photo of tattoo Forever Alive, Forever Forward on my forearm — The words of 19th century American poet Walt Whitman tattooed on the author’s arm, “*Forever Alive, Forever Forward*.”

A Memoirist’s Journey

“The only journey is the one within.”

– Rainer Rilke

“I’m told writing is healing, which may be true, but traveling solo for a long time may be the Gods’ best fix.” — DHB

April 1, 2024 / Issue #25

Nightmare of Paradise

The road through paradise was a dark, twisting, downward slide toward a slippery, wet, sulphur-soaked gloom.

Rocks the size of footballs fell from high, craggy cliffs, pelting the narrow passage where many a retirement dream lay still as the dead.

I spiraled fast into the abyss, swirling through unknown spaces, knowing nothing, unable to explain anything. Yet, whatever it was, wasn’t good.

I only knew it as the nightmare of paradise that kept me up nights.

What was retirement supposed to be, anyway?

I was living alone, in a large, comfortable house in a secluded Hawaiian rainforest; I had a big-screen TV and a plush recliner.

I’d stay up late watching YouTube videos of vacation destinations, soaking up visions of tanned young bodies traveling the world to endless soothing hypno-synth soundtracks.

I’d smoke good Hawaiian weed, drink craft beer, and watch TV until falling asleep. Sooner or later, the remote would slip from my hand, tumble onto the faux-hardwood floor, wake the dogs, and send me to bed.

Mornings started with strong black, fresh brewed Hawaii-grown coffee, homemade kefir for the stomach, bananas, star fruit, avocados, or whatever else was growing ripe around the house.

More coffee, more smoke, some exercise, and a walk around the house where I’d inventory the yard work that I’d likely ignore that day, as I did mostly day after day.

Paradise was beautiful, of course. But after 27 years, Hawaii, my home, had become more like a Monopoly jail in the boomer board game of capitalist dreams.

I was not looking for a get-out-of-jail-free card, I wanted out of the paradise game, my jail, and what my life had come to in Hawaii.

Otherwise, paradise was beautiful.

***

That’s a lead-in to the memoir, or at least the current version.

It describes the angst I suffered living alone in the family home, the kids grown, my wife divorced, and my head spinning wearily over what to do next.

There’s a lot of the book that will lead to this scene and a lot that comes after it, but in the fractured or fragmented structure I like in the memoir genre, I think this portrayal paints the misery I felt before I set off to travel.

I’ve been reading and writing a lot about memoir craft, experimenting with structure, and giving readers a few examples of what I’m working on while giving pause to some who may be thinking, “Is he really working on writing a memoir or just thinking about it?”

Well, both. I gave myself this year to produce a manuscript and today, April Fools Day, we’re a quarter of the way into 2024. I’m pleased with the pace, so today I wanted to give my friends who follow me a little something more to chew on.

Your thoughts are welcome and always helpful.

***

Another, More Upbeat, Traveler’s Music List!

As an antidote to the last AMJ (3/18/24) piece about sad songs and travel, how about in this issue I look for the most energizing, uplifting, good-time travel music to accompany travelers.

I compiled a long list of favorites and trimmed it down to the Top Ten and Honorable Mentions below.

Almost all have a destination or an inspiring travel connection to them and there are no particular rankings to the list; but all of them, I’d say, have the special ability to get us on our feet and moving!

T0p 10, in no particular order:

On The Road Again, Canned Heat

The Passenger, Iggy Pop

With A Little Help From My Friends, Joe Cocker

The T-Bone Shuffle, T-Bone Walker

Roadhouse Blues, The Doors

Katmandu, Bob Seger, Silver Bullet Band

Rocky Mountain Way, Joe Walsh

Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix

Vivir Mi Vida, Marc Anthony

Midnight Rider, Allman Brothers

Honorable Mentions (just a few among many, many more): Great Balls of Fire, Jerry Lee Lewis; Johnny B Good, Chuck Berry; Mississippi Queen, Mountain; Further On Up The Road, Bobby Blue Bland; Born in Chicago, Paul Butterfield Blues Band: What’d I Say, Ray Charles; White Light Lou Reed; We Could Be Heroes, David Bowie; Goin’ Down, Jeff Beck; The Grange, ZZ Top; Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, Bob Dylan; Space Is The Place, Sun Ra

Thanks to all who responded to the previous issue’s sad songs list. Now I’m eagerly looking forward to hearing your comments on this list. Let me know!

***

What I’ve been reading

Safekeeping, Abigail Thomas; Written in the form of a fractured, or fragmented, memoir that leans heavily on beautifully written short vignettes of her life. Well done, but it didn’t move me in the way I thought it might.

Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch; I read and reviewed this a few months ago but didn’t get nearly as much out of it reading the Kindle version as I did from the hardcover book, which is a luxury I’m enjoying more and more now as a traveler with roots, a mailing address, and easy access to real books of all kinds. It’s still as raw and raunchy as I remember, and this time I pulled the deeper insights and meaning from Yuknavitch’s telling of her life.

I’m also continuing to browse through “Your Life As Story” By Tristine Rainer, an older (1957) craft book subtitled, “Discovering the ‘New Autobiography’ and Writing Memoir as Literature.” A lot of value here for a fledgling memoirist, despite its age.

***

Going to Substack, A few days ago, I discovered that I ALREADY HAVE a Substack account! Not sure when or how that happened, but I’m now giving it a test and thinking it’s going to be easier to manage and more valuable to my writing efforts.

I’ve begun planning to shift from Convertkit, my current home, to Substack. It looks like I’ll be able to move all my Convertkit subscribers over to Substack en masse. I’m guessing it will look different, but that should be no problem. I’m looking forward to the access I’ll have to Substack’s writers specializing in memoirs, health care, race, and many other topics, while my impression, or understanding, is that Substack is geared more toward writing, and not as much as Convertkit on pure money-making.

***

An Invitation to Join the AMJ Community

Subscriptions to A Memoirist’s Journey will continue to be accessible for free. All are welcome. So continue to tell your friends and relatives about it. To sign up, simply go to my website at realontheroad.com and click on A Memoirist’s Journey (NEWSLETTER) for the easy subscription form. All I need is your name and email address for you to receive the free, twice-monthly newsletter.

There’s also an “AMJ Archive” accessible in the menu bar for the contents of all 24 previous issues. See you here soon!

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March 18, 2024 / Issue #24

Livin’ On A Prayer

Lunch at one of my favorite restaurants in Buenos Aires, La Poesía, meant good, traditional, local food served by a friendly, efficient wait staff.

It’s a well-preserved, old, wood-paneled cafe with a literary theme, translated to English as, “The Poetry.”

Local writer Ruben Derlis established the cafe there in the old city neighborhood of San Telmo in 1982.

I was there at least a couple of times a week for long lunches, soaking in the historic atmosphere during the month I spent in Buenos Aires.

Most of the tables are fixed with small brass plaques inscribed with names of the writers, artists, and free thinkers who were eager to express themselves freely following the period of the late 1970s and early ‘80s when a military dictatorship ruled Argentina.

Traditional foods and drinks are served like Cynar, an artichoke liqueur mixed with pomelo, a tangy grapefruit-flavored soda; however, I opted for the wonderful wines produced in Argentina.

Photographs, artifacts, and books reflecting the heady post-dictator days line the walls, playing out the full sense of Argentine authenticity.

Who knew that on this particular day I was there, a tender bit of travel magic would enliven the storied past of this setting for a couple of strangers sharing a brief, but memorable, moment of international pop culture recognition and brought a tear or two to my eyes?

Coping With Solo Travel

Traveling solo for a long time over long distances is often written about in terms of loneliness and how a traveler copes with the rigors of solo travel. I was often asked when traveling how I dealt with loneliness on the road.

