn’t already know China’s history.

I italicized the newspaper People’s Daily, which the author called the “official newspaper.” Of what? Google is a copyeditor’s friend, and this time was no exception. Instead of changing the text to “official newspaper of the Chinese Communist party,” I added it as a suggestion in a comment box because, once again, I had been instructed to do “light editing.” With all the problems I found in the manuscript, I wondered, How is one supposed to lightly edit this?

Did I mention I was still only on page one?

When I reached page two and Googled “Teng Hsiao-p’ing” (and added the apostrophe to his name), I noticed Teng and Deng were the same person, but the author hadn’t clarified this. Which name did the author want to use? Choose one or explain they’re the same man.

It quickly became clear this test was made cumbersome on purpose to weed out prospective copyeditors, but I didn’t want to give up; I wanted to see if I could “pass” it.

Word Choice, Repetition, and the Footnotes That Almost Broke Me

The word “Oriental” appeared on page two to describe “society.” Yikes. I advised the author to use an alternative, less offensive word to refer to people. I made twelve comments total on page two, including one that asked the author to cite a source. I fact-checked an incorrect date. I deleted the useless word “utterly,” and added an “e” to “feared.”

On page three I noted redundant information that already appeared on page two and called out a repetitive phrase that appeared in two consecutive paragraphs. When I reached my first footnote, I almost quit. The author’s name was misspelled, and the referenced page numbers were wrong. This manuscript required tons of fact-checking.

Did I mention copyediting tests are unpaid?

One footnote in chapter two needed to be deleted completely because it referred to something that didn’t exist in the text, which meant renumbering the footnotes, which weren’t numbered at all but were instead denoted by symbols: “* † ‡.” Fun!

Bogged Down in Research

I pointed out a cliché: “stirred the pot.” I fact-checked another incorrect date, and I tried to locate “Ximen River” on a map in Weng’an County and failed to do so, despite it showing up in an article on the internet that this chapter was based on. (Where the hell is Ximen River? I thought, as I spent way too much time scouring Google Maps with no luck.)

Remember the Audience

When the author referred to a young woman who’d been killed as a “corpse” in an “ice coffin” along the river, I urged “revise!” Another offensive “yikes!” moment that I’m sure the test creators added on purpose to see how copyeditors would respond. Remember the audience: This is nonfiction, not sci-fi, and she’s someone’s daughter, her death inciting an important political moment in history.

Then protesters were said to have “legitimate problems,” but what were they? I wondered.

Revising Is Faster than Querying

By the fourth page of chapter two, I gave into my impulse even more to “rewrite” and “cut” when instructed otherwise. I deleted a sentence that appeared word for word twice back-to-back. I revised phrases like “due to the fact that,” an overused phrase that bugs me.

I continued to fix misspelled names, point out incorrect facts, ask the author to clarify confusing statements, and adjust footnotes. Then I proofread the endnotes, checking links, italicizing large works, putting quotation marks around smaller works, and deleting unnecessary information. Finally, I noted why the bibliography was formatted incorrectly and how to change it.

One Last Pass . . . Then Another

Every time I took “one more pass” through these sixteen dense pages, I found something else I’d missed. I was impressed with how thorough the test was at making me question my knowledge, abilities, and mental health. But I’d come too far to quit now.

What’s in a Style Sheet?

In my style sheet, I wrote chapter overviews with the correct timeline of events, dates, names, etc. I added notes about grammar, acronyms, numbers, and punctuation based on perceived author preferences and pertinent Chicago Manual of Style rules. I listed notes about references and permissions, offensive and outdated language, and correct spellings of names of people and locations.

In all, I spent four full business days on this Big Five copyediting test, and when I sent it to the editor, I didn’t care anymore if I’d passed it or not; I was happy to have finished it. Also, I returned the completed test two days early.

The Shorter Independent Press Test

If I could finish this test somewhat successfully, I could finish any copyediting test, so when I saw a dreamy independent press call for freelance copyeditors and proofreaders on LinkedIn, I was excited. I sent an email and awaited the test—this time for both copyediting and proofreading. The copyediting test was two-and-a-half pages, and the proofreading test was one PDF page (two printed book pages side by side). Piece. of. Cake.

The instructions were simple, and I didn’t need to create a style sheet: “Freelancers should have familiarity with Chicago style as it pertains to trade book publishing, an ear for literary voice, and the ability to communicate sensitively.”

Attacking the Work Like It Was My Own

I turned on Track Changes in Word and attacked this copyediting test like I would my own writing—striving to maintain the author’s voice as he explained the origins of how he came to write this book. In the first sentence, I changed “sit around dreaming” to “dream.” In the first paragraph, I capitalized the first word in a question after a colon and deleted an unnecessary comma that divided a complete sentence and an incomplete sentence separated by “and.” I fixed a run-on sentence. I queried if the author meant “eternal” instead of “temporal” to describe “common questions.”

On the first page, I also fixed a misspelled “calendar” and changed “where” to “in which” in “. . . three calendar years where my own responses . . .” I deleted two hyphens to create “twenty-nine years old” and fixed subject/verb agreement in “all utopias has,” which clearly should be “have.”

I noticed the misuse of “sometime” and broke it into two words. I queried “American utopian communities,” asking “Which ones?” Could the author be more specific than “American”? I changed “Youtube” to “YouTube” and three-hundred-twenty-six” to “326.” At one point, the author wrote “etc., etc.” Instead of querying to suggest a change, I crossed it out in favor of “and so on.”

Slash and Burn

On page two, I did quite a bit of revision, not considering that the Big Five instructions from the previous test might apply here as well. “I watched as the files piled up” became “I watched the files pile up.” “I kept thinking that” became “I often thought.” “I kept waiting” became “I waited.” “A co-worker of mine” became “My coworker.” I deleted “just” when it was unnecessary. (You’d be amazed how many writers use the filler word “just” in a manuscript. “Find” that word in yours and see what I mean.)

I slashed and burned this sentence: “All this stuff, all of these little things which I keep thinking were the precursor—or the thing that was eventually going go to make way for the . . .” What a mess. I wrote this instead: “All this stuff I thought was the precursor was what would eventually make way for the . . .” It still wasn’t optimal.

Revise for Clarity

I changed “its” to “the pages’” and “it” to “the files” to clarify what “its” and “it” referred to. I changed “might” to “may” and added “rather” to create this sentence: “I may have known that sooner rather than later.”

On the last half-page, I added “19” to “1990s.” I took out the hyphen in “nonfiction.” I changed “things” to “ideas” and cut excess words, making sentences clearer and more succinct. I queried several more items: When the author wrote, “. . . butt of its own joke,” I asked, “How else might this be rewritten to avoid a commonly used idiom?” I suggested “a lot” was a word choice issue. (One of my teachers once said, “A lot is a piece of land.”) When the author switched from writing in first-person to second person with “. . . if you do it right . . .” I suggested recasting the sentence.

Query Madness

When the tone and content shifted in the last paragraph to include “egomaniacs,” “boy kings,” and “bad theologies,” which didn’t coincide with the rest of the prose, I pointed it out. Which egomaniacs? Which boy kings? Which theologies, and what makes them bad? The conclusion introduced a new topic that was never covered.

I thought I’d nailed this copyediting test after a few passes, spending much less time than I did on the longer test with the prior publisher.

Proofreading: Orphans, Ladders, Meticulous Details, and Offensive Language

The PDF proofread didn't seem too difficult either. Immediately I saw the missing “l” in “enrollment.” “Hoodwinked” is one word, not hyphenated. At the end of the first paragraph, the orphan “him” appeared on a line all by itself—and shouldn’t. In the second paragraph, the past tense verb “listened” didn’t align with the present tense verb “explain” in the same sentence, and I deleted an extra space in a properly hyphenated word.

