The Yes Girl and Her First Love

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XI

A Working Title, a Slayer Concert, and Links Between Unlikely Events

When I worked on the first iteration of my manuscript, I wrote essays about my love life in a linear fashion because it didn’t dawn on me to do otherwise. I wasn’t explicitly connecting the stories, so it made the most sense not to write about my short marriage, then tell the story of my first love, then, say, sprinkle in my grief over never having children. I aimed for clarity; a linear structure seemed like the logical way to keep the reader from getting lost. I’d participated in enough writing workshops to know it’s not unusual for even the most discerning reader to become befuddled. When a nonfiction writer tells her story, she may forget strangers know nothing about her before they start reading. She can’t assume readers will understand her background, desires, and characters from her life unless she fills in the gaps—at strategic times: When did this happen? Where? Who is this person? Why is this situation important? How did we get here? A writer wants to complicate the story in as much as she wants the reader to turn pages to find out what happens next, but puzzling the reader for the sake of puzzling the reader is a surefire way to ensure she won’t finish the book.

I wanted the ideal reader I couldn’t envision yet to understand my trajectory from wholesome teenager who couldn’t determine if her first kiss was a real kiss to a forty-something single woman who can’t remember how many men she’s kissed. So, after writing an essay about high school, I wrote an essay about my first boyfriend, whom I began dating three weeks before graduation and stayed with until I was twenty-two. I called the essay “First Love, First Everything.”

Choosing a Working Title

Around the time I was working on this essay, I thought of the manuscript’s working title. It had only been a few years since my midthirties roommate bequeathed me a theme song and sang it often and unprompted while wandering through the house: “I’m just a girl who can’t say no!” He said he’d buy a Take-a-Number ticket dispenser to mount next to my bedroom door. My favorite word at the time was “yes.”

Many books have “girl” in the title—despite social media flak—but I couldn’t find any named Yes Girl. That’s it! I thought when I came up with it. My manuscript would be named Yes Girl for the next seven years, until mentor number three combed through my latest query letter and the first chapter of my revised memoir and said she read the title as Yes, Girrrlll, which had never occurred to me. She suggested I either rename the manuscript or add “The” to the title: The Yes Girl. Problem solved. She did believe, however, the title no longer matched the content unless I did another massive overhaul, so I renamed my memoir with the help of my oldest friend. (We’ll get to that later, along with how often I’ve brainstormed subtitles only to discard them.)

Two Stories a Decade Apart

The essay “First Love, First Everything” is fourteen pages, double-spaced, starting on page twelve of the collection, but in the current version of my memoir, boyfriend number one’s story is woven together with my two-year stretch as a high school English teacher, in which I compare “Jake’s” personality to my students, providing an opportunity to reflect on how young we were when Jake and I got together—like the students who now sat in front of me in my classroom ten years later. I make connections between experiences that aren’t readily obvious but nonetheless make sense, which makes the material nonlinear and more interesting. The chapter starts on page twenty-six, and I condense four years with Jake into half as many pages as the original piece.

The idea to connect the two sets of scenes a decade apart came to me while working with mentor number two three years after I wrote the essay. It’s a prime example of how valuable it can be to embrace the process and give it time. In hindsight, I would not have been content publishing the first version, despite a few funny moments I later removed. Reading it now, I view the cut material as needless, and much of it is not my story to tell in the first place. In fact, I wonder what the hell I was thinking explaining the parts of his story that have nothing to do with me; it’s not his book!

Chaperoning a Boy to a Metal Concert

In the essay, I describe our first date. On the way into school before 8:00 a.m. in spring 1991, when he put his arm around me and asked, “Wanna drive me to a Slayer concert?” I said, “Sure!” despite only liking the opening band on a four-band bill. Jake didn’t have a license yet. I had a car. He needed my wheels. That this is the origin of my complicated adult love life is apropos. It’s too spot-on to work in fiction.

I picked him up in my 1980 green Volvo in a pink shirt and white jacket, “instead of the customary black I’d been wearing since ninth grade. We went to Taco Bell in Costa Mesa and gorged on Taco Supremes before heading to the Pacific Amphitheatre. The line at the show wrapped around the fairgrounds. No one was wearing pink.”

I talk about waiting in line outside the venue during Alice in Chains’ entire set because concert security was tight. “I heard the faint sound of Layne Staley’s voice through the trees. I never had a chance to see him perform again before he died eleven years later. I wish we’d skipped Taco Bell.”

I talk about “long-haired metal heads with too many tattoos” and “inappropriate pat-downs” and “metal detectors.” I talk about the greasy-haired boy, no older than eleven, who bounced on his orange plastic seat behind us during the show, shaking his fists in the air, screaming, “I’m so stoned!” I write too much minutia about the beginning of that four-year relationship, despite sharing my uneasy, timid reaction to being in an environment that wasn’t my scene, revealing the personality of my eighteen-year-old self. The content begs to be pared. I eventually shrink the concert to two short paragraphs before moving on.