It took me a while to think that through, but eventually, I could articulate an exercise for my mind, sort of an exercise program for my emotions, to go along with the exercise program I created for my physical health, or body strength.

Singing, dancing, laughing, and even crying, can improve your daily disposition.

I found this self-administered advice useful on a recent seven-year solo world journey.

I started thinking about this soon after concluding my decades-long journalism career, after fleeing post-retirement life in Hawaii, which was unraveling from a multitude of misfortunes, triggering feelings of deep loss, grief, and remorse that I was trying to heal only with increasing substance abuse.

However, combined with my FEBS (Flexibility, Endurance, Balance, and Strength) program for home and travel, I began believing that I could also develop a program to improve my mental outlook and right the course of my emotional journey.

I called it simply “Sing, Dance, Laugh, and Cry,” and that plan worked so well on my emotional health that I’m tentatively titling the working version of my memoir with it.

It’s a means of being more open and forthcoming with my emotions, and not feeling hindered about expressing my feelings when others may be around.

Singing, dancing, laughing — those first three — are the easy ones, more easily expressed in public than the last one, crying.

It’s the crying that raises eyebrows and makes others fret for your mental health. But I’ve found it true that the tears one sheds are the most healing part of the plan, wherever you happen to be when you shed them.

Tears, after all, may be the only emotional release reflecting both joy and sadness.

Crying isn’t just about sadness. Sometimes even joy itself brings tears to our eyes, reflecting our humanity.

Briny tears are like an elixir of our being, giving us depth, adding dimension, and a better understanding of our existence, helping to cleanse our minds of emotional debris, and releasing those innermost feelings that might hold us back from a fuller appreciation of our lives.

Our emotions can be powerful conveyors of our deepest inner feelings, whatever they are, and our outward physical being gives us comfort and healing in releasing them.

I’m now prone to shedding a tear or two everywhere I go when I feel the mood, sad or happy. Now let me share what happened while having lunch at La Poesia.

Livin’ On A Prayer

The “La Poesia” Moment

Among my many treasured travel magic memories, one occurred late last year in Buenos Aires, my final travel destination on a long, cathartic journey of healing and adventure.

While waiting to be served lunch in “La Poesia,” a pleasant, historic, friendly, historic cafe/restaurant not far from my room in an older part of the city, where I enjoyed going often, I sat at a table by myself in an uncrowded side room when two men and a young woman arrived and sat at the table next to mine. They spoke Spanish, and from their appearance, I guessed them to be nearby office employees there for the good food and pleasant lunchtime atmosphere.

They were quietly talking when I heard the beginning of a familiar song begin playing softly somewhere in the background atmosphere of the restaurant, another room perhaps, and recognized American rock star Bon Jovi’s, Livin’ On a Prayer, a great rock song. Instinctively, I started singing along quietly, nodding my head and mouthing the chorus where I knew the words.

I was enjoying myself when I noticed the woman seated at the next table had raised her head as well and was singing herself! When we became aware that we were singing together, we looked at one another in the eye, smiled, broke into a laugh, and went on singing.

What a wonderful moment! Strangers meeting in the chorus of a popular Bon Jovi song, celebrating a moment of international recognition of the power of music to bring people together. What a world!

Little moments like this make solo travel such a worthwhile pursuit, each of us, strangers to one another, yet willing to sing along to a song that we liked without care for who was paying attention, sharing a precious moment, discovering the truth that we are not alone in the world.

More than one tear flowed from my eyes in that singular expression of pure communal joy!

Now, Your Turn To Cry!

While traveling, I often found solace in the books and music I took with me on the road, especially the music and especially the sad songs.

And if you need help drawing upon a source of sadness – not everyone does – I suggest five songs that moisten my eyes every time.

They are not the only ones, but they are among the ones I’ve heard that have affected me most.

Maybe you have your own sad songs that bring a tear to your eye, and set you off on your day with a more satisfying perspective on our lives.

Only the first one on my list, Luka, by Suzanne Vega (link), is not about love gone bad, but I consider it the saddest of them all. Watch the video (link) with Suzane Vega. It’s unusually beautiful. And so sad.

Here are the others:

On a Bus To St. Cloud, versions by Trisha Yearwood or Jimmy LaFave, a deeply penetrating song about lost love. (I much prefer Yearwood’s more tender version.)
I Fall to Pieces, Patsy Cline (the more popular, jaunty version doesn’t quite fit the song, but it’s still a sad portrayal of breaking up in small-town America).
Time After Time, Cyndy Lauper gives this song a strong sense of the vulnerability and tenderness felt when the man she loves and adores abruptly leaves her. A masterpiece.
You Were Always On My Mind, Willie Nelson, a country classic given the style and grace only this great songwriter and stylist can engender.

Without doubt, there are many more. These are only the first ones that came to my mind. Let me know via email (davidhunterbishop@gmail.com) what your favorite sad songs are. Tell me what you like; I’d be sad if you didn’t!

***

Don’t forget the AMJ Archive at realontheroad.com. Each of the 23 previously published editions of AMJ, going back to the first in April 2023, is there for anyone wanting to view what has been written about here. You will see the AMJ Archive listed in the main menu.

***

Look for the next edition of AMJ in your email on April 1, 2024 (no fooling!), and please send me any questions or comments about A Memoirist’s Journey. I love to respond!

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“Do not be stilled by anger or grief. Burn them both and use that fuel to keep moving. Look up at the clouds and tip your head way back so the roofs of the houses disappear. Keep moving.”

— Maggie Smith, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful

March 4, 2024 / Issue #23

The Problem With Race

I’ve been perplexed by issues of race ever since scientists completed the Human Genome Project in 2003, when they demonstrated that human beings throughout the world are genetically the same, all of the same race, originating on the continent of Africa thousands of years ago.

Physical characteristics of people evolved as the diaspora spread a rich, complex mix of human development far and wide, resulting in new cultures and physical appearances among human beings in differing climates around the globe.

But in the decades since that landmark study, people still find it hard to accept the new reality that there is only one race –no White, Black, Asian, American Indian, Alaska Native or any other “race” that you might still find on a U.S. Census form.

We are all of the same origin, the same species, sharing the same genetic makeup.

We are, all of us, human beings.

***

Now I’m writing a memoir in which race will play a significant part.

I grew up in a largely segregated town in southern New Jersey, where I was involved in incidents and influenced by events in which skin color and white privilege played key roles.

My memoir-in-progress will examine my participation in these incidents and the culture in which I was raised and are likely to cast an uncomfortable reflection on my youth.

But promoting the science that sweeps away the false perceptions that linger about race, prompting hatred, bigotry, and violence throughout the world, is more important than pretending that the misguided racial indiscretions of my youth never happened.

I’m only afraid that my hope for that kind of societal change lies on the floor of a lighthouse that’s blown its fuse.

Nevertheless, few, if any, people recognize the modern concept of one race, the human race, much less develop an understanding of the science enough to make significant changes in the conduct of our culture toward race relations and basic humanity.

So I was excited recently to see a new book by a young writer, podcaster, and musician, Coleman Hughes, titled, “The End of Race Politics.” Hughes is a political analyst on CNN, focusing on race-related issues, public policy, and applied ethics.

Perfect, I thought. Here’s someone who would bring an enlightened view to the issue of race relations.

What a disappointment. Not one mention in the book of the science that proves there is but one race, the human race. I’m not suggesting that’s the end-all solution to anything, but it might help if there was more widespread recognition of the truth at the core of the debate, that there is but one race, the human race.

Hughes prefers pushing a facile argument against the “neo-racist” (his term) policies being promoted by authors Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, while focusing on ending racism itself by reviving the principles of the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and promoting a “color-blind” society.

As the late Rodney King asked, “Can’t we all, just, get along?”