In that same column, “student Union” didn't need a capital “U,” and “...” didn’t follow the Chicago ellipsis style with spaces: “. . .”

I capitalized “Black” when referring to people, spelled out numbers under 100, and added a hyphen in “sing-alongs.”

In the second column, a ladder needed to be fixed. In typography, a “ladder” describes when a hyphen appears at the end of multiple consecutive lines. A book is more visually appealing and readable without it.

Fact-checking was in order for “Slurpie” and “7/11,” both proper names spelled incorrectly. (The correct words are “Slurpee” and “7-Eleven.”) I added an Oxford comma in “long hair, scraggly facial hair, or sloppy clothes . . .” and queried this line: “. . . to say nothing of Black folks,” which struck me as overly generalizing. I wrote, “Pointing out how Black students stood out and calling them ‘folks’ could be considered offensive.” At the proofreading stage, when text is already formatted, something like this should have been caught sooner.

Many proofreading changes involve whether or not something is a compound word; “back seat” is not one of them if used as a noun. “Saint Louis” is “St. Louis.” A single straight quote (') isn’t the same as an apostrophe, and commas surround names of states when listed with cities, like in “. . . West Memphis, Arkansas, an unmarked sedan . . .”

So Much Quality Competition

I finished the indie press copyediting and proofreading tests feeling positive but knew I had competition because the call on LinkedIn had 728 likes, 140 comments, and 79 reposts last time I checked, and finding work via LinkedIn is like screaming in the middle of an empty forest.

Response Time for Results

The response time between the date I turned in my test to the Big Five publisher and their decision was six weeks and two days. The time to receive a response from the smaller press was five weeks and came in the form of a group email with attached rubrics to show us exactly what the “correct” answers were, which was unexpected and extremely generous.

Which Test Did I Pass?

Believe it or not, I passed the harder test from the Big Five publisher and wasn’t accepted into the freelance pool following the shorter test for the independent press.

Relish and Heed the Rare Feedback

The editor at the Big Five replied, “You’ve been approved! With a caveat.” She said I’d caught “pretty much all of the errors we check and also had useful queries.” The caveat: I was “a little overzealous in rewriting” with regard to removing “unnecessary sentence openers, taking out passive voice,” and deleting “that” to tighten up the work. In this case, I edited too much.

Point taken.

“We often have very voice-y memoirs or fiction where that level of rewriting could get problematic,” she wrote. I fully embraced this wonderful note, but I did ponder the text they’d given me to edit, which wasn’t a “voice-y memoir” nor “fiction.” I assume it’s the standard test for every one of their imprints. She mentioned it was a “fine line to walk.” I agreed.

My favorite note from her email was this: “You’re at an 11, and we want you to dial it back to a 9.” She asked if that made sense. Yes, it does. “Granted, I don’t know how much of this was simply you trying your best on the copyediting test, since, well, it was a test! We don’t want to penalize you for good work.”

First Big Five Projects

I was surprised and pleased with these results, and I have since completed a “low stakes” endnotes and index proofread for the Big Five and am awaiting a full memoir project in August. The August memoir is a “cold read,” which means I’m taking the first pass after the book is formatted to catch the pesky errors that were missed at the manuscript proofreading stage—as far as I understand it.

I didn’t receive the same personal feedback from the independent press, but when I went through the rubric and noticed I’d caught 99 percent of their changes—and then some—I realized they’d probably have the same feedback as the Big Five if asked: I edited too much.

Minor Mistakes Are Inevitable

I missed “loose lines” in the PDF file where alignment needed adjustment, and I didn’t see a dangling modifier. (Gasp!) No one’s perfect, which is why these manuscripts go through several rounds of copyediting and proofreading with different sets of eyes before printing.

The independent press’s parting words were, in part, as follows: “We received hundreds of excellent tests and were able to onboard only a handful of the many talented editors who applied. Of course, no two edits will be exactly alike, and many astute suggestions that were made are not represented [in the rubric].”

Rejection Is Also Inevitable

This is not my first rejection and won’t be my last. Finding freelance work as a traditional publishing copyeditor is not easy, but it can be done.

Say ‘Hey!’

Contact me with any questions, suggestions, or to share your own experiences. I’m always available to quote individual author projects and look forward to hearing from you.

Side note: The 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style is coming this fall! Here are some updates.

How to Spend Five Hours Alone with a Tired Three-Year-Old Who’s Getting over a Cold

It's always better when Mommy is home. Aunt Chewy has no idea what she's doing.

You pick up your nephew from his gingerbread house of a preschool on a Thursday afternoon. “Chewy!” he cries. He grips you as if you’re rescuing him from lockup.

Seven hours ago, he cheerfully greeted each of his fellow classmates and teachers. “Good morning! Hi! Good morning!” He smiled and waved as if on a parade route. “Bye, Mom,” he’d told your sister as if to say, You can go now.

Now he says, “Bye bye, school. All done, school,” and runs toward the exit gate.

In the morning, your nephew can’t wait to go to preschool. In the afternoon, he can’t wait to leave.

“He was really good today,” his teacher says. “He slept for an hour. He ate pasta for lunch. We talked about Thanksgiving.”

“Thank you,” you say, envisioning the quality time you’ll spend with your sweet man-child tonight while Mommy’s at work.

“Chewy’s car!” your nephew yells as you load him into his car seat. “Home!”

Silence on the way home from preschool.

“Yes, we’re going home,” you say. “Did you have a good day at school? What did you do?”

He sucks down a bottle of water and stares at you.

“Do you have friends at school?” you ask.

Silence.

Back at the house, he wants to watch “train show” the second you walk through the door. “Train show” is a series of long amateur YouTube videos of trains going by. That’s it. No plot. No characters. No dialogue. Just trains. He loves trains.

You put on “train show” so you can finish your day’s work on your laptop at the kitchen table while your nephew sits in the middle of his own toy train track on the floor and spins his toy train around. The real trains on TV provide a suitable soundtrack. In between videos, he points to the specific train clips he wants to watch next. Steam trains. Coaster trains. Amtrak. Surfliner. “That one. Not that one. That one. Not that one.” He’s a man of few words, but he knows exactly what he wants.

Watching “train shows” upside down. They’re apparently better that way.

“Do you want a snack?” you ask.

“No.”

“Do you want milk?”

“No milk.”

Only trains.

As you work, you periodically lean over to check on him. He’s running in circles in the living room in his boxy homemade Halloween train costume, hacking up phlegm from his dwindling cold. He loves his train costume now that it’s November. He refused to wear it on Halloween. He trick-or-treated in jeans and a T-shirt. “Tritch or treat!”

He only wants to wear his Halloween train costume in November.

You find a small bowl of raspberries in the refrigerator. You set them on the coffee table in case your little train conductor is hungry after all. Two minutes later he comes back with the empty bowl and hands it to you.

“More.”

There are no more raspberries.

“Do you want something else?” you ask.

“No.”

After you finish working, you cuddle on the couch with your nephew while he continues to watch trains. “Toot! Toot!”

You’re bored and hungry, so you decide to make dinner early. Dinnertime is a crapshoot. Your nephew lives on cheese, carbs, fruit, or air, depending on his mood. Mommy told you earlier he’ll now eat a grilled cheese sandwich with a thin slice of turkey hidden inside the bread, so when you find a block of cheddar and tortillas in the fridge, you figure a slice of turkey in a quesadilla is the same thing.

Your nephew’s basic diet for years: carbs and cheese, preferably cut into small pieces.

You painstakingly grill a quesadilla so the cheese doesn’t spill out the sides. Otherwise he won’t eat it. You hide the turkey slice inside. You cut up an orange for color and hand him his plate.

You return to the kitchen to boil him an ear of corn. Thankfully he loves corn. You also decide you may as well have a quesadilla too because you can’t think of anything else to make. You peek around the corner to see if he’s eating. He has taken one small bite of his quesadilla and is now transfixed by “train show” again.

