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.”

The First Essay of the First(ish) Draft of a Collection

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part X

When I sat down to write a book, writing an essay collection was a logical choice, and starting with romantic missteps in high school seemed like the best place to start.

In January 2014, with a few essays written and workshopped—and one of them published in an anthology—I finally realized I was capable of writing a nonfiction book about my tragic—and hilarious—love life, the topic I was drawn to almost exclusively. Up until then, however, I had no particular plan for these lengthy, nonchronological essays about dumb boys and my broken heart. At forty years old, it had been eighteen years since I had written in a journal, “I just want to be a writer,” and now I was able to say aloud, “I’m a writer,” without adding an undermining caveat. My assuredness wasn’t high, but it was improving because of people like Shawna Kenney, whom I wrote about in the last entry.

When my self-confidence was in the basement in 2008, after standing in a long line waiting for David Sedaris to sign When You Are Engulfed in Flames, I said, “I’m a writer too, but I’m not as good as you.”

“You’re probably as good a writer as I was when I was thirty-five,” he said when he found out how old I was. I doubted this was true, but it was thoughtful of him to say. He drew a turtle in my book while fifty-plus more people waited to talk to him.

While doodling, he asked if I was a Pisces.

“Gemini,” I said. “My sister is a Pisces.”

“Close enough,” he said.

Where to Start

When I finally sat down to write a book, it made sense I would write an essay collection because I had already been compiling standalone nonfiction pieces, and that was still my go-to genre when choosing other people’s books to read, like Sedaris’s.

I heard from published author acquaintances, “Essay collections are hard to sell,” and “the memoir market is saturated,” but someone was publishing them because I read them all the time! I wasn’t deterred. (I was naïve about publishing.)

But where to begin. When I thought about starting at the beginning-beginning—in my childhood—I thought about how stable and uneventful it was. A book about my first fifteen years would be boring! I didn’t have a tumultuous upbringing—quite the opposite. My parents loved me, took care of me, had a sister, in part, for me, and although we had nowhere near the money of so many others in our upscale geographic area, we only ever had “first-world problems.” I wasn’t abused; no one in my family was an alcoholic—although, some of us have a penchant for falling in love with alcoholics; my parents were still married and didn’t fight; my sister and I got along well; and I had a substantial group of supportive friends. I was fortunate and grateful. The only “real” problem I had was anxiety. (There’s a whole book about that I have yet to write.)

“Sweet Seventeen, Barely Been Kissed”

External conflicts arose when I reached an age when romance was a factor—or should have been—so I decided to start there, writing what would be the first chapter in my essay collection: “Sweet Seventeen, Barely Been Kissed.”

Here’s the beginning of that essay:

“When I was eighteen, I named my nonexistent children with my sixteen-year-old first boyfriend Jake. We would have one boy and one girl: James and Tiffany. I didn’t envision a white picket fence, but the kids were a given, and I thought we’d always be together, starting with the night before my eighteenth birthday, the first time I stuck my hand down his shorts. We were sitting on the lifeguard tower closest to the Newport Beach pier on a breezy June evening right before I graduated from high school.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It won’t bite.’

I was in love.”

(Note: I changed the names of the characters in my true stories from day one and have ever since, not including immediate family members.)

In that first essay, I describe previous opportunities for first kisses that never happened, sort of happened, and happened but maybe didn’t count. (I confirmed years later a major high school crush does count my first kiss with him, so that’s a plus. I promise I’ll explain.)

I start with an eighth-grade graduation party in which seemingly everyone from my class—except the one boy I wish was there—is crammed into my friend’s attic bedroom playing a kissing game:

“. . . when the deflating balloon they were batting around the room landed on me at the party, I said, ‘I’m not playing. I just want to watch.’ The response I got was, ‘You have to play if you’re going to watch. If not, you have to leave.’ It was a dilemma. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t want my first kiss to be part of a stupid party game. I also didn’t want to tell them I’d never kissed anyone before.

They arbitrarily demanded I kiss Mark, a boy who’d been in my class since kindergarten. I’d never been into him. He had a giant fuzzy mole on his cheek. Since then, I have kissed more questionable men, but I was picky at fourteen. Thankfully my cute brunette friend from second grade squealed, ‘I’ll do it!’ She threw herself at him. They slobbered on each other. I watched, relieved and disgusted, holding the balloon.

I wouldn’t have another opportunity to make out with anyone else through the better part of high school because I was clueless about male advances and an off-putting chickenshit who was attracted to petrified boys. It proved torturous to be loyal to so few crushes throughout my teen years.”