Similarly, Hughes, Kendi, and DiAngelo are whistling in the winds of tired arguments that brought us to the present moment.

What’s needed now is full recognition that their concept of race is a failed relic of the past.

I’d suggest we move on and recognize that all of humanity is one race, based on scientific research and discovery, and, if possible, start anew to bring about change based on that premise.

***

What I’m Reading:

You Could Make This Place Beautiful / by Maggie Smith

This week I read Maggie Smith’s memoir, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” and found her writing beautiful, but I didn’t quite get the feel of a fractured structure to the narrative that I’d expected.

The book was often fragmented into short, trenchant pieces that didn’t fill a page, and while the timeline moved back and forth a bit, I didn’t find the style particularly noticeable or disconcerting.

I mention it because I think breaking up the narrative structure of the memoir I’m writing could help tell my story, but I’m now only beginning to work seriously with the concept.

On the whole, Smith’s narrative moved along gently in a fairly straight-line in depicting her life after learning of her husband’s infidelity, leading to their divorce and angst over balancing her writing career and childcare as a single parent of two young children.

The book was widely acclaimed, stemming partly from Smith’s poem, “Good Bones,” which went viral online in 2016 and is part of this book.

***

The Chronology of Water/Lidia Yuknavitch

I read and enjoyed this a few months ago on a Kindle that I traveled with, but I bought a hard-cover version of it this week that I’m eager to re-read without the screen.

This book has an unmistakenly fractured narrative. It’s also a great story if you don’t mind the raw earthiness and debauchery in the protagonist’s telling.

I loved this book the first time, though I was unprepared for the intensity that hits you like a tidal wave after the first chapter.

Yuknavitch is a powerfully untethered writer in the Chronology of Water. This time, I’m prepared to dive into its swift currents headfirst.

***

Back in the USA

I find a lot to complain about living in the U.S. again after living the previous seven years traveling on a worldwide solo journey. But having a permanent mailing address where stuff gets delivered to your door swiftly on request by mail isn’t one of them.

I get as excited as the people in River City, waiting for the Wells Fargo wagon to arrive in the 1962 classic The Music Man. It was one of my favorites when I was a kid, and I still love it. Anyone else remember that film?

***

Don’t forget the AMJ Archive at realontheroad.com. Each of the 22 published editions of AMJ, going back to the beginning in April 2023, is there for anyone wanting to view what has been previously written about here. You will see the AMJ Archive listed in the main menu.

***

Look for the next edition of AMJ in your email on March 18, 2024, and please send me your questions and comments about A Memoirist’s Journey. I love to respond!

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February 19, 2024 / Issue #22

“What is important for a painter is not a thing’s reality but its shape, and what is important for a novelist is not the course of events but their ordering, and what is important for a memoirist is not the factual accuracy of the account but its symmetry.” — Orhan Pamuk, “Istanbul: Memoirs and The City

***

Author’s note: I wrote the following short story in Brick, New Jersey, after visiting the local Social Security office last week to file my appeal of the penalties that Medicare wants to charge me for failing to sign up and pay for its health insurance plan since 2016. That was when I was about to embark on a seven-year journey outside of the U.S., and the Medicare info I read was clear about not covering any injuries or illnesses suffered by its citizens that occurred outside of the United States. For seven years I paid for my insurance from my own pocket and it worked out well. Now, upon returning from my journey, on which I successfully self-healed, I signed up for Medicare, which wants to penalize me with substantial charges levied against my hard-earned Social Security income for as long as I have Medicare, or until I die!!! Whichever comes first.I’m not making this up. It’s our government at work. Enjoy!

***

Having Fun Filing My Medicare Appeal
The clerk seated behind the plexiglass wall of protection at the Social Security Administration was a bit miffed at what I’d pushed to her through the narrow slot in the plastic.”
I’m appealing a Medicare Part B penalty,” I announced through the porthole, as she scrunched her face until it looked like a walnut, and leafed through my 14-page bundle of documents.
She looked up to eye me with a hopeless stare like I was wasting her time and mine.“You’re going to lose,” she said curtly. “It’ll take months.”
I waited while she disappeared with my documents into the back office and returned it to me smartly rubber-stamped with a fresh, official-looking blue-and-red notice of receipt on the first page.
“It’s scanned in, going to the processing center,” she said, as though we were done.
“Where’s the processing center?” I asked.“
There’s a lot of them, they’re all over,” she replied, suggesting that she had no idea where it was. “We get a lot of these appeals. Nobody ever wins.
“And it’ll take months … months, before you get a response,” she repeated.
“Not surprising about the SSA,” I offered, “maybe they should hire some more people.”
She muffled a chuckle and explained that if I brought the colorfully stamped document back with me sometime, I could get a report on the status of my appeal. Although I had the feeling she might just as well have added that I shouldn’t hold my breath for that, either, because it’s all likely to take “months … to take MONTHS!”
So I stood, nodded her way, and turned to leave with my fancy, colorful, official-looking receipt in hand. And, just for fun, I said, cheerfully with a smile, “See you next month!”
I glanced back at her staring at me wildly through the plexiglass as I walked out the door.
“No, NO! It’ll be months, MONTHS!” she wailed, voice fading to a faint whimper in the distance,”It’ll be months … ”

***
Race Taking A Larger Role in Memoir
Issues of race have taken on a larger role in my memoir than I’d anticipated when I began this writing project more than a year ago.
Back then, I thought I’d mention growing up in a segregated small town in Southern New Jersey, but I didn’t realize the impact my years growing up there would have until I started rooting through that shuttered closet of my past.
Not until I wrote a story in 2018, about a night I spent in an all-black neighborhood of Livingston, Guatemala, did I begin to feel the full impact that living with segregation in my youth had on my life.
That was only the beginning.
Racial incidents that I recalled from my youth started tumbling off the closet shelves into the light, and I knew there was much more to write about.
Many race-related events, once suppressed in my psyche, began pouring forth as a result of ‘Saysha,’ who took me on a stormy night stroll along an ill-lit bayfront, ostensibly to buy some marijuana, but raising my fear at the all-of-a-sudden prospect of being the only light-skinned person around.
There I was, a couple of years into my world journey, with quickly rising anxiety and foreboding about what might happen to me next.
However, a strange thing happened while writing the story. I wanted to end it on a light note with Mark Twain’s quote about travel being “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
But I felt strangely drawn toward re-writing the conclusion, and when I sat down to type, I felt as though some powerful force in the universe had taken control of my hands, sending an alternative narrative directly from my brain through the keyboard into the computer.
It’s the one that stuck with the story, which you can read below.
It told a vastly different tale, still using Twain’s quote, but positing that what he’d written wasn’t always the case with travel, and I’d discovered that Twain’s lightning bolt of wisdom about travel’s psychic healing power had not yet struck me.
The result was an award-winning story about how my long-held confidence in being colorblind toward all others had been shattered in Guatemala by my experience with Saysha.I think I posted the story a few years ago, but now that I have so many new subscribers, I posting it again here. I hope you enjoy it, and will send me any comments you may have about it.
***