Avoiding Spoilers and Omitting What’s Not Mine to Tell

In both versions, I focus heavily on ditching my virginity because it was . . . tricky. Here’s the part of the series where avoiding spoilers becomes an issue. I’ve been considering how to explore the process of writing a memoir without giving it all away. Let’s say when I was eighteen, anatomical limitations prohibited certain activities. In the essay, I get sidetracked explaining said constraints by sharing a humorous conversation with a high school friend who didn’t have the same problem I did. This conversation isn’t essential for the reader to understand what happens next when my new boyfriend and I attempt to have sex for the first time.

In the memoir I extract three full pages from the middle because, although as a newbie book writer I am compelled to clarify how Jake came to be the teenager he came to be—and how that affected our bond—writing about his relationship with his mom, intimate information about his childhood, and the ways in which he manifested trauma has ethical implications waffling between fuzzy and blatant. In any case, it doesn’t matter what he experienced before he met me; it only matters what happened between us that’s within his control.

Multiple Breakups and No Regrets

In the essay, I write more than one breakup scene because we broke up more than one time, once on a landline when I was in Northern California on vacation with my mom for my twenty-first birthday. The only breakup that counts, though, is the definitive one, and after he’s no longer my boyfriend, the paragraph about what he did with his life next is unwarranted too. Like I said, it’s my book, not his. (Taking the scissors to the last couple paragraphs of an essay usually works out.)

In the memoir, I skip speculation about why “he transformed from worrying about my loyalty to being indifferent for no discernible reason” because, to this day, I have no idea why he did a “180-degree flip,” nor do I care anymore. I spent the summer when I was twenty at a community pool with my best friend, her boyfriend, and his friends. I write, “Where the hell was Jake?” He wasn’t there, but what’s more significant is having no regrets about dragging out a relationship that should have ended much earlier because a first love is impossible to let go of—until it isn’t. What’s important is how wildly in love I was and how innocent and pure it was. What’s real is how unbroken and hopeful I still was when we parted ways. What’s vital is how fortunate I am to have memories of young love because old love is different—much better in many ways—but different. I have regrets, but this isn’t one of them.

Slain Darlings

In the revision process, I axed a few details I still find amusing. Here they are without context:

1. When I was in the new-love stage of lying on the floor with a stomachache and the inability to think about anything else besides him, my seven-year-old sister asked my mom, “What’s wrong with Chelsey?”

2. “The way I was hearing it, she could hold her vagina up to her ear and hear the ocean.”

3. “Like 9½ Weeks, the whole world was our giant fridge of cut fruit.”

A Word Lover’s Origin Story

When I was a child, I read every Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary novel I could get my hands on. I rejoiced on days when the Scholastic Book Fair came to my elementary school. I read at the dinner table. I reorganized my bookshelves often, opting to submerge myself in words while other children played outside and perfected Atari games.

I was that kid in junior high who relished diagramming sentences and didn’t flinch when we were forced to memorize all the prepositions in alphabetical order, as if that would somehow make us better writers. When my eighth grade English teacher introduced the dreaded five-paragraph essay and enforced her predetermined sentence variation requirements, I complied without question, even though she treated essays like a fixed math problem with one “right” answer and forbid the use of “I” in our work; it was taboo to have opinions.

During my first week of high school, my ninth grade English teacher said, “Forget everything you’ve ever learned about writing.” He set us free to make arguments on the page without restrictions on sentence types or a specific number of paragraphs. It was revelatory. Around that time, I connected my love of reading with my love of writing. It took an inordinately long time and an enormous amount of self-imposed work, however, to reach my current trajectory.

I am a lifelong learner, and in midlife I have substantial experience and skills I never imagined possible when my friends and I sat in that windowless freshmen classroom, marking off the days until the Rose Bowl Depeche Mode concert on my teacher’s blackboard. In hindsight, it was inevitable I would become an English major, receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Irvine, but on the last day of my undergraduate career, I had no solid plans, aside from purchasing an alumni sweatshirt. At twenty two, I wrote in my journal, “I just want to be a writer.” Then I didn’t write. I didn’t consider it a viable option.

To remain a student, I attended California State University, Long Beach, where I studied for two years to become a high school English teacher. Between 2000 and 2002, I taught ninth, eleventh, and twelfth grade literature and writing, ensuring I had zero time to read and write for pleasure—or date anyone—and the stress of disciplining teenagers when I still looked like one likely shaved off a couple years of my life.

So I became an editor, the other career option I’d considered in the late nineties. After I quit teaching, I edited law textbooks and interviewed attorneys for a newsletter. Then I managed a data center association magazine. Next, I edited an electronics manufacturing magazine for sixteen years, most recently as the chief content officer.