High Expectations

I wanted my first kiss to be special. I wanted it to mean something. I had built it up in my head since elementary school. I had been the go-between for my junior high school friends, relaying messages back and forth from hormonal girls to their would-be boyfriends, unwittingly getting them together, then watching as they made out next to their lockers, but I was never the protagonist in this narrative. I was the innocent sidekick. Maybe I’d been a hopeless romantic and too selective, or maybe I was scared and never noticed when boys liked me—nor understood why anyone would, for some ridiculous reason—oblivious to flirting until college, always attracted to the “safe” boys who wouldn’t make a move or the “wrong” dudes who ignored me. Maybe I came out of the womb destined to have trouble with romantic love; maybe it was learned; maybe both played a role, but the main reason I was drawn to writing a book about love (and lust) was because I was trying to understand why I found myself single at forty with no children, when that’s the opposite of what I’d always wanted, assuming I’d have what my parents have without being proactive, not understanding it was a choice and that I have agency.

Technically my first kiss was with a good friend when I was sixteen. It was a quick peck while sitting around with other friends on a regular Friday night watching TV or making cookies, only so they could say, “See, now you’ve kissed someone.”

That Time I Blew My First Real Kiss

From the essay:

“My second first kiss was with a boy named Chase. It’s iffy to count my second first kiss though. I was seventeen. I had never been on a real date before, probably because I’d been wearing my friend Dean’s letterman jacket to school because I was cold, thereby warding off any possible suitors. Later, at my ten-year reunion, a male classmate asked, ‘Didn’t you date Dean in high school?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We were just friends.’

‘Then why were you always wearing his letterman jacket?’

Oh fuck.

When Chase finally called after my junior year to ask me out, I said yes. He was a year younger and had recently gotten his license. I had been pining over him for almost two years, like I’d done with a different blond boy in junior high. We’d only acknowledged our mutual adolescent attraction once. When I was in tenth grade, we met and sat next to each other in biology. One day I lent him my Catching Up with Depeche Mode cassette tape. The ’80s version of texting, I inserted a note into the plastic cover that said, ‘I like you.’ It came back with a one-word response: ‘Likewise.’ Like was underlined. I had to check my dictionary to determine what ‘likewise’ meant. I was giddy, but neither of us mentioned it again the entire school year, until he wrote something vague in my yearbook: ‘I’m really sorry that I didn’t. I guess I wasn’t ready.’

Didn’t what exactly?

On our courageous night out to the movie theater more than a year later, I put my hair in a ponytail, threw on my black Doc Marten boots, a white Erasure T-shirt, and faded skinny jeans, and paced my driveway. I watched his white compact car roll down my street soon after a rare phone call. He stopped midway down the block, turned on his overhead light, stared into the rearview mirror, and rapidly combed his short blond hair. He didn’t know I was watching him primp. I chuckled. He wore jeans and a button-up shirt and smelled shower fresh.

We saw Presumed Innocent. I don’t remember the film because my mind was focused on the boy radiating heat two inches from me. I held my breath, waiting for him to make a move on my skinny ass. Chase, not Harrison Ford. Neither of them did.

Chase dropped me off at my house afterward, where his clutch went out. He was embarrassed. I said he could use our landline to call his mom. It was 1990 after all. Their phone conversation went something like this:

‘Hey, mom, we got back from the movies, but my car broke down.’

Pause.

‘No, it’s okay. I can get a ride home.’

Pause.

‘No, please, really, it’s okay. She can give me a ride home.’

Pause.

‘Geez, mom. It’s okay. Fine. Bye.’

He turned to me, exasperated.

‘She’s coming to pick me up.’

So much for my first real kiss, I thought. I’d been nervous about this moment all night. I was somewhat relieved but still bummed. There’s no way he’ll try to kiss me now, is there? I thought.

When his mom arrived, she politely waited in the car, but she left it running, adding to the anxiety of a quick, unromantic goodbye to accompany our transient, tense evening. We stood within her line of vision. I anticipated a hug. His face moved in. I wasn’t prepared and didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I closed my eyes and pushed out my puckered lips. His tongue hit my closed mouth and then immediately disappeared. I opened my eyes. He was scurrying away.

‘Bye,’ he called over his shoulder. I’d blown it. I hadn’t opened my mouth. He had licked my face. His breath smelled good. I was in heaven.”

Where Is This Collection Headed?