Saysha, What Happened?
A True Story

There was darkness down there, and places with only the shadows of darkness. A few bare, low-watt bulbs dangled here and there in the empty outdoor pavilions by the bay, their feeble rays crushed by the black, rain-soaked sky.
People hung around in what appeared to be lounges, sitting high on rickety stilts. They may have been people’s living rooms. It was dark there, too. I wasn’t certain of anything.
Turns out the “drink” I thought I bought my new lady friend in Gamboa Place by the bay was a full pint bottle of Garifuna rum, strong and heavily seasoned with a thicket of roots and herbs stuffed inside the bottle with liquor.
She’d taken my money, and when no one was looking, walked around to the business side of the bar, grabbed the bigger bottle, took a long swig first then poured her pint full before we took off.
“Saysha,” or something sounding like that, had already paved over her native creole with a thick slurry of alcohol, so it made no sense to me. But I was beginning to get the big picture. So I thought.
I talk a lot about how it doesn’t matter where you are, that you can always find yourself in dangerous situations, but that there are things you can do to avoid them, like using your gut instincts — if it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it — staying sober enough to make good, responsible decisions quickly in difficult situations. Don’t do stupid things, blah, blah, blah, … . Then you get in a certain situation, and it’s like junior high all over again.
True, I could have been anywhere with sketchy women and big, menacing men hanging around in the night at an oceanfront barrio. This place happened to be Livingston, Garifuna town, on Guatemala’s Caribbean coast.
The number of gringos around here at night normally can be counted on one finger.
On this night it was pointing at me. With Saysha. All I‘d wanted was a little smoke.
I hung out down at Gamboa Place by the bay plenty during the day. I was in town enjoying the Garifuna Settlement Day celebrations. The food was good, and I had met Marie the owner, her mom, and Marie’s brother Elvis on a previous trip to Livingston. But this was Friday night. There was supposed to be some traditional drumming and dancing going on.
I sat waiting with Elvis’s nephew, Caesar, who’s normally trying to hustle a living in New York City, but was enjoying the holiday himself this weekend in his hometown.
Caesar was mulling whether he might be better off staying down here, and I was just mulling along with him when the conversation turned to drugs.
Since it seemed that after a couple of hours, the live entertainment was maybe not going to materialize as planned and that drinking had taken over as the prime source of entertainment, I started thinking about what else might amuse me.
I said to Caesar that if he knew where I might obtain a joint or two, I’d be happy to share and that way help pass the time.
That’s about when Saysha showed up, an attractive, dark chocolate-skinned local lady with soft, seemingly gold-flecked brown eyes and a bushel of curly brown hair framing a pretty, delicately featured face. I guessed she was in her early 30s.
Caesar said Saysha could probably get the marijuana, so after she filled her bottle with booze, she and I set out under the wet blanket of darkness that enveloped Garifuna town.
The tide was high, and small waves were sloshing around the muddy seafront walkways. I stayed close, and she just gestured for me to keep following along.
The first stop was her “bedroom,” which is where my ”holy shit!” instincts started going off. It was a bedroom, alright, with nearly every inch of wall space covered with snapshots of men — many, many different men.
Quickly drawing on my emergency reserve of Spanish, I tried to convey to her that perhaps there had been some mistake in communication. I had neither the cash nor the protection, not to mention the Sildenafil, for what I was pretty sure she had in mind.
“Vamos, vamos,” I said. “Let’s go.” I only wanted a little marijuana, not a disease and my picture on her wall. So she got the idea and we went out again into the gloom and came to a wooden staircase that we climbed up into an old beach casa with the waves of the bay breathing in and out hard but unseen beneath us.
People were hanging around up here, I was sure of it. I could hear low murmurings and see eyes atop large shapes.
Sometimes your best intentions, all your best-laid plans for certain situations, don’t amount to a mound of refried beans when you find yourself suddenly where everything seems to be taking the curve a little too fast.
Yet strangely, in my mind, there was still hope Saysha was going to come through for me — with the marijuana, that is. But doubt was mounting as she seemed to be losing interest in me rather quickly.
We visited another place like this and then a third, where Saysha immediately attached herself to a particularly large shape rather a little too warmly, I thought, landing deeply in what appeared to be a large lap. Then, a pair of eyes fixed on me, which is when I decided that was my cue to excuse myself politely and begin easing backward down those stairs without tumbling into the bay.
I sloshed back to the Gamboa OK but a little nervous. Caesar laughed when I told him what happened and said Marie’s daughter, a pleasant, less, shall we say, adventuresome young woman than Saysha, could help me with what I’d gone out for in the first place, and she did. Very soon, it all turned into a pleasant evening.
No harm was done though sad to say in a way I never laid eyes on Saysha again.
But my reflections on what did or didn’t happen began to unnerve me for some time afterward. I was never actually threatened with anything, but let my imagination work overtime in a spooky situation.
How did I know that anyone in these places wouldn’t have invited me in for a pleasant smoke? Was it because I was assuming that everybody was black but me? Did I even know? What difference did it make?
I’d like to hope none of that came into play but, unfortunately, no matter how good and enlightened you think you are, uncertainty and fear can induce some awful thoughts.
Maybe I should have talked to someone in those dark spaces. Maybe I would have been touched to my soul by a beautiful, heartfelt human experience.
Maybe my body would have been dumped into the night, washed away with the tide, found by fishermen in the morning.
Or we could have had a great time just drinking and sharing stories late into the night.
The guidebooks don’t address this sort of thing.
Mark Twain famously wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
True enough, I think, but not always right away.
In my case, I’m afraid, the fatal blow had not been struck.

***

February 5, 2024 / Issue #21

“For old age is respected only if it defends itself, maintains its rights, submits to no one, and rules over its domain until its last breath.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman philosopher and statesman

Sing, Laugh, Dance, Cry

Welcome back to A Memorist’s Journey, as we are now in the second month of 2024.

And a special welcome to recent new subscribers Bill Buffett, Steph Salazar, Lauren Rush, and Carl Hall. Thanks for signing on to AMJ.

Some of you who have been here awhile may recognize the title of this edition of A Memoirist’s Journey. It’s one of several mantras I adopted to accompany me on my seven-year solo journey around much of the world, which ended last month.

These words in the headline have provided me with constant comfort on the road, while seeking healing and redemption for the serious grief I was suffering from in my life.

They allowed me to let my emotions feel the ebbs and flows of the rivers and seas I crossed; to roll peacefully across the rocks, potholes, and sharp turns in the roads I traveled; to revel in the joy of our human foibles; and allow my tears to flow freely, cleansing the soul and washing away sadness.

The headline is the new working title of my memoir, taken from the trip that began a new life of freedom, health and well-being on the road as I entered my retirement years in Hawaii.

Those seven post-retirement years were the most important of my life, and the book will tell how they helped me overcome the demons that threatened to destroy me when my life started falling apart.

Other titles I’d proposed didn’t convey the same message and focused on a broader view of my life. This title zooms in on the healing process, which encompasses the most important part of my seven decades in this world.

Your comments are always welcome.

***

Woe To Those Needing Travel Health Insurance

The quotation (above) taken from Cicero that I selected for this edition, unfortunately, was chosen to help explain a slow start to my progress on writing the book due to the unbelievably authoritarian and expensive administration of health care insurance in the United States.

I kept myself relatively healthy and fit while on the road and insured myself for catastrophic health issues while traveling, enjoying the good care, low costs, and easy access to excellent health care in most of the countries I traveled to. I filed only one claim; it was with an Australian insurer that knew I wasn’t qualified for it by my lack of a residential address in the U.S., but the company accepted my premiums, anyway.

The company then denied my $300 claim for treatment of bronchitis in Thailand, based on my lack of a residence. I appealed, the company balked, I threatened to hire a lawyer, and the company settled by paying me three times the original amount of my claim.

Otherwise, I paid all my medical costs out-of-pocket, because they were affordable without insurance, even though I was always covered by insurance that I paid for. It was simply easier to pay the low costs directly than to go through all the hassles of filing a claim.

Now that I’m back in the U.S. filing for Medicare, I’m finding insurance to be an expensive, bureaucratic nest of government and private industry greed and collusion.

I’m being asked to pay excessive amounts of penalties because I didn’t sign up for the government’s Medicare insurance when I left the country in 2016, and stayed away for seven years, even though Medicare wouldn’t cover me if I were injured or sick while outside the U.S.

I’m now in a battle to prevent the penalties that the government wants to take directly out of my Social Security check every month FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE! Yikes!