You watch his corn cook and inhale your own quesadilla standing up in the kitchen, your hand on your belly, thinking, “I will regret this cheese later.”

You return to the living room where your nephew takes his second bite. He looks up at you perplexed, whimpers, and hands you the quesadilla. You fucked it up with the turkey. Now he won’t eat it.

You remove the turkey and show him. “Look, it’s only cheese and tortilla now.” That doesn’t matter. The cheese is now tainted.

You return to the kitchen, do the dishes, cut the corn off the cob, and put it in a plastic bowl.

“Corn!” he says, smiling, when you bring it to him. Phew. You’ve done something right. He eats two bites and finds a string from the cob. He pulls it out, hands it to you, and whines. No more corn. Instead, he pulls out a plastic dump truck from his toy basket and shovels corn into the back. He drags the truck across the room, trailing corn on the wood floor.

You realize you didn’t drink any water with your quesadilla, and, in fact, you haven’t had any water since long before you picked him up from school. Now you understand why Mommy “forgets” to eat and hydrate when she’s on kid duty, which is always.

“Train show” drains your will to live. It’s only 6:30, and Mommy isn’t coming home until 9:00, so you ask, “Want to go for a walk?”

“Oh-hey!” he says.

He has one shoe on before you can find your keys. No socks. Outside he takes in the fresh air with a smile and bolts down the street. “Nighttime!” he yells, looking up at the sky. He’s happy to be walking outside under the stars. You are too. He stops and admires an airplane flying overhead. “Ooooohh, airplane.”

Trains and airplanes. He’s all boy in a world where Mommy planned to make his life as gender-neutral as possible. Nope.

He resumes his purposeful stroll. It’s going well. He even lets you hold his hand, which he doesn’t always do. You remind him to watch for cars as he scurries toward driveways and intersections. You’re in your own panicky game of Frogger, but this was a good idea.

You walk a quarter of a mile. You reach 2nd Street, the street you turn down every time you walk with him and Mommy. It’s standard. You start to turn in the direction of Belmont Shore. “Not that way!” he screams. He points toward the end of the block where the ramp down to the beach spools into blackness.

“It’s too late to go to the beach,” you say.

He shrieks. Tears fall down his cheeks. His face turns red. Snot pours from his nose. “That way!” he yells again, pointing toward the beach, where you were once warned your nephew shouldn’t be running in the sand barefoot because of the stray needles.

“You can go this way,” you say, pointing down a well-lit 2nd Street, the direction he’s never had a problem with until now, “or you can go down that street,” you say, pointing toward 1st. You provide two options so he can make his own decision. No dice.

“That way!” he says, now pointing to the park across the street that’s sometimes unsafe in the dark after the farmers’ market folds up.

“You’re tired. I think we need to go home,” you say.

“No home!” He falls to the sidewalk. “Walk!”

You look around, expecting social services to appear. You pick him up and begin the trek back to the house as he howls his disapproval and wipes snot onto your sleeve. Halfway home he goes limp. You lug all thirty-six pounds of him sideways like a wet log. Passersby stare at you with pity or disdain. You can’t tell which.

You set him down in a stranger’s yard to shake off the ache in your wrists, computer-related pain you’ve experienced for years. You pick up the overcooked ramen noodle again and wonder if you’ll be able to make it home or if you’ll have to set up camp on a stranger’s grass until morning. Your nephew continues to screech.

When Mommy’s here, she carries him just fine. What’s your problem?

You set him down two more times to rest your hands before you get home. Each time, he drapes himself across random yards like a drunken lawn gnome. You finally make it home, where you sit him down on the front steps and attempt to calm him down before you go inside so you don’t disturb the nice lady upstairs watching TV.

He finally stops crying when you put “train show” back on. By now, his quesadilla has congealed. His oranges remain untouched. His corn is cold. You bag his dinner and put it in the fridge for later—except for the pickup truck corn.

He has to eat something, you think. You don’t want him to starve on your watch, so you bring him a bowl of plain yogurt swirled with Trader Joe’s pumpkin butter. He slurps it down.

“More yogurt,” he says, handing you the bowl. He gulps a second bowl. You’re relieved his stomach is filled, so you head to the bathroom to warm up a bath before you introduce him to a new unwanted activity that may set off his internal alarm bells.

One of the glass shower doors is stuck and won’t open—the one next to the faucet. You stretch across the tub to turn on the water and get it to the right temperature. Then you tell your nephew he can watch trains again in a few minutes, and you begin to undress him in front of the TV. You smell poop. You drag him to his bedroom and lay him down to wipe his butt before his bath. You realize after you’ve already torn off the sides of his pull-up diapers you’ve caught him mid-poop.

He arches his back, his legs straight, his butt in the air. You scoop poop out of his butt while he performs a perfect bridge and rocks back and forth. You ask him if he wants to poop on the potty, already knowing the answer. You put on a fresh diaper so he doesn’t finish pooping on the floor instead.

You head to the bathroom to turn off the faucet. Your nephew decides at 7:00 it’s time for bed. When you return to his room, he hops into his toddler bed, pulls the comforter up to his neck, and refuses to get up. It’s cold. He has no clothes on. You wonder if he’s finished pooping yet.

“You can go to bed as soon as you’re clean and dressed,” you say.

“No bath,” he says, writhing under the covers.

You wrestle him to the bathroom and take off his diaper. One small miracle: no more poop.

“Hot!” he says when he sees the water. He hasn’t touched it yet.

“It’s fine,” you say and set him in the tub. The water is now lukewarm. You reach across the tub behind the door that won’t budge and turn on the faucet again to warm him up. Your middle-aged back aches. You wash him as quickly as possible. Your shirt is now wet with water and mucus.

“All done,” you say, expecting him to be thrilled bath time is over.

“No,” he says. He is now lying on his stomach, floating in the water. He won’t get out.

When you finally coax him to stand up, you swaddle him in a towel as he coughs in your face. You feel the mist of spit hit, and you begin to count his sick days in your head and pray he’s not still contagious. Four days. You’re doomed.

Nightly bath-time ritual: towel on head, body wet, face-down on the floor, butt in the air.

On the bathroom floor, he crumples into a ball, forehead against the floor, his body still wet. You take this as an opportunity to smear butt paste on his chafed booty. Then you somehow manage to dry him off and put on his pajamas. Thankfully you brushed his teeth while he was still in the bathtub. Score one for Aunt Chewy.

As you sit on the toilet and brush his hair, he pulls down the front of your shirt, points to your cleavage, and says, “Butt!”

You laugh and text Mommy.

“Lololololol,” she writes.

It’s 7:30. You figure you’ll get him into bed by 8:00.

“Let’s watch Peg,” you say, suggesting a real scripted TV show. You can’t take any more trains.

He asks for a bowl of goldfish crackers. You’ve already brushed his teeth, but at this point, you think, Why not? It won’t kill him.

He’s clean, calm, eating crackers, and watching Peg + Cat when you think the drama is over. Then he stubs his toe on the bottom of the couch and starts weeping again. You wipe his nose for the fifth time and wash your hands for the tenth.

“Give me a hug,” you say, trying to comfort him. He wraps his arms around you and slams his skull against your face. “It’s time to read books,” you say as you both rub your foreheads.

He willingly trots to his bedroom to read books. He gets cozy under the comforter. You crouch down on the hard floor next to him. Everything in your body hurts. You read him a book about a mama and a baby bunny. With the turn of every page, he shouts, “Bunny! Bunny!” pointing and covering up the words you’re trying to read.

You read him Goodnight Moon, and as you reach for a third book, you say, “This is the last book.”

After the third book, he wants a fourth. You say no. He cries again. You tell him he’s tired. You turn off the lights and cover him up. He’s forgotten his stuffed goat and tiny shiny blankets, both of which he can’t sleep without. You find the soft, floppy goat on the rocking chair next to the bed, but it takes five minutes for both of you to wander the house to find the blankies stashed in his bucket you brough home from preschool.