The rest of the essay covers the one time I went to Chase’s house, and while we watched MTV, I lay sprawled on his bed, and he stood leaning against his desk chair—far away from me. Next I go to the prom with Dean, which is a disaster that ends our friendship. Then I detail how I met Jake in typing class, and why I was attracted to someone so cocky—the opposite of Chase. The essay is 3,155 words, but the meaning of the piece—aside from showing how inexperienced I was in high school—comes at the end:

“I don’t recognize that innocent girl anymore: a girl who sidestepped a first kiss in eighth grade, found comfort in a boy licking her face, and daydreamed about the one guy who would love her fully and make babies with her. She’s a wholesome version of me cloaked in a tiny burgundy velvet prom dress. She has yet to be rejected or make faulty decisions, and while this hopeful teenager has been obscured, she and I still have one desire in common: We both want lasting romantic love, even if the definition has changed. The picture of love no longer needs to include wedding bells and a baby. It calls for experienced partners who’ve already loved and lost before. It involves passion, friendship, and commonalities. Perhaps it even includes older children who already have a mother. The best part, however, is the dream still necessitates a first kiss.”

I still like that paragraph, and the essay showcases my voice and humor, but it’s missing depth. One paragraph at the end doesn’t quite cover how the essay should speak to the other ones yet to come. Where am I going with this collection? Why am I writing it? For whom am I writing it? Why is it universal?

Writing the Book I Had to Write, So I Could Start Over

In 2014, during a six-month period, I write an entire first draft—editing as I go because that’s how I roll—attempting to answer these and other questions in 79,000 words; trying to recall the long-ago details of my life; struggling to sift through what’s important and what’s not; and not understanding that much of what will appear in later drafts hasn’t even occurred yet. I tweak the book for the next year and a half and initially call it done.

If I had known how much longer it would take to write and revise an alternate version; write and revise a nonfiction book proposal; research and query agents; and submit to independent presses, I may have given up before I started, but thank goodness I didn’t. (And you shouldn’t either!)

Next: more from that first(ish) draft of my essay collection—the book I had to write so I could start over and write a different book later.

In Defense of my Solo-ish Essay

Two months after I published an essay in The Washington Post, I read the comments. Here’s my response.

On January 18th, I published an essay in The Washington Post titled “I’m not an extrovert—and that makes it harder to find love.” It was an ideal publishing experience. I pitched the essay. The editor accepted it the next day. The essay was published the day after that. Plus, the editor did a superb job of cutting a 1,700-word essay to fewer than 1,000 words without changing my original intent. I was impressed.

I’d published essays before, but never on a highly visible site that included a comments section. I was tempted to read the 47 comments that followed, but after reading the first one accidentally, I heeded the advice of authors everywhere who say the number one rule of self-preservation in publishing is “don’t read the comments.”

I waited two months, long after my standard publishing anxiety dissipated. The way I saw it, if I had Internet trolls, I’d made it.

Then I read the comments.

Those who understood what I was trying to convey validated my work, and the ones who bashed me fascinated me. The part of me that’s intrigued by online trolls is the same part that took abnormal psych in college for fun. Trolls project their own adverse experiences onto strangers without appreciating a flesh-and-blood human sits on the other side of the screen. A lack of empathy accompanies blistering online arguments because anonymity makes it safe.

I don’t understand why people bother. How often have people’s minds been changed after a heated social media exchange?

Exactly.

Hell, I’ve only ever written one Yelp review.

But after reading the WaPo comments, my first inclination was to react immediately to each unfavorable post. I didn’t.

One sentence in the essay riled readers most: “I can tell within five minutes of meeting someone if there’s a chance we’ll fit together.”

Key word: “chance.”

I have written more personal essays with grittier details than this one. I hadn’t anticipated these 16 words would touch so many nerve endings. Besides, the editor revised this sentence, which first read, “I know within five minutes of meeting someone if there’s a distant chance we’ll fit together.”

If the word “distant” had been left in, would this declaration have angered people less? Maybe, but I doubt it.

Readers complained I “judge” men within five minutes of meeting them. They presumed I “audition” prospective romantic partners with a quick “evaluation” and subsequent dismissal. (Isn’t that “speed dating?”) Part of my problem is I don’t audition people at all. I don’t date. I don’t remember how.

Readers ascertained my persona based on 992 words without knowing anything else about my life or meeting me face-to-face—equivalent to the swift individual assessment for which they criticized me.

