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In a writing class I took a thousand years ago, the instructor said to use a found object or a trigger to begin writing, write as if a memoir, using what is in front of you to lead you the way, a la Proust and his madeline. I walked outside my apartment on Vermont Street on Portrero Hill where we had moved, having arrived back in San Francisco much to my chagrin from a truncated and aborted move to New Orleans. It was 1996. I saw a safety pin while Sam and Arlene were peeing on the tiny patch of grass in the greenless world I had re-entered. I thought of the time I had wet the bed as a six year old and how my mother had lost it and made me wear a diaper to school. I had ill feelings about the whole memory.

Later, in retelling this story to the new agey woman who lived downstairs and did reike she responded in a way that made me see a different memory. I was my mother’s lynchpin and when I collapsed so did her tentatively structured world.

Today, after a good night’s sleep having had an awful one the night before, I was eating the rest of the mammoth bagels brought to me by my colleague from New York during Jazz Fest (trying to rid myself of these as I am about to go on a nonacoholic six week cleansing and weight loss diet) and was looking at the New York Times magazine before putting the rest of Sunday’s paper in the recycle bin. I saw an ad for Eileen Fisher, a lithe Asian model wearing loose and monochromatic capris and a top. It reminded me of when Steve took me to meet his parents for the first time and I wore an orange shift and humongous turquoise colored earrings. He asked me to wear jeans instead. But stubbornly I went in my orange dress albeit I had lost my desire for my outfit not too long after we were in the car headed down that boring drive to Sacramento. He always lusted over the Eileen Fisher ads and I always thought they were the most boring clothes I could imagine despite the gorgeous quasi Asian or silver haired middle aged beauties who donned them in magazines.

I bought a pair of Eileen Fisher capris just the other day, they are grey, the most neutral color you can wear and I did so because I’m fat and nothing fits me, and so these neutralizing, slimming capris were a temporary bandaid to this problem I seem to be having. A woman at the gym who is thinner than she should be said, “I’m ten years older, we all went through that patch right at menopause, early 50s, the thickening middle, you will come out of that trough. We all did.” She then said, “Now I’m too thin.” That’s when I stopped listening to her, any person who ever complains to me about being too thin is not to be listened to in my estimation.

I then read in the same NYT magazine that a character from Eat Pray Love wrote their own memoir, called now a metamoir, and thought this has gone too far, much in the same vein a friend who saw my new froggy shoes said to me the other day, “You have gone too far.” Yet, my niece had said to me over Skype half-jokingly the other day, “You should write a memoir.” I thought, aren’t I doing that? Isn’t that what this is? A blogmoir?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 20th, 2011 at 7:47 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.