Good luck getting your nephew to go to sleep without Goat and Tinies. (Not pictured: Goat.)

You put him back in bed with his requisite sleep-time accessories. “I’ll be right here in this rocking chair,” you tell him, thinking he’s so tired he’ll fall asleep within minutes. It’s already after 8:00.

You sit in the rocking chair in the dark and notice your neck is tweaked from carrying him a quarter of a mile down the street. You’re as tired as he is. You might even be able to sleep sitting up in a chair for the first time in your life. You think, This is why young people have children.

You listen for measured breathing indicating he has fallen asleep. It doesn’t come. Instead, he twists his blankets into a knot and beats the bars of his toddler bed like a drum. “Chewy! Mommy! Chewy! Birthday cake!” he says to himself.

His belly rumbles with the pumpkin butter yogurt/goldfish cracker meal he ate earlier, but your stomach is the one making loud, gurgling noises because you’re still hungry.

He gets quiet. You think it’s safe. You tiptoe out of his room and leave the door slightly cracked. He cries out in the darkness, “Where’d you go, Chewy? Chewy!”

“I love you. Go to sleep, baby,” you say, returning to his room, fixing his blankets, and plopping yourself back down in the rocking chair in the dark next to his bed. You then realize why Mommy is two seasons behind on Homeland.

It’s 8:15. You sit there for ten more minutes in silence. You consider pulling out your iPhone to play Words with Friends, but the screen’s light will act as a nephew homing beacon. You consider pulling up Facebook and posting, “I’m being held hostage in a three-year-old’s bedroom. Please send help.”

You know you’re spoiling him. You don’t care. You continue to sit in the dark. Surely he’s asleep by now, you think around 8:30. You head to the hallway again and slowly close his door. He doesn’t freak out. You count this as a win.

Five minutes later, when you’re back in the dining room on your computer, you hear slow, tiny footsteps on the hardwood floor heading down the hallway. Your nephew peeks around the corner, smiles at you, and melts your heart.

“What are you doing?” you ask. “You need to go to sleep.”

You steer him back to bed. You find him in the hallway again five minutes later. “I’m so tired,” he says, wiping his bloodshot eyes with the back of his arm like he’s a middle-aged woman in a Tennessee Williams play. You consider crafting him a mint julep.

You take him back to bed and realize his bedroom smells like fresh poop. The smell wafts from the overflowing diaper genie you stuffed his diaper into earlier. You decide it would be cruel to force him to sleep in this room without disposing of the big blue cylinder bag of stinky diapers. You reluctantly turn on the light. He stares at you as you open the diaper genie and realize you’re forty-two and you’ve never emptied a diaper genie before. How the hell does this thing work?

After a few minutes of fumbling, you succeed in pulling out the bag, detaching it, and retying it. Your nephew follows you to the kitchen, where you dump the diapers in the kitchen trash, promising yourself you’ll take it outside when Mommy gets home.

By now you’re thinking your nephew may need another diaper, but you don’t dare change him. You send him back to bed, possibly wet. Two minutes later Mommy walks through the door. It is at this exact moment when your nephew falls asleep. It’s after 9:00.

You pour yourself three fingers of Amaro Lucano while Mommy scarfs a giant post-work burrito.

That was only five hours. Mommy does this every day for twenty-four. How?

You tip a nonexistent hat to your superhero sister.

The next morning Mommy takes your nephew to his annual checkup. He cooperates with the doctor like a champ. He has an eye test, blood test, and a urine test. He doesn’t flinch and thanks the doctor on his way out. Of course he does.

A different day when your nephew looks Instagram-worthy in a beautiful photo, but Mommy spent the day chasing after him and had to remove him from a restaurant when he threw an epic tantrum before you even started eating. Thankfully he’s no longer three.

Your nephew is eleven now, and he loves to hold Mommy’s hand when they cross the street, only now he calls her “Tessa.”

Your two favorite people in the whole wide world. One of them is turning forty on Sunday and is the best mom ever. (Happy birthday, Tessa!) The other one is eleven going on fifteen. He’s a golfer, track cyclist, straight-A student, and gourmet food connoisseur and is already talking about Ivy League colleges. When you were eleven, your only goal was to try to get your evil sixth grade teacher fired. (Damn tenure.)

The Boy in the Microscope

Donna Drysdale as told to Chelsey Drysdale

In summer 1968, when we were almost nineteen, we had our first kiss on the Adventure Thru Inner Space ride at Disneyland. The ride purported to shrink people to smaller than an atom inside a giant artificial microscope, but as I sat next to the cutest boy I’d ever seen in real life, my buzzing atoms felt more expansive than ever. Earlier that day, the boy—who most likely wore Levi’s Button Fly jeans, a button-up, short-sleeved shirt with pin stripes, white socks, and black shoes—was nervous as we boarded the parking lot tram. This was my first date with him. This was his first date ever.

Inside the microscope, the outside world vanished. I doubt the tall, lanky, blue-eyed boy with short, wavy brown hair and I noticed the booming voiceover of the “scientist” who said, “I’m the first person to make this fabulous journey!” We probably didn’t notice the oversized snowflakes swirling around us, growing as we continued to “shrink.” When our lips touched, I wasn’t thinking about how earlier that week, the boy’s sister-in-law said, “We should all go to Disneyland this Saturday!” to which the boy replied, “Yeah! I get paid on Friday.” He, his brother, the unwitting matchmaker, and I were hanging around the Phillips 66 full-service gas station where the boy worked for his dad in the oppressive San Bernardino County heat. I’d only met him about two weeks prior. Our connection was instantaneous, but at the gas station I knew I’d break up with my high school boyfriend of three-and-a-half years inside the week because Disneyland was an unspoken “date.” Like many relationships with star athletes that begin when a girl is fifteen, this one had reached its expiration.

Saturday, the boy and I, now unattached, happened upon a classic rock band and a dance floor while walking through Fantasyland—me most likely sporting Keds, pedal pushers, and a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. As soon as I heard the music, I said, “Let’s dance!” He squeezed my hand so tight, I thought my bones might snap. “I don’t dance,” he said.

I love dancing. In high school, my biggest disappointment was not making the song-leading team, settling instead for pep commissioner. It was the perfect teenage activity for a chatty social butterfly on the edge of the popular crowd. Two-point-two miles away, my future introverted Disneyland date hid in the back row of the classroom, quiet, praying the teacher wouldn’t call on him.

The boy’s fear of dancing didn’t stop me from falling for him as he eagerly took me on the Matterhorn Bobsleds and the Rocket Jets above a make-believe NASA launch pad, despite my trepidation for fast-moving rides. We spun round and round in the sky, our young love burgeoning only weeks after I moved into his house, where I unpacked and fell in love with the boy’s shiny red Austin-Healey before meeting him in his mom’s kitchen; she’d uncharacteristically rented a stranger a room in their historic home.

Inside the Disneyland microscope, as the boy and I canoodled, and our hearts melted with the snowflakes, the voiceover asked, “Have I reached the universe of the molecule?” At that moment, our own molecules combined. He was the E ticket ride I hadn’t expected—totally worth the $7.30 price of admission. That day I added another love to my repertoire, alongside Disneyland and my mom.

Disneyland opened eleven days before my sixth birthday, where my precious mom and I walked down Main Street, U.S.A. in wonder toward the King Arthur Carrousel. I couldn’t have known one day, decades after my mom’s premature death, I’d open a Westways magazine and see a surprising full-page 1955 aerial black-and-white photo of my mom holding my tiny hand as we took our first steps into the happiest place on Earth. I couldn’t have known that intoxicating kiss inside the microscope with the boy in 1968 would be one of many; that, after his wavy short hair had grown longer and curlier, my bangs had disappeared, and I’d traded in pedal pushers for bell-bottoms in the early 1970s, we’d ride the Skyway buckets from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland with a couple who’d offer us a joint. I couldn’t have known my future husband and I would take our blond, pigtailed oldest daughter there every year for her birthday. I couldn’t have known my youngest daughter would take my grandson to Disneyland too, or that both daughters would not only be mine but also would belong to the boy in the microscope.