Here’s what I meant by the gut reaction I have when I first meet someone new: I have fallen in this-may-be-love at first sight more than once. In my experience, the cosmic connection—or whatever you want to call it—has often been immediate. And my intuition turns out to be correct 98% of the time. I’m usually a decent arbiter of character early on. Where I go wrong is when I employ logic to negate my instincts.

Case in point: When I met the man I married, I didn’t feel an instantaneous magnetic pull in his direction, but after six months of friendly interaction, I gave it a shot—just like the readers of my WaPo essay advised I should do. Four years later when I signed divorce papers, I thought back to my first impression: He’s not really my type. I kicked myself for not sticking to the “let’s be friends” talk I had with him after the first night he stayed at my apartment.

Second, I made a friend playing Yahoo! Hearts online the night before I turned 26. I slid him into the friend zone after meeting him and kept him there until nine years later when we finally became romantically involved. He disappeared shortly thereafter. If I’d kept him in the friend zone, we might still be in contact. As it stands, I’m flummoxed by his vanishing act.

This is not to say experiencing that swift spark in the beginning means two people are a long-term match, but, for me, it works best if I at least start with attraction. When I meet someone I really like, there tends to be a twinkle of “perhaps” from the get-go, accompanied by reverberating thoughts of, “I must know this person”; “Where has he been all my life?”; “There you are. What took you so long?”; “That guy. Is he single?”

In my experience, these fervor-at-first-sight observations almost always end up substantiated with an easy flow of conversation. And if a guy I’m drawn to is smarter than me or makes me laugh—or both—I’m toast. So, that’s why I said it only takes five minutes to have an inkling of the possibilities.

We are, after all, an amalgam of our past experiences.

Other reactions to the essay focused on my aversion to online dating. People encouraged me not to dismiss the process entirely and advised ways to make it work. I get why they made suggestions, and I value the guidance, but, if they knew me, they’d know it’s not going to happen. I’ve scrolled through hundreds of profiles; they terrify me. While I’m adept at conversing with new people I meet casually in person, the thought of forcing an encounter with someone I don’t know under the guise of potential romance freaks me out.

Recently, I met an acquaintance for coffee so she and I could get to know each other better. While I waited for her in the coffee shop, it dawned on me how I would feel if I was anticipating an online date. My heart started pounding. All I could think was thank God this isn’t a Bumble date. (We had a fantastic time.)

Here’s a further example that was cut from my WaPo essay:

“Not too long ago, I listened to a story on The Moth podcast in which a mathematician working on his Ph.D. optimized his OKCupid profile while fiddling with a supercomputer by cracking the website’s algorithms. He treated 88 coffee dates as an experiment until he met his future wife. While the story was compelling and amusing, the idea of 88 brief coffee dates filled with awkward, fidgety chitchat with strangers is right up there with listening to the dulcet sounds of a neighbor’s tile saw outside my window. I don’t have it in me to treat dating like a job hunt. There’s not enough Xanax in Los Angeles.”

As one like-minded commenter wrote, for people like us, it’s about “self-preservation.”

One commenter advocated I join a community theater group; another said I should go to church. Those are the last two places you’d find me, right behind a Coldplay concert and a monster truck jam. I’d rather join Tinder. I’m more apt to whisper “hello” to a future mate in a hushed library where no one is mingling, and everyone’s faces are buried in books.

To the person who instructed me to “get off [my] couch,” I say this: Last weekend I hiked Sedona and wine tasted in Jerome and Cottonwood by myself. I made the effort to talk to new people. I talk to new people all the time. There’s a great restaurant a few blocks from my apartment I’ve dined in alone quite often. One night there I interacted with a friendly, normal, responsible, age-appropriate man. We got along well, but I wasn’t attracted to him. When he handed me his card at the end of the evening, I thought I will never sleep with you.

Believe me, I wish meeting a prospective partner was as simple as bellying up to a neighborhood bar for some gourmet fish and chips. As I mentioned in the essay I wrote for The Manifest-Station, having the pieces align for a lasting partnership sometimes requires good old fashioned luck.

But if I had all the answers to my relationship struggles, I wouldn’t have written a whole book about them. Wait until that more comprehensive remnant of my blunders is available. The online rabble-rousers haven’t seen anything yet.

Thank you to everyone who read my Washington Post essay and took the time to comment or private message me, even acrimonious cyber-goblins. If you had an emotional reaction of any kind, I did my job.

Except for the guy who said he wished the essay had been written by a man and that I’d fail any man’s five-minute test; he can jump naked into a rushing, icy river.