And appeals are handled by a company contracted by Medicare!

I’d certainly rather be working on my book, but I’m taking the advice of Cicero, and defending myself for respect in my old age.

Look for the next edition of AMJ in your email box on February 19, 2024!

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January 22, 2024 / Issue #20

In his book, Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor describes his leaving London by steamer on the Thames in December 1933, at the outset of his journey of unknown duration toward Constantinople. “I wondered when I would be returning. Excitement ruled out the thought of sleep; it seemed too important a night. (And in many ways so it proved. The ninth of December, 1933, was just ending and I didn’t get back until January, 1937-–a whole lifetime later it seemed then—and I felt like Ulysses, plien d’usaage et deraison (full of use and reason), and for better or for worse, utterly changed by my travels.

***

🎶 ‘If I Were A Rich Man’ 🎶

Once, I lived a life of travel, meandering about the world carefree with a monthly retirement check and steady pension income. I was a relatively wealthy man in the lands I traveled, living modestly but quite comfortably where the American dollar goes a long way.

Low-income seniors, like me, now have a raft of bureaucracy to haul around back in the U.S., where I am now, to get affordable food and other essentials, not to mention medical care, which is a nightmare of bureaucracy.

Medical care in most of the well-traveled countries I visited is easily available, inexpensive, and good.

Now, back in the grip of the greedy U.S. system, I’m relearning what it means to live in the wealthiest country in the world without an easily accessible, fair, affordable system of health care for its citizens.

Competing government and private healthcare systems created an intricate and confusing maze of plans, costs, requirements, and paperwork.

Many seniors finally resort to the equivalent of flipping a coin to decide who or how they’ll get health care administered to them in their Golden Years. Then they worry whether they are in the correct, limited sign-up period, several of which are scheduled on different dates by a chimp throwing darts at a calendar.

I was fortunate to escape the mayhem of Medicare in the U.S. seven years ago when I decided retirement in the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” was not for me.

In 2016, I decided to forge a new life on the road as a nomadic world traveler, leaving the U.S. on a solo journey to six continents and 35 countries, seeking a sense of healing and peace of mind after a series of traumatic events in my life.

Before I set out on that journey, I was advised that when I turned 65 later that year, I would need to sign up for a paid Medicare plan even though whatever might happen outside the U.S. was not covered by Medicare. I never knew about any penalty for not signing up… I just thought the idea was so absurd I just forgot about it.

I thought that I’d made a wise consumer choice by opting to forgo Medicare and take my chance on the more affordable medical care systems in the world outside of the United States, since I wasn’t planning to return to the Good Ol’ USA any time soon.

Well, hold on there, cowboy!

Turns out Medicare frowns on a decision like that, and should you decide to return to the U.S. someday, they’ll knock you right off your horse.

I never took a nickel from my home country’s coffers for medical care, yet I was assessed a 10 percent annual fee on the cost of Medicare for each of the seven years I was gone.

Next month, it will start coming straight out of my Social Security check – the one I worked more than 40 years to earn.

I wasn’t foolish, traveling the world without insurance. I insured myself with private travel plans that suited my needs. On several occasions, I could have filed claims, but medical costs in most foreign countries are low, so rather than deal with the bureaucracy and paperwork, it was simply easier to pay for medical care out of pocket.

As I write this, I am still uncertain how much the penalty amounts to since the only information I received from the Social Security Administration says my Medicare Part B premium will reduce my Social Security benefit by about 13 percent, and the penalty is included in the Medicare premium that I’ll pay.

The SSA did not disclose how much the premium penalty is, which is critical since – and here’s the kicker – the penalty never ends!

For leaving the country for seven years without taking government-mandated insurance, which I could not use outside of the U.S., I will be assessed the penalty as long as I have insurance or until I die. Whichever comes first.

Welcome back to America.

(Note: I intend to appeal this imperiously perverted practice. Stay tuned to AMJ.)

***

In the AMJ notebook …

Thanks to the many new subscribers signing up to read AMJ, and to the subscribers still with me as the landscape shifts beneath my feet.

***

I have been thinking of moving AMJ to Substack since it seems that’s what everybody’s doing, and it appears to be easier to manage than Convertkit. Any thoughts or comments you may have about that, or anything else on your mind, are welcome. Let me know via this site, or by email to davidhunterbishop.co

Look for the next edition of AMJ in your email box on February 5.

Happy Groundhog Day!

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January 8, 2004 / Issue #19

“The most important distance traveled is within oneself.” — Rolf Potts, a travel writer, essayist, adventurist, teacher, podcaster, and well-known author of Vagabonding and The Vagabond’s Way, among several other books.

A New Year, An Ongoing Journey

Welcome back to A Memoirist’s Journey’s first AMJ newsletter of 2024.

Note first the quotation (above) that I selected for this edition from one of the world’s most celebrated and accomplished travel writers.

Rolf Potts has written informative and entertaining books about his travels over the past 25 years. I take the liberty of calling him a friend, as I’ve been an eager student of his in the past two annual summer travel writing workshops he conducts in Paris, where I learned much about the business and practice of travel writing. And I’ve participated in several online discussions with him about his books.

Unusual about Rolf is the hold he’s had on the cohort of travelers, including me, who stayed in touch with him since taking our first workshop together in 2022.

Nearly every member of that group returned in 2023 to take the workshop again, and most continue to meet regularly via Zoom to discuss books, travel plans, writing, and publishing. They plan to attend the Paris workshop again this year in September.

It’s a remarkable tribute to the character of the people involved and a testament to the value of Rolf’s knowledge, experience, willingness, and ability to share it all so amiably with his students.

While I have felt a compelling need to come to grips with the retirement life I chose, Rolf has helped immeasurably with the encouragement and inspiration to follow through with my desire to complete a memoir of my life and travels.

My book will include how it came about that I took off to see the world full-time instead of settling into a conventional American retirement, with insight into why I’ve done many of the things I’ve done with my life, how I’ve overcome several significant hurdles that stood in the way, writing my story not just for myself, but for others who may benefit from it as well.

I’m also finally in the right place, mentally and physically, to complete the manuscript this year. It will not be easy. But now, in addition to having a stable home environment in Brick, New Jersey (not far from where I was born and raised) and a comfortable workspace to bring this work to fruition, I have a beautiful and smart partner in marriage, sharing my life.

Iona Conner, whose home I moved into recently and married on Dec. 29, is a writer and committed environmentalist who inspires me daily with her talent and drive toward making the world a better place. We met fortuitously through a mutual friend in Zimbabwe when she was writing a monthly environmental newsletter, and I was planning a trip to Africa.

I joined her non-profit board of directors a few years ago, and our friendship blossomed into the loving relationship we share today.

I’ve often felt lucky in my life, but never more so than I do today with Iona.

I recently ended my continuous seven-year-plus journey on the road to work full-time on my memoir. During that time, I traveled solo for tens of thousands of miles across six continents. Yet the distance I traveled between my ears on that journey was far greater than the ground I covered traipsing around the globe. That was the primary reason I embarked on this journey, and I learned more about who I am and what I was doing with my life as I entered my seventh decade than I ever imagined possible.

If you’re new to “A Memorist’s Journey,” I began writing it in April to begin documenting my memoir learning process. The complete archive of the twice-monthly editions is available in the main menu on my Real On The Road blog.

If you are already a subscriber, don’t forget to tell your friends about AMJ. Subscriptions are free and also available in the main menu on the ROTR blog site.

Don’t forget to contact me via email at davidhunterbishop@gmail.com with any comments or questions. I’d love to hear from you.

The next edition of A Memoirist’s Journey will be in your email box on January 22!

Happy New Year! All the best to you in 2024!

May all your journeys lead you to a better place in your heart!