In 1978 we bought a house twenty-seven miles from Disneyland after nine years of marriage. The cutest boy I’ve ever known is still my husband, and we still live in that house. We talk about renewing our long-expired annual Disneyland passes but are deterred by the prices and crowds that didn’t exist when we met. No matter. We have decades of memories watching the elevator stretch in the musty Haunted Mansion; thrills inside Space Mountain, getting whipped around in the dark; giggling over the wiggly hippo ears on the Jungle Cruise; and singing, “Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me!” in the Caribbean.

These days we are content to watch Netflix, me on the couch, the boy lying on the floor, reaching up to grab my feet under a blanket, a reminder I’m still here. Who needs a light parade or fireworks over a castle when you still have your best friend you first kissed at Disneyland fifty-five years ago—the boy who continues to take you on all the best rides of your life? Now we are less Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and more cozy train ride around the park’s perimeter, but if we were to pass a rockin’ band, this time I’d be able to lure him onto the dance floor. I might even let him lead.

Donna Drysdale is a lifelong Southern California resident and a retired photographer, court reporter, and event planner. Her latest love is her eleven-year-old grandson, who divides his time between golf and velodrome track cycling. Chelsey Drysdale of Drysdale Editorial is her oldest daughter.

Ending a Memoir When the Story Isn’t Over

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.

Concealing a Memoir Character’s Identity

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XV

How to Write about Real People Anonymously

After my developmental editor read my essay collection, I sent him a couple extra pieces involving a Very Important Person I left out of the manuscript. I’d written the pieces for a workshop, shared them with the workshop, received feedback, and rewritten them. Then I’d set them aside, knowing if I included them in the manuscript—with the specific details I’d shared—several people would ascertain his identity, which I considered a deal-breaker.

I convinced myself I didn’t need him in the manuscript; I could write a book in which his presence in my life was nonexistent. My editor set me straight, calling him and two other Very Important Persons in the Chelsey Orbit my “triptych of superimposed happiness.” He said the absent VIP was the “logical ending.” How could I leave him out if he was one side of a triangle central to the narrative? Could I turn a two-sided triangle into a pointy hat or a pup tent instead, pretending this person doesn’t take up space in my consciousness? Leaving him out felt wrong; putting him in seemed impossible.

But my editor gave me the permission I needed in one sentence: “You can write about him completely anonymously.” I knew in that instant he had to be in the story. But how does one write about someone completely anonymously?

What I Didn’t Do

Memoirists attempt to conceal identities by changing people’s names, which I did from the outset with most of the characters in my manuscript; some writers also change job titles, hometowns, and other major defining details about people. However, I had to take this situation to the next level: I had to write intimate, honest scenes without hinting at anything that might tip off readers who know him. Aside from providing him with an apropos nickname, here’s what I didn’t do:

• I didn’t reveal where any of the action between us took place. I used the obscurity of the locations to my advantage. We could be in any city, in any state, in any country, and the interactions, thoughts, and emotions would be the same. We could sit on any bench next to any body of water and still have the same conversation. We could have met in any dive bar. We could have had philosophical conversations in any speakeasy. In a two-person world, the bustling world outside doesn’t have to exist.

• I didn’t talk about his children. Knowing he’s an attentive father is enough.

• I didn’t write the scenes that would automatically divulge who he is—no matter how pivotal they are. If I provided an example here, that would negate what I did in the book to painstakingly keep his identity hidden.

• I didn’t mention what he does for a living. While this would lend new layers to his personality, I had to skip his day-to-day involvement in the world.

• I didn’t discuss his personal hobbies and activities. Like his profession, this would be a way to build character, but his unique and disparate interests, especially when lumped together, are indicative of him as a person.

Dialogue, Setting, and Metaphors

Without these elements, then, can a writer do a person and a story justice? Of course! But how? I wrote scenes and curated written and spoken exchanges carefully to convey what’s vital. Here’s what else I did in the memoir version:

• Foremost, I made ample use of dialogue, both in-person and online. I saved texts, Facebook messages, and other written correspondence, which I wove into the story. How do two people sustain a long-distance connection in our modern digital era? How do texts relate to brief face-to-face contact, and how do conversations extend from one interaction to the next? How does technology play a role in a cyber-relationship based on thoughtful correspondence, what-ifs, and intense emotions? And how do monthslong stretches of silence affect the outcome?

• When describing his appearance, I mentioned his “gentle, kind smile” and “bright” eyes without referring to height, hair color, eye color, etc.

• I described the setting without naming it—and I explicitly connected setting to time because much of the in-person scenes occur in roughly the same space on the map. For example, the bench where we had a key conversation one year no longer existed a few years later after a major renovation when we met up there again. How did the same setting change from year to year? What does it look like, and what occurred there? There’s no need to name the exact spot.

• I used metaphors to describe my feelings about him and our situation. I reconfigured the “boy meets girl” fairytale narrative to explain my motives. What does a timely, realistic “fairytale” look like, and how does it differ from the sugarcoated ones fed to us in Disney films?

• I wrote scenes in which I discussed this person with other people. What are outsiders’ reactions to our connection and the circumstances surrounding it?

• I wrote imaginary scenes that never happened. I envisioned an alternate universe in which they did. The reader is privy to what’s real versus what’s in my head.

Is This Chapter a Novel Instead?

At dinner recently, a close friend and I talked about some of the important events I had to leave out and how frustrating that was. She suggested I write a novel on the topic instead. Now I can’t stop thinking about it. Autofiction would be an excellent way to tell the story—and use my imagination to its fullest potential.

I never thought of myself as someone who could write fiction until I read Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation. I knew I wanted to write a novel after I read that book. I started a novel in 2019 loosely based on my experiences as a high school English teacher. I worked on it for a year, completing one hundred pages of a draft. Then I realized what the story was about. I planned to start from page one again. I put it aside, and I haven’t picked it back up yet.

But now I have a cool new idea, thanks to my astute friend. I don’t know whether to be grateful or pissed she thought of it first. In the meantime, I have to figure out what to do with the memoir I already wrote: Set it aside? Cut it up on the floor and rearrange it? Write more? Keep sending it out as is? Publish more pieces of it as standalone essays?

The Problem with Memoir Endings

Before I consider scrapping a decade of my work, we have to talk about endings in the next installment. I wrote at least four or five of them. I may have to write yet another one if my circumstances change again before I hear a “yes” from the publishing powers that be—if that ever happens.

How does a writer end a memoir when life never stops unfolding until she’s no longer living?

Lost in Los Angeles

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XIV

My penchant for overthinking spilled onto the page, but guessing games don’t make the cut.

By page 193 of my essay collection, I’m still making the same mistakes: starting essays with backstory instead of scenes; writing lengthy origin stories about how I met certain people—and often sharing what happened to them after they were no longer in my life; including every detail about every experience without curating the sparkly bits; and speculating about what other people are thinking and why they’re acting the way they are.

No one knows what a person is thinking and what that person’s motives are, especially when the writer barely knows them, so why hypothesize?

I’m Not a Mind Reader

When I moved to Culver City in 2009, I was pushing thirty-six and still reeling from a momentary marriage, a called-off wedding, and a couple post-relationship, fringe-dude disappearing acts. This would have been an opportune time to find a therapist; instead, I sought experiences that would further deplete my self-esteem and thrust my imaginary family out of reach. My wonky headspace and move to Los Angeles to live with a childhood friend collided, and if this collision had made a noise, I imagine it would have sounded like the space shuttle sonic boom above our house that shook the foundation and launched me off the sofa.

Reading the initial thirty-four pages that recount the self-inflicted rollercoaster of desperation that was my midthirties, I note a few instances of pointless conjecture about the reasons why one of my roommate’s friends spurned my advances, aside from the obvious one: Perhaps he didn’t want to sleep with you, dumbass.

Like this:

“He had willpower of steel—or maybe other women on the side. His personal life was a mystery, part of his game. He seemed to get more pleasure out of torturing me than actually having sex.”

Or this:

“I was beginning to think he had a phobia about intercourse. Maybe he was afraid of diseases, or maybe deep down . . . a good boy was hiding. I could never tell.”

And it doesn’t matter. I didn’t have any idea what he was going through at all. Guessing his intentions—or lack of them—on the page serves no fascinating purpose for the reader.

My Premature Agent Search Was Unsuccessful—Thankfully

I feel compelled to harangue my younger self for expending so much mental and emotional energy for no justifiable reason. It can be grueling to read early drafts of a me that’s me—but also not me anymore. On the plus side, I am grateful my full-court press to find a literary agent didn’t pan out when I hadn’t rewritten my manuscript yet. That the essay collection never found a home is a blessing—and I never use the word “blessing.”

One agent read it front to back in one day and said she was interested in seeing a revision that dealt with my anxiety and trouble saying “no” in other aspects of my life aside from romantic love, but that wasn’t the direction I was compelled to go in.

I pitched another agent face-to-face at a conference who said, “This is exactly what I’m looking for,” and then she read my manuscript. At first she wasn’t a solid “no,” but she was rightfully ambivalent after peeking under the hood because this version isn’t tight or multilayered enough, in part because of the excessive speculating.

Turn the Guesswork Inward

The assumptions continue with another lad I liked who “talked to me like a real person.” He was a recent Los Angeles transplant and “hadn’t been in town long enough to play fake LA games with women, I figured.”

We had just met. I knew nothing about him. How did I know if he was a game-player or not?

In another attempt to infuse feelings into a real person, I mention my roommate “felt [like he was] in the way, I suspect” when I was flirting with yet another one of his buddies.

Instead of wondering how he felt, maybe I should have asked him!

Even if I’m correct in my theories about the drives and sentiments of men I knew when I lived in Los Angeles, they have no place in the text. The more imperative question is why I was acting like a teenager in my thirties, hiding behind a fake “quest for merriment” that concealed a lack of trust in my own judgment about people’s character; a deep-seated fear of rejection; and the engrained conviction I didn’t deserve the fulfilling life I wanted.

Attempt to Answer the Vital Questions

To unlock this chapter, then, is to magnify only those scenes that endeavor to unravel my own motives and feelings. The men’s actions speak for themselves. Holding the reader’s hand undermines her intelligence; what she thinks based on my retelling is up to her.

So, in the fifteen-page revision, I start with a key middle-of-the-story scene inside “The Lodge,” the room in our house that resembled a log cabin—the setting for much of the mayhem that ensued in the time between Easter 2009, when I moved in, and Halloween 2010, when I moved out. After leaving the reader with questions about what happens next, I explain my current state of mind, tying this chapter to the previous one, mentioning the abrupt departure of a person I considered important—the “launch point for a tailspin.”

And instead of spotlighting the interiority of the supporting characters, I underscore my own gobbledygook in relation to others’ behaviors I can actually observe. In other words, I examine my desperate, sad self—an element an early writing teacher indicated was lacking—stating things like, “It fed my inclination for people-pleasing,” and “I had entered the unattractive realm of wanting people to like me at the expense of me not liking myself,” and “I pursued every guy based on a mere twinge of attraction.”

By the end of the chapter, the reader knows the most pertinent absurd, amusing, and distressing events that transpired in 2009 and 2010 inside The Lodge in Culver City—excluding ones I know for certain would upset my old roommate, with whom I’m still friends—a conscious choice to circumvent that which is Not My Story to Tell.

A New Anonymous Character

As I reinforce words that first appear at the beginning of the chapter—underpinning my midthirties conviction that love and happiness are reserved for others—the reader is now primed to meet a person who is completely absent from the essay collection, someone my second mentor gently nudged me to consign to a rightful—yet anonymous—starring role after I shared workshopped pages I’d cast aside. Leaving this person out of the manuscript felt like a glaring lie of omission.

But how does one write about a person totally anonymously? It’s not easy, but it can be done.

Attention High School Seniors: It’s Time to Write Your College Application Essay!

In a short essay or personal statement, university-bound seniors must make every word count.

It’s still summer. You are (hopefully) enjoying the sunshine. Your senior year of high school (hopefully) hasn’t begun yet. You (hopefully) aren’t thinking about classrooms, lectures, and homework. You may even be on a family vacation or lazily scrolling through social media, watching Netflix, or working a summer job for some extra—or indispensable—cash. This is not the time to focus on the nebulous “future,” right?

Actually, it is.

If you plan to apply to a four-year university for the 2024–2025 school year, now is the time to brainstorm, write, and revise your college application essay(s)/personal statement(s).

A Special Kind of “Essay”

I’m certain the word “essay” conjures many thoughts and emotions—not all positive. Maybe it invokes those dreaded five paragraphs you’ve been perfecting—or avoiding—since middle school. Maybe “essay” makes you think of painstaking research or literary criticism to prove you read and understood the deeper meaning of the latest novel your English teacher plucked from the district-approved “canon.” You know the one: It was written at least a hundred years ago. It was assigned to a whole class of varied individuals, and you were all supposed to connect with it and apply it to your modern-day lives. You were asked to glean its themes and metaphors and write about them in a formal fashion with examples from the text.

I know those essays well. I’ve written and read countless versions of them.

Here’s the thing: College application essays are not those kinds of essays.

As a former high school English teacher and current published essayist who has read and assigned those frightful five-paragraph academic papers, I can say with conviction that a college application essay is more fun to write. (No, really.) It’s satisfying because it’s creative, and it’s about you.

Throw Out the Rules

Have you ever had an English teacher tell you never to use “I” when you’re writing an essay—no first-person narrative ever? I have. Guess what? It’s time to toss out that rule and embrace your own narrative. Now is your chance to showcase your unique personality—your voice on the page; a distinctive spin on a specific experience from your life; what you learned about yourself; and how you did or did not change your outlook or behavior as a result of that experience. Bonus points if you learned something universal about the world you can apply to your future as a college student on an incredible campus of your choice!

Where to Begin

The anecdote you choose to write about for your college application essay/personal statement informs the person you are today—right now—with all of your imperfections and marvelous attributes, and it doesn’t have to be a giant tragic—or joyous—life event. In fact, it’s probably best if it isn’t. If you can morph a mundane, unremarkable incident or concept into something weighty and thought-provoking because of how you write about it, you will stand out from the hundreds of other essays in the gatekeepers’ inboxes.

Don’t Fear the Blank Page

If you’re like me, the blank page can be scary. After all the relentless work you’ve accomplished as a young scholar up until now, how can a piece of writing that’s 650 words or fewer stand between you and your dream school—your introduction to the big, bad awesome world of adulthood with all its potential, where anything can happen? If you take it one step at a time, I promise it doesn’t have to be as painful as it appears when you’re staring at that blank page.

This is your opportunity to exhibit your character; to sound like you in a more informal way than when you write bookish papers; to be proud but humble; humorous but not overtly so; an adept storyteller using all five senses; and a straightforward, succinct, reflective interpreter of a personal tale—momentous or otherwise.

A Failure Transformed into a Success

How will you grab a smart reader in the first sentence? How will you make your essay jump out from the pack of other deserving incoming college freshmen?

Let me give you an example:

I once guided a friend’s son through the process of completing his Common Application essay—an online portal used by more than 900 universities. The first draft he sent me began like this: “Humans are fallible creatures . . .”

This is true. The words themselves are solid. But the eyes of someone reading hundreds of these submissions would most likely glaze over if they saw this. Why? Because it’s too broad; it’s something everyone already knows; and it tells me nothing specific about my friend’s son.

Based on my suggestions, in a future draft, he wrote an honest, direct statement about himself instead: “My junior year I made the worst decision of my academic career. I plagiarized an assignment . . .” In fact, he copied an entire essay word for word after three years of busting his backside to succeed without duplicity.

Why would he choose to take this action and admit he cheated on a crucial paper—years before ChatGPT—in an essay meant to help him gain access into his favorite college? Because the rest of the essay explains why he did it and how he overcame such a questionable choice, the actions he took to better his emotional and educational circumstances, and how his current stance makes him an excellent candidate for admission into the university. In the essay, he wrote, “I cheated, but I’m not a cheater.” (Spoiler alert: He got in.)

Start with a Scene

If I advised him now, I would go even further: Start your essay in a scene. If someone was watching a defining moment from your life in a film, what would they see, hear, and feel? The first part of your essay should read like fiction even though it’s true. Universities want to know you can write, and they want to learn about you as a real human—not only someone who will impact their institution but someone who is self-aware and grows from mistakes. Readers like a compelling story about overcoming adversity—self-inflicted or otherwise.

I Can Guide You

You don’t have to go through this process alone, nor should you. Let’s work together. As your college application essay specialist, I will:

• . . . brainstorm topic ideas with you, asking compassionate, probing questions about your background, interests, achievements, mistakes, and skills.

• . . . provide guidance during the writing process, sharing more than two decades of experience as an essayist, editor, and mentor about what makes a good story; when you should “show” what happened; when you should “tell” how it affected you; how to find the structure; and what to focus on, cut, or expand to make your essay stand out.

• . . . proofread your essay for grammatical errors, repetition, word choice, spelling errors, and other mechanics.

• . . . act as an adviser and cheerleader, highlighting your strengths and where your writing works best, as well as which sentences can be improved and how.

Learn More!

Proto-Cyber-Courtship to Real-Life ‘Relationship’

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XIII

Two Beginnings, Two Endings, Tangential Characters, and Toying with the Timeline

At this point, you may be wondering, “How many dudes can this silly girl fall for before she gets it right?” Will I ever get it right? I get it wrong way less often than I used to, and I now have a better understanding about why I got it wrong so many times, in part because I wrote a whole book about it—kind of the point!

Take for instance the guy I met online long before dating apps became the norm. In my essay collection circa 2014 to 2017, a twenty-eight-page piece about this same-aged man starts at the beginning of our story, the night before my twenty-sixth birthday in 1999 when we were playing Hearts on Yahoo! with a couple other strangers. He sent me an email after the card game to wish me happy birthday. We then wrote long emails back and forth nearly every day for a couple months. He didn’t know what I looked like. I didn’t know what he looked like. If you remember life before social media, you understand.

I gave my online pen pal too much real estate in the essay collection. Also, it wasn’t prudent to start at the beginning. In the revised version, I begin our tale on a dirty shag carpet in the basement of his friend’s house in the mountains of Virginia on New Year’s Eve 2001 because it’s more interesting to watch him stroke my hair while I lie on the floor than read our instant messages about hockey the night we first chatted. In the memoir, I reduce our initial cyber-courtship to a brief mention, incorporating it into a scene in the mountain house in Virginia two years later. It speeds the story along and gets the reader to the “good stuff” more quickly—the necessary stuff to understand how this relationship played out.

I Should Have Saved Those Emails

That said, it may have been useful if I’d saved the digital correspondence from when we first “met.” It would no doubt be an enlightening glimpse into my twentysomething psyche and how I interacted with someone I considered a “friend” before we ever came face-to-face, something that happens regularly in our world now but was much more anomalous then. When I switched from Yahoo! to Gmail twenty years ago, I printed our email exchange and saved it in a file in my closet. One day—most likely during one of my many moves—I shredded it and put it in the recycle bin.

I do, however, still have the emails we swapped in Gmail in 2008, and I include relevant portions of them in the manuscript. They were crucial to writing a memoir, dredging up pain I didn’t want to relive but had to relive; a writer signs up to relive pain when she writes a memoir—it’s part of the deal.

Girl Meets Boy—Then Meets Him Again

Back in 1999, after we mailed photos to each other, I dragged my best friend to San Francisco to meet him in person when he was visiting friends. In the essay collection, a few paragraphs explain my crappy navigation skills—pre-GPS—and how my best friend and I pulled the cord on the bus several blocks too early. The reader takes the long trudge up a steep San Francisco hill with us in uncharacteristic heat. I yank the reader out of the story to explain our terrible public transportation skills: “The way we get blatantly ignored trying to hail a cab in New York City is YouTube-worthy.” The forward momentum of the story lags—at the same slow speed as our trek up the hill.

When we finally make it to our destination, my pen pal is standing in his friends’ living room holding a welcome gift: a new blue Washington Capitals cap. (I still have it.) On page four of the essay, the story moves at a more rapid clip. I blaze through the trip to San Francisco in one paragraph, adding, “I’d hastily put Archer into the ‘friend zone,’” a line that later inspired the current chapter title: “Out of the Friend Zone.” In the essay collection, I include two scenes about meeting him: the online meeting and the in-person one. It’s excessive.

Ditching Peripheral Characters

The next seven pages are devoted to New Year’s Eve 2000, an unflattering, extended incident in a La Jolla dance club, where free vodka cranberries and immaturity spurred careless behavior. I wore a shiny purple tank top I called my “lucky shirt,” and I danced and kissed Archer’s friend’s roommate. There’s dialogue, conflict, a clear setting, physical gestures, humor, and humiliation. It’s a fully fleshed-out scene, but in the end, my apology to Archer eight years later in his apartment is more important than detailing what happened with a fringe character I’d never talk to again.

Instead of this . . .

“. . . [the stranger] gave me a piggyback ride, my long black skirt stretched across his back. As I bounced on him, he hailed us a cab back to his house.

‘You don’t even know my name, do you?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I do. You’re the girl on my back!’”

. . . there’s this:

“‘I was such a jerk eight years ago that night I kissed your friend at the bar. I’m still sorry about that,’ I said.

‘You didn’t owe me anything.’

‘Yes, but that was still a really shitty thing to do. I wasn’t a very good friend.’

‘It’s okay. I haven’t lost any sleep over it lately.’”

I was able to condense the long New Year’s Eve segment into a couple sentences, referencing it in a more emotional, retrospective context the summer Archer and I finally dated eight years later. He and I are the stars of the story, not the acquaintance who never mattered to me.

Tinkering with the Timeline

The linear structure of the essay collection from 1999 to 2008 is fine, but it leaves too much room for the kitchen sink method: I include every detail about everything that happened between me and my long-distance pen pal without considering if each scene earns a rightful spot in the text. When I revised the material, the summer of 2008 became the anchor I kept returning to because that’s when most of our important interactions took place.

So, the current memoir structure is this: New Year’s Eve 2001 (I did something shameful. My pen pal took care of me!); summer 2008 (We dated!); 1999 and 2001 (We met online—a truncated version! Before I did something shameful on New Year’s Eve, we had a friendly week in DC!); summer 2008 (We continued to date but still used email as our primary mode of honest communication!); summer 2008 (Foreshadowing: I almost met another man at a wedding—a pivotal figure I would meet two years later!); summer 2008 (Everything falls apart with my pen-pal-turned-almost-boyfriend!).

In the latest version, while moving back and forth in time, I provide context about where we are and when we are, explicitly linking the nonlinear scenes together, so the reader (hopefully) doesn’t get lost.

I also provide deeper insight into my own character—something that was absent when I was too close to the material. Writing when the emotional experience was fresh—so as not to forget the details—was beneficial; editing from a temporal distance once I “saw” what the experience meant was key.

Writing Toward Self-Awareness

It took several years and several revisions to understand something fundamental—and really obvious—about myself: I pursued emotionally unavailable men because I, too, was emotionally unavailable. Toward the end of the essay collection, I discuss a story Archer wrote about a man who calls his best friend after a catastrophic one-car crash to tell him he’s in love with his wife. I write: “Even in fiction, the protagonist wanted what he couldn’t have. Maybe this was Archer’s modus operandi. I’ll never know.”

After our relationship comes to a halt, I avoid him at a hockey game—a bonus ending!

Here’s the current ending, sans hockey: “Even in fiction, the protagonist wanted what he couldn’t have. Maybe this was Archer’s standard operating procedure. Maybe it was mine too.” This sets up a four-year romantic tailspin—coming right up.

A ‘Stalker,’ a Disappearance, and a Couple of CPR Dummies

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XII

On my fiftieth birthday, I recall a crush from twenty-four years ago.

The essay collection I wrote in 2014 not only includes essays about boys I dated but also an essay about a boy I wish I’d dated. In spring 1999, after boyfriend number three and I broke up, I took a required health class to finish my teaching credential, and on the first day of school, I had a rare “where has he been all my life?” moment when a handsome young man walked into the room and sat down a couple seats away from me. I saw him for three hours once a week for sixteen weeks and didn’t ask him if he had a girlfriend until we were walking to the parking lot on the last day of the semester. He was still dating his high school girlfriend “unfortunately,” he said. We hugged goodbye, and I didn’t see him again for nine months.

Likeable Unpublished Essays

A couple essays in the scrap pile might be publishable with some rework. One of them is about a night two weeks before I turned thirty when my best friend and I went to our usual Irish pub and met a gorgeous twenty-three-year-old lad who only had eyes for me at a time when I was feeling washed-up. (If only I could go back twenty years and shake that thirty-year-old’s shoulders and tell her to enjoy her youth while it lasts.) I revised that essay for seven years and never tried to publish it.

The other essay—“Stalker”—is the one about the boy in my health class. I was the “stalker,” despite the target of my affection not fearing me, in part because he didn’t know I was—sort of—stalking him. (I swear I’m not unhinged, just resourceful.) That I was able to locate his whereabouts nine months after our class ended without the help of the internet and track him down in person—with a tip from a dear friend—is more impressive than creepy, if not a tad delusional.

If I tackled that essay again, I would focus on the two most noteworthy scenes: the day I followed health-class hottie to a Saturday CPR certification and the afternoon I found him on campus when I was no longer a student at the university—the last time I would ever see him.

Stalker

Here’s a section from the day I supposedly learned CPR:

Partway through the semester, our instructor informed us we needed CPR certification, so he gave us a weekend CPR training schedule. I signed up for one immediately, but the next week I overheard Mr. Right telling the teacher when he was signing up for his CPR course. I cancelled mine and rescheduled to take his. I didn’t tell him. I was jubilant I would see him an extra day out of the week—a Saturday even.

Oh my god, it’s official. I have become a stalker, I thought.

The morning of CPR training, I arrived early and sat in a chair against a wall across the room. I nonchalantly scanned strangers’ faces without making eye contact and fake-read a novel. (Smartphones would have been so convenient back then.)

Then I heard his sexy voice at the front door as he signed in with the instructor. My heart soared into my throat. When he saw me across the room, pretending I didn’t see him, peering out a window, side-glancing in his direction, he beamed. I beamed. I put on my best surprised face.

“I thought you signed up for a different day!” he said.

“I did, but then I couldn’t make it,” I lied.

We all lined up on the cold, hard floor and set up plastic CPR dummies with permanent O-shaped mouths and dead eyes. They could have easily doubled as weathered sex dolls. It was disconcerting.

Dreamboat crouched next to me, hovering over his designated lifeless synthetic body. We practiced mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on those dummies. I watched him through my peripheral vision, his gorgeous lips blowing air into his peach-skinned doll, his strong hands compressing her rubbery chest.

Why aren’t we partnering up and testing this shit out on each other? I thought.

Yet, I still didn’t tell him how I felt, and I had the perfect in. I hadn’t always been this reserved with men, so what was stopping me? None of our other classmates were there. It was me, him, and a couple of stiffs who wouldn’t kiss back. The words “I really like you” stuck to my tongue.

Somehow I got CPR certified that day, but I was thankful to take home a brochure with a step-by-step diagram because, when I left with my official card, I could not recall anything. I had been too busy fawning over the hot boy.

How many breaths vs. compressions? How is it different for babies? Oh my god, someone is going to choke and die because I have a crush.

The One Who Got Away—or Not

The following school year, when I tracked him down on campus, passing off our run-in as a coincidence when it wasn’t, he had broken up with his girlfriend, and he almost skipped class to have dinner with me. He hesitated, looking at his watch. Then he went to class. This time I didn’t let him get away without my email address and phone number, but I didn’t ask for his. I knew he would call. He never did.

For weeks I thought maybe this was the one time in history someone actually lost a phone number, but his lack of contact could have been for any number of reasons: He was busy as a post-grad and didn’t have a job yet; he met someone else; he lived with his parents; he wasn’t as into me as I was into him! Duh.

I expended a ridiculous amount of emotional and mental energy on a fantasy. I barely knew the guy! I had done this before, and I would do it again. In my late twenties, I wasn’t totally over college heartbreak, and my confidence was shot—although, not nearly as shot as it would be in my thirties after continuing the same pattern over and over, always with the same result: a self-fulfilling prophecy of rejection. I focused on “relationships” that were “safe,” not sustainable.

The Best-Laid Plans

About a decade later, I scoured the internet to locate his whereabouts—more stalking. He was married, living in a rural town on the other side of the country, working as a used car salesman. He had a dog but no kids. In class he said he wanted to teach to have more time with his future children.

What happened to his plans? I wondered.

And what happened to mine? I only lasted as a high school English teacher for two years. I wanted children and never had them either. I have moved back into my childhood home five times as an adult. It took me a long time to recognize there’s nothing wrong with plans not working out the way we expect. Do they ever?

Still an Effective ‘Researcher’

At the end of the essay, I mention the nonexistence of “fate” and reword the concept of “sliding doors,” but, like most of my first essays, I didn’t dig deep enough into self-reflection. I do, however, still find the story funny, and when I started this blog entry, I looked up that dude again. (Have I learned nothing?) He still lives in the same state on the East Coast, but I’m not sure if he still sells cars or if he’s still married, and I don’t care anymore.

I eventually let go of the boy and the essay. I couldn’t determine how to infuse the piece with more weight without connecting it to something else, but I never figured out what that something else was, and the essay doesn’t lend anything new the reader doesn’t already know about me: I’m a dreamer; I am drawn to good-looking men who disappear; I’m adept at internet research, even when a certain person of interest, whose shirt was buttoned incorrectly the last time I saw him, isn’t on social media.

No Writing Time Is Wasted

In addition to several excised essays and chapters—I have a document of marooned paragraphs I couldn’t part with forever, determined I would someday find a use for them. I played an effective trick on my psyche. I have more than 44,000 random words of potentially usable material that I will never use. Nonwriters might consider the time spent writing these dustbin words a waste, but it never is. All craft practice is worthwhile. Writing a book means writing more than one book—and possibly several.

Status Check

After ninety-six agent rejections and twenty-four independent press rejections, my memoir is in one independent press Submittable queue and one inbox of a very generous editor who read my overview and said she wants to help me figure out where else to send the book, even though she only publishes novels. After a two-year break from querying agents, I am ready to do it again. Maybe I’ll find a home for my memoir before the ten-year mark—or at least sometime while I’m still in my fifties, which started today.