get a grip, indeed!

what a commenter taught me about why I write memoir

Hi, friends—

Last week, in response to my post about my experience of the election and its aftermath, an experience that still includes fear and bewilderment, someone left a comment telling me to “get a grip!” This comment, as well as some unsubscribe notices on the day that post went out, got me thinking about writing memoir in general, my own memoir writing in particular, and what I’m doing on Substack in the first place. And while I recognize that most of you reading this will not be surprised by what you see here, I am writing because I am trying to better understand myself, and writing is one of the ways I do that.

Identifying as a memoir writer means writing about my life, not only about the big things like divorce, but also about the everyday things like the way the sun looked this evening after a day of rain and the smell of my dogs’ wet fur on our morning walk. Using the material of my life in an attempt to make something compelling for a reader means I will not be able to—nor do I want to—silo off one part of myself and avoid ever writing about it. After all, I write about my children’s suicide attempts. I write about being raped. I write about the endless work and effort it takes to live with serenity and acceptance. I write about sex. I write about falling in love.

fall, 2024

I assume the commenter and unsubscribers don’t want me to write about politics, either because they disagree with my leftist leanings or because they want whatever they are reading to be apolitical. (A word I actually think means nothing in this current context, but that’s for another post.) But leaving out my “politics” would be as impossible as leaving out the fact of being a mother, or a daughter.

I am a progressive. I was raised by a retired Catholic priest and his radical friends at The Catholic Worker. At my Jesuit high school, Oscar Romero and Gustavo Gutiérrez got as much airtime as any U.S. president. Until I was in my late 20s, I didn’t know one could be both “Catholic” and “conservative” at the same time—ignorant of me, yes, but it speaks to how deeply steeped I was in radical Catholic communities. Some were quite stereotypical, it’s true—hippie priests with long hair and guitars, Peter, Paul and Mary and Pete Seeger around our campfires. These were communities of people united in their faith to do—quite literally—what they believed Jesus would: feed the hungry, shelter those in need.

I’m a long-lapsed Catholic, and I certainly am no defender of the Catholic Church as institution, but I cannot deny the impact those early experiences had on me. I was raised to believe that a life of service was one to aspire to, that one’s faith was actually a blueprint for how one would act. Out of college, I taught basic literacy skills in community centers across Chicago. I taught English as a Second Language. I taught nontraditional students in city colleges. And while I made barely over minimum wage in all of these endeavors, the lack of substantive income never drove me to more lucrative professions. I’m not looking for a gold star for these choices, which were, of course, not unproblematic; rather, one of the truest things I can say about myself is that working in direct service was simply what I most purely believed.

I’m not on Substack to argue with strangers in tiny little boxes on my screen. I can go to Facebook if I want that. (I don’t, so I won’t.) I’m on Substack to write words that I hope will move you, or surprise you, or make you laugh. And I, in turn, want to be moved, enlightened, and made to laugh by the other fabulous writers here.

But understanding that Substack is not Facebook is different than abandoning a part of myself every time I show up here. I will not hide the fact that I most definitely wanted a different outcome in the election. I fear for the most vulnerable among us. I fear that more will be hungry, disenfranchised, made victims of violence of all kinds. I fear my internal ethos of service and accommodation and dignity—the one ultimately rooted in Jesus’s examples of radical care—is modeled less and less in American society writ large. All of this will be in my writing, because all of this is in me.

Perhaps I’ll lose more subscribers. That’s okay. For all who have read this far, I send you peace and love and fortitude. Coraggio, as my Nonna frequently reminded me. Thank you for being you.

xoxo, F