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December 11, 2023 / Issue #18

Plans are made for change; the more they change, sometimes, the better they get. –dhb

AMJ On Holiday Til January 8

Welcome back to another edition of “A Memoirist’s Journey,” the newsletter I’ve been writing twice-monthly since April about the process of writing my memoir.

Some significant progress toward planning the memoir was made in 2023, but I am planning to supercharge the writing process in 2024 by curtailing my traveling, which lately has been making me weary in knowing that it’s affecting my work on the memoir.

I have found a long-time residence in Brick Township with a dear friend that I believe will be an ideal setting as a new home base for writing.

In the meantime, the AMJ newsletter will be on a holiday hiatus until the next issue is sent to your email box on Jan. 8.

I wish all of my subscribers – and I’ve been pleased at gathering many more of you than I anticipated at the start of this project – all the best to you this holiday season in whichever manner you celebrate.

I will be celebrating as usual a couple of my favorite holidays, the Winter Solstice and, two days later, my 72nd birthday — I’ve never had one of those!

Following, of course, there will be New Year’s Eve and Day, which most of us will celebrate joyously and always with hope, especially this year, for a better year than the last.

And on these occasions may we find peace in the Eternal Spirit within each of us.

I’m leaving Buenos Aires on Wednesday and heading back to Brick Township, New Jersey, where I will seeing a dear, long-time friend, Iona Conner, in her home, establishing the first base of operations relative to my travels since 2016.

Iona and I first met several years ago when I started writing for the international environmental newspaper she was publishing at the time. Now we will be sharing her home in Brick Township, New Jersey, while we both continue to work and support one another on our independent book projects.

I have realized that the rigors of travel were wearing me down, slowing the progress I’ve been wanting to make in writing the memoir. Now, I’m looking forward to making a significant amount of progress in 2024, taking advantage of my first solid base of operation in more than seven years.

I believe I have much yet to share with readers about the events that led to my rejection of the typical baby boomer-style retirement and getting myself back into a much healthier place in the world, physically and spiritually, and I’m thrilled that so many of your have expressed your interest in coming along with me on this significant turn in my path of life.

Here again, if you missed it in a recent AMJ newsletter, is the 22-word description I have settled on as the overall theme around which my memoir will revolve:

“A troubled career journalist sees certain doom in traditional retirement and flees Hawaii for healing and adventure as a solo world traveler.”

Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already; the easy-to-complete newsletter sign-up form is in the main menu of my author’s site at realontheroad.com, so tell your friends if they’re not already subscribers.

Send me a message any time with questions or comments. I love to hear from readers, and hope to see all of you back in this space again on Jan. 8 for the next edition of “A Memoirist’s Journey”

Happy Holidays!

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November 27, 2023 / Issue #17

“Only those who are fit to live are not afraid to die.” — variously attributed to Gen. Douglas McArthur and President Theodore Roosevelt

Memoir Book News

Accomplished author Amy L. Bernstein is hosting a workshop with the savvy book publishing pro Jane Friedman on Writing a Really Short Book Description, which helps pitch book proposals to busy agents and publishers who want to know what a book is about in a few sentences or less.

They asked for pre-workshop comments, so I sent them my memoir’s best working description, which I think is pretty good, but I wondered if it might be too short.

“A troubled career journalist in Hawaii sees doom in retirement and flees paradise for healing and adventure as a solo world traveler.”

Ms. Bernstein responded quickly:

“David, nice logline. Can’t wait for the major motion picture.”

I think I’ll keep it.

***

Travel With A Terminal Disease?

“What would you write about if you had a terminal disease? Life takes on a compelling dimension when you taste the brink of its transiency. – author Natalie Goldberg

No need for the conditional tense in the question above. I already have a terminal disease. I’d write about that – COPD. Of course, some might say life itself is a terminal disease. No one survives. But that’s another chapter in the book.

Right now, it’s enough that four years ago, I was diagnosed with Cardio Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, commonly called COPD, a disease of the lungs caused primarily by smoking.

The World Health Organization lists COPD as the third leading cause of death worldwide, killing millions of people annually, mostly attributed to smoking tobacco.

The studies don’t address whether marijuana is more or less harmful than tobacco, though I suspect there’s little difference. I know that, in my case, it was exclusively marijuana.

Since I retired, I’ve made no secret of being a former marijuana smoker for more than 40 years, inhaling inordinate amounts of smoke, and holding it in my lungs as long as possible for a maximum high before exhaling and breathing again.

In my 50s I started having serious problems with indigestion, chronic asthma, and bouts of bronchitis, which continued into my retirement.

I began smoking the weed while a midshipman in the U.S. Naval Academy.

I was recruited to the Academy because I had a good high school record of achievement and potential to help the academy’s struggling athletic program.

It was the early ‘70s when the Vietnam War discouraged many good candidates, especially the top-notch athletes, from wanting to join the Navy, no matter how prestigious the program.

I went because it was by far the best deal I could get – all expenses paid and a salary, and it made my dad proud.

But while I was there, I started to envy all the fun my friends were having in college – drinking, drugs, women, parties – while I was lonely and struggling with the academy’s strict disciplinary program and stiff curriculum.

Smoking pot at the Academy, if caught, meant automatic dismissal, and I only did it once while a midshipman, after I’d already decided the Navy life wasn’t for me.

I was on leave following the Army-Navy football game in Philadephia and joined my former high school buddies in a dorm at Temple University, where I smoked pot for the first time in my life.

After 18 months at the Naval Academy, I resigned and enrolled at Temple, where the good times rolled, yet still graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree.

I gravitated toward journalism, was married, and moved to California and eventually Hawaii, where my ex and I raised two boys in a house on the side of Kilauea Volcano in the Puna rainforest.

It was a good life. I had a rewarding career and a wonderful family, close to a dream life for a baby boomer.

Until retirement.

Health problems escalated, and the dream started to fade. A disintegrating marriage and career brought on increasing problems.

Retirement in Hawaii seemed more and more like an unsatisfying solution.

Less than three years after retiring, I abandoned “paradise” and started traveling full-time, but I took my substance abuse habits with me on the road, an especially risky venture.

Not only did my weed-smoking habit worsen, but carrying the contraband across borders and buying it from strangers on the road was especially foolish. I could have been caught, arrested, and sent to spend the rest of my life in some nasty foreign prison.

At least twice, I thought I would die from asthma attacks.

I went to a few clinics in Central America and Southeast Asia, where I was treated for symptoms and advised to quit smoking. But I failed to understand the urgency of their advice.

After an afternoon in a Thailand hospital suffering from bronchitis and hypoxia, a dire shortage of oxygen in my blood, I spent several days recuperating in bed in the guest house I was staying in.

Malaysia was my next stop.

I went to see orangutans in the wild, one of the original goals of my solo world journey. But I noticed first that the city of Kota Kinabalu, where I was staying, had an impressive-looking new hospital, and while I wasn’t suffering at that time, I felt a potential disaster hovering over me like black clouds before a deadly storm.

The hospital’s gleaming newness attracted me, so I walked in, was treated cordially by the staff, and was immediately assigned an appointment the next day with the head of the Pulmonology Department, Dr. Arfian Ibrahim.

I was vaguely aware that the symptoms I was suffering from were all the common signs of COPD, although most people get it from smoking tobacco.

I imagined that I might have some immunity from the deadly, terminal disease since I never liked tobacco; I was only a cannabis fiend with a bad case of wishful thinking.

Deep down, I was looking mainly for certainty in a diagnosis that I had not yet been given, hoping Dr. Ibrahim could provide that for me.

He asked me to sit and tell him my story. As I did, I sensed his recognition growing as he listened quietly to what I told him.

Then I began to realize the truth within myself, what I’d known all along but didn’t want to confront.

My reckoning had arrived.

He sent me downstairs for tests. An hour later, back in his office, he placed an x-ray on the large back-lit screen behind his desk.

He pointed to what he called my “abnormally enlarged” lungs.

“Is that a good thing?” I asked, feigning humor.

“No, it is not,” he explained, not smiling. “It’s symptomatic of your disease.

“You have COPD.”

I knew it then to be the result of all those big “hits” I took for most of my life, trying to maximize my pleasure from all the sweet smoke that, all of a sudden, I learned was threatening to kill me.

Dr. Ibrahim pointed to a small dark spot at the top of my left lung, where I showed tangible evidence of damage. The spot would grow larger the longer I continued smoking, and even if I stopped smoking, it would only grow more slowly.

By professional accounts, I had a terminal disease that would get progressively worse. I was in the beginning of Stage 2, Dr. Ibrahim said.

Yet, four years after the diagnosis, I sense that my health with regard to COPD has improved. So what was happening?

I’m still not sure. I check the websites, and they’re full of suffering COPD survivors, none of them reporting anything like my experience.

But on the day I was diagnosed, I quit smoking weed completely, stopped consuming alcohol excessively, started avoiding smoke in public places, and began checking posted air quality ratings in the places I chose to visit.

I resumed traveling and began caring for myself with more exercise and a healthier diet.

I also have no problem complaining about smoking where it’s a problem and leaving if I have to. It’s my health, and more people should be aware of their own risks in the presence of so much air pollution in the world.

In a way, the best thing that ever happened to me was being diagnosed with COPD.

I had to make choices. Life and travel? Or misery and ruin? Not a difficult decision. Travel had become the love of my life; the alternative was not an option.

Initially, I didn’t know whether all the lifestyle adjustments would work. But now, in my 5th year of healthy living with COPD, I’m still moving, staying alive, and feeling good!

That, to answer Ms. Goldberg’s prompt above, is what I would write about with a terminal disease.

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November 13, 2023 / Issue #16

If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Looking At Loneliness

Loneliness is one of the more oft-discussed topics of solo travel and often provides a backdrop for memoirs.

I’ve been on the road traveling solo for most of the past seven years and felt my share of loneliness on the road. But I’ve found ways to cope with those feelings throughout my life that have all but eliminated acute loneliness.

When I looked back at my childhood, I saw a vast amount of time in which I was alone and created worlds within my head that overcame loneliness.

I never felt stressed by loneliness as a child, though I recall some angst over loneliness as an adolescent.

I’ve wondered how that ability to cope with being alone as a child had anything to do with my desire to travel solo as an adult.

How did I cope when I was a child, and what did I learn as a retiree on the road that overcame the natural isolation of solo travel? Did I find any benefits to it?

What mechanisms helped me overcome roadblocks to travel with loneliness, and were they relatable to my ability as a child to be immune to the feeling?

The Internet is full of articles about an epidemic of loneliness in the world, creating serious health problems too often leading to death.

I’ve felt lonely before and thought about killing myself. The first time, I was 18 years old and had lost an important wrestling match that cost my school a championship. I was devastated. Late that night, following the match, I sat on the bank of the Delaware River, contemplating just driving myself into the drink.

The thought didn’t last long, though, as I quickly weighed whether or not it would kill me if I did or whether I’d just lose my car and swim to shore more stupidly humiliated than it was all worth.

As a child, I remember spending a lot of time alone, but creatively making ways to pass the time without ill effect, actually enjoying the games I’d made up to compete with myself or create imaginary teams to compete against one another, doing my best for both sides.

At age 65, I took off on a solo world journey that tested my feelings of adult loneliness and found within myself various ways to cope with and overcome them, allowing me to move on and thrive among the many benefits of solo travel.

I could never say I haven’t felt lonely on the road, though. That would be foolish. Anyone striking out on a solo journey has time on their hands, much of it with no one else around, at least no one you want to spend time with.

So, of course, I have felt lonely as a traveler. But I have two very good friends who are always with me, and I call upon them whenever the need arises.

Their names are Books and Music, with whom I urge all travelers to begin a good relationship. They were a large part of my family life growing up, and they were always there in my head or my Kindle to help sweeten the water in the well of my travel lust.

Being alone with my Books and Music also led me to adopt the related practice I often invoke to keep me going. That is to “Sing, laugh, dance, and cry every day,” which keeps me on an even emotional keel as I travel through my life in the world.

There’s so much more to be said about this fascinating topic of loneliness, and examining it will likely continue to be an important part of my memoir.

So, I’m going to leave you here with a short story I wrote recently about an incident related to loneliness that I instigated in my youth and continue to think about with profound regret and remorse.

I’d love to hear what you think of it.

Visions of Leroy

It was a dreary late winter afternoon. A dirty, melting ground cover of snow reflected the steely gray sky.

Like naked sentinels, Sycamore trees lined the street, awaiting a new spring long in coming, among the melancholy loneliness of nothing much to do.

I was about 12, packing slush balls with pride – near perfection – alone in the backyard of my family home.

There was an artistry to sculpting the icy orbs to the contours of the hand that gave them shape, throwing them with care, precision, and keen awareness.

But what was it with no target but aimless practice?

Then along came Leroy, recently a new elementary school classmate. He was quiet, a little shy, shuffling along, kicking up the detritus of winter’s insults on his shoes.

Over 150 feet away across the street from my backyard, Leroy walked with a seeming toward his home, a highly unlikely, very unlucky, moving target.

The odds of hitting Leroy at that distance were slim. But who was calculating the odds? Only a sly, young, misguided sniper with a snowball from hell.

I wound up and let fly my cold missile, wondering how close I might get, when I recoiled with dread in mid-flight at the unexpected sight of the trajectory, whistling clean through the bare Sycamore’s branches, landing with a messy splay on the side of Leroy’s face.

I was stunned, thinking it would land harmlessly nearby, close enough to startle him for a moment, then laugh, and we’d become friends in that kind of perverse manner of boyhood.

But Leroy caught the full, intense, icy sting of the cold-hearted blow, and I felt the intense gravity of my aimless shame – making the perfect shot in a surprise attack of violence with a projectile I knew could cause damage.

For a moment, I stood more frozen than the slushy ice, more ashamed by my next action than the grievous act itself of heaving that slush ball.

I ran for cover as though Leroy hadn’t already seen me staring in disbelief at what I’d done, as though it would erase the sheer callousness of what I’d done.

I could have approached him, owning up to my stupidity, apologizing, offering to help, whatever I could do to make some amends for what I had done. But I didn’t. Leroy continued walking, crying, with one hand holding the side of his face.

And like a punk, I ran.

No one applauded my miracle throw.

I just ran.

Leroy’s family must have moved away not long after that. I never saw him again, not in school, never again walking beneath the Sycamores across the street from my house.

And I suffered no consequences, except that in the decades that have passed, my stupidity and cowardice that day never left my mind.

These things come to mind as I examine my life, bruising the ego of thinking that I may have lived a pretty good life.

Demonic gremlins in the mind never let you forget these kinds of things, though. They kick up these memories often enough to keep you wondering just who you really are.

I recently revealed the story to an old friend who grew up around the corner of the block where my silent treachery unfolded, the first time I told anyone.

“Wow, Dave, I didn’t think you’d ever do anything like that,” she said.

But I did, of course, and writing a memoir has brought me to this point of examination, bringing bleak memories like this from the back of my mind to the fore of my being, among others I’d rather forget.

Who was I that day?

Was it really loneliness or boredom that sent that ice ball flying? What is it that now pulls the memory out of life’s attic, never coming to grips with that cold, shameless act hidden away in the unforgiving scrapbook of my mind?

Now, what do I do with it? Except write about it. Is that why memoir exists? Do I feel any better about it now? Can I ever wish it away, or only continue to anguish over it in the context of my life?

Maybe I really could have made a friend out of the damage, or maybe at least I could have tried. Maybe that’s really what I’d hoped for in each slow-motion replay in my head of that long, lonely flight of a single slush ball.

If only I hadn’t run.

Maybe, but the memory reels of the mind never stop running.

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October 30, 2023 / Issue #15

“We are our memories, we are this illusory museum of moving shapes, this heap of broken mirrors.” – J.L. Borges

(NOTE: Due to a production problem, I’m resending a corrected version of this post to all subscribers since I am uncertain whether the corrected copy was sent to the correct mailing list.)

Why Do So Few Men Write Memoirs?

I signed up for Jane Friedman’s Oct. 26 online seminar, “Psychology of Memoir,” and discovered, as expected, an informative, insightful discussion of the craft of memoir-writing.

Friedman has 25 years of experience in the publishing industry and is a well-respected source of industry knowledge. She writes several regular columns and teaches courses on various writing and other industry-related topics.

After last week’s course on the Psychology of Memoir, Friedman emailed each of the men who attended, thanking them, as so few males these days seem to have much interest in writing memoirs.

I thought I’d share some of my thoughts I had on the workshop with the subscribers to A Memoirist’s Journey, together with some additional input from psychologist Dr. Terrence Real, Solo Travel writer Janice Waugh, and renowned traveler, writer, and memoirist Rita Golden Gelman, who identified the trend of the diminishing male solo traveler several decades ago. Gelman is now retired.

I think you will find this subject interesting, whatever your preferred gender.

***

I’m a retired career journalist from Hawaii who, in 2016, saw only pending doom in retirement, even in the so-called “paradise” of Hawaii.

Instead, I began a journey of solo world travel in 2016 and started slowly generating ideas for the memoir I’m writing.

That journey gradually turned into a helpful and revealing period of self-examination, now in its eighth year, and it’s an important part of the memoir I’ve been working on intently for the past 18 months.

However, when I started looking into the all-important comp titles for a draft book proposal to agents and publishers, I was struck by how few I could find, and, even in those, I was startled by their lack of depth in the issues I intended to pursue in my book.

It seems most men are neither interested nor comfortable opening themselves up to the insecurities, shortcomings, weaknesses, and failures they face now, or may have faced in the past.

Too often, men’s memoirs are retirement travel stories of good-time trips with spouses – we went here, we went there – laced together with feeble attempts at humor.

I discussed this previously in my memoir-writing newsletter, and a reader told me of a book by psychotherapist Dr. Terrence Real titled I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression.

Real’s book identifies the depression similar to what I felt in 2016 as I looked at retirement with feelings of loss, grief, and guilt over my belief that I’d failed my parents, who suffered intensely with their deaths from cancer.

At the time, I was also suffering from substance abuse, a failing marriage, and residual stress from a seven-year-long court battle with my employer after being illegally fired in 2005, despite prevailing in the case.

Not until I was diagnosed with a potentially fatal lung disease while on the road in 2019, traveling solo, did I begin to understand myself better through deep introspection.

I began planning my memoir based on the hurt and suffering I’d experienced and how I was finding the way to a new life through “soul-searching solo travel.”

Solo travel, however, apparently is going the way of memoir-writing among the male population, according to the statistics compiled by Janice Waugh on her website solotravel.com., which show rapid growth in the number of women taking off to travel the world sans men, who prefer to stay put.

Accomplished children’s author Rita Golden Gelman, whose classic memoir, Tales of a Female Nomad, was published in 2001, noted then that “Older men … are not as courageous as women. All those years of being responsible have diminished their capacity for adventure.”

Other readers pointed me to Luke Russert’s memoir, Look For Me There, published earlier this year, in which he grieves the death of his father, Tim Russert, the iconic host of NBC’s Meet the Press, who suffered a fatal heart attack in 2008.

The younger Russert worked as a news correspondent at NBC for eight years, then quit to travel and reassess his own troubled life in the years following his father’s death.

I quickly identified potential parallels in his story and mine and read the book, but found it only marginally helpful as a comp title.

While the younger Russert and I grieved over the death of a parent and took to the road for healing, that’s where the similarities ended.

Luke Russert is much younger than I and has a reported net worth of $9 million after working eight years at NBC. I’m a full-time budget traveler, retired, and now in my ’70s.

While I admired Russert’s candid portrayal of his character as a traveler, it too often consisted of inexcusably boorish, ugly American behavior, including sexism and violence, such as flaunting the conquest of a young woman he met in Ecuador, and championing his assault of a French man in Sri Lanka because he thought the man was too close to the turtles he was photographing. The young Russert offered no sense of regret or remorse, sorrow or reflection, apparently satisfied in his justification for chasing and attacking the man on the beach.

Although I gave Russert credit for attempting a soul-searching examination of his life, I wasn’t sure that he understood what he’d learned about himself.

In the 1982 book Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon’s beautifully written account of his long, solo journey along America’s rural byways, he only alludes to the failed relationship with his spouse that in large part drove him to that journey.

While reading it before I even began examining the memoir genre, it occurred to me that some discussion of his motivation for taking his trip might have provided greater insight into the “why” of his story.

Another possible comp I read was journalist Rick Bragg’s acclaimed All Over But The Shoutin’, a memoir revealing insight about life in the poor South.

Bragg is extremely talented and smart and rose to success in journalism with an extraordinary ability to write compelling stories in difficult situations. He has a tragically poor yet endearing mother who raises him and whom he loves dearly.

But as he is absorbed in his work, he neglects his family and acknowledges his shortcomings, such as failing to attend his grandmother’s birthday celebration.

Too busy, he rationalized, yet failed otherwise to address the issue confronting him. He sends his mother money and buys her a house but fails at making emotional amends.

I related to having similar feelings about neglecting my parents while also thinking, as he did, that my work was too important to take the time.

One of my most glaring failings was not attending my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary celebration, congratulating them with a phone call from Hawaii instead, now a deeply felt regret I cannot shake.

In short, it has been difficult to find comp memoirs written by men willing to address the sufferings in their lives. Few seem to have that desire to examine their thoughts and feelings in a published work, revealing themselves to be the vulnerable, flawed human beings that we all are to some extent.

Returning to the analyst’s couch, 20 years of experience finally convinced Dr. Real that depression is a “silent epidemic” and that men “hide their condition from family, friends, and themselves to avoid the stigma of depression’s un-manliness.”

If anyone can point me to the memoir by a male traveler who bares his soul, cuts open emotional veins, or otherwise reveals deeply felt emotions that have scarred his life, by all means, let me know.

***

Don’t Forget to Tell Your Friends About AMJ

New subscribers can sign up easily on my website, realontheroad.com. Add your name and email address to the form accessible in the main menu under A Memoirist’s Journey (Newsletter).

Or, if you choose, send your name and email address to me directly at davidhunterbishop@gmail.com. I will add you to the list.

I’m also always open to comments and questions, so don’t hesitate to contact me any time via email at davidhunterbishop@gmail.com.

I’d like to hear from you.

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October 16, 2023 / Issue # 14

“We write memoir not to remember, not to cling, but to honor and let go — Natalie Goldberg

NOTE: My apologies to subscribers. Please don’t be confused by the date shown above. This edition was supposed to be sent to subscribers last Monday, Oct. 16.

But a long, exhausting overnight flight from Philadelphia to Buenos Aires on Oct. 12/13, and some problems settling into my accommodations here in Buenos Aires led to befuddling delays in the AMJ production schedule.

I plan to send the next edition on Oct. 30, which will bring me back to the prescribed twice-monthly schedule, and hope this doesn’t happen again. Sorry for any confusion or inconvenience.

Another New Subscriber

A warm welcome to Lydia from