Simultaneously, beginning in 2007, I mustered the courage to write personal and craft essays, memoir, and, more recently, fiction, while also providing constructive feedback on other writers’ multi-genre work, cultivating a nourishing community. After a handful of writing workshops through UCI Extension and Gotham Writers Workshop, I found a mentor in author Shawna Kenney through UCLA Extension in her personal essay class. After a ten-week class on campus, she invited me to join a critique group. I spent four eight-week sessions in her private workshop, where I compiled essays that would turn into a draft of a collection. I latched onto the workshop environment, listening to constructive criticism, applying it to improve my abilities as both a writer and an editor, offering notes in a safe space of supportive, like-minded, creative people.

As the editor of the anthology BOOK LOVERS, published by Seal Press, Shawna accepted one of my essays for my first official publication. Seeing it in print in a real book and participating in a series of readings in Northern and Southern California was the push I needed to submit my work elsewhere and continue writing outside the workshop environment with no deadlines. I continued to trade pieces with trusted readers as I worked toward completing my manuscript, and for six years, I edited a fellow writer’s television pilots and screenplays, once attending a table read with professional actors, where I gave advice along with seasoned filmmakers.

For seven months in 2014, with concentrated, consistent work, I completed a draft of my essay collection. After a few revisions over the next year and a half, I declared I was finished. It was a feat to be celebrated, but the manuscript was nowhere near ready, and I have since learned it’s only done when it’s published.

I queried agents, with some interest, but on a gut level, I knew the manuscript was missing something—or had too much of something. (Both were true.) So, I sought a second mentor and found him when a friend suggested the online class Write Your Story at CreativeLive, taught by author Joshua Mohr. His lectures were another revelation. During his book tour for his first memoir, SIRENS, I attended his three-hour, in-person master class and knew immediately I wanted to work with him. We spent eight weeks one-on-one in 2017 revising my collection, molding it into an improved, cohesive memoir with fewer pages, more structure, and deeper emotional resonance. His invaluable notes were all delivered via video chats. We moved the middle of the book to the beginning, and everything extraneous began to fall away. A friend who also worked with Josh said, “He has magic glasses,” and I borrowed them to catch a glimpse of a 3-D stereogram of jumbled, colored triangles morphing into a previously hidden, suddenly recognizable, standout image. Once I saw the big picture, I couldn’t unsee it. His approach changed my writing life forever. That summer, I wrote and revised like a woman on fire, thinking, “What would Josh do?” whenever I hit a snag.

Then I thought, again, “I am done with my manuscript!” (I should have known better.) I even posted a photo of a printed copy on social media, while continuing to query agents, rewriting a book proposal and query letter innumerable times to meet disparate requirements.

In the meantime, I published personal and craft essays in multiple journals, and in early 2017, I published an essay in THE WASHINGTON POST that was republished in a number of global outlets, including in a Sunday print edition of THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD. The piece garnered supportive private and public messages and forgettable comments under the original post. I experienced a dopamine surge—and heightened anxiety—waking up every morning to new attention. “This is it! I have arrived,” I thought. But, after only a week, I was once again alone with the blank page. So it goes.

By 2021, my manuscript revision count numbered somewhere in the double-digits. I had overhauled the ending nearly as much as I’d colored my hair. I reached out to a third mentor after reading BEFORE AND AFTER THE BOOK DEAL. Courtney Maum read my first chapter and query letter, sent an extensive assessment, and followed up with an edifying phone call. Fresh eyes served, yet again, as a tremendous boost. I changed the title, made the first chapter the second chapter, wrote a new first chapter, and revised my query letter based on her insight about what agents look for beyond what’s listed on their websites.

After querying oodles of agents, I researched independent presses and am still submitting to them. Two submissions were “in-progress” for over a year! In their recent rejection, one publisher apologized for the lengthy process, stating I’d almost made their long list, encouraging me to “keep going.” The other one said they loved everything but my first chapter, which was the one I’d most recently added. So I cut it. They said my memoir was “compulsively readable.” I’m getting closer.

Now I know my “finished” manuscript isn’t finished; it’s on hiatus. I have fully embraced the process. The trick, another writer friend said, is to work on the next project while waiting. In workshops, I often said, “I could never write fiction,” even though I love reading novels, but once I attended an inspiring and practical Maria Semple lecture series at the Hugo House focused on the imperative elements of narrative, I changed my mind.

In the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote 100,000 words of a novel until I figured out the story I was trying to tell and returned to page one. If someone would have told me in 2007 when I signed up for my first online creative writing class that I would cast aside 100,000 words to start a novel from scratch without second-guessing why that was important, I never would have believed it.

Working with outstanding editors and fellow writers over the years, I have become a better editor and writer myself, and I will never stop refining my craft. I have learned cutting precious but superfluous words is liberating; every adept writer and editor needs other capable readers to guide them; interminable perseverance is a required trait; one can’t control the outcome, only the journey.

I’ve been on a similar journey as you. I understand your triumphs and travails, but every writer’s process and timeline are unique. I will meet you where you are and help you reach the next level. Collaboration is key. Find me at https://www.drysdaleeditorial.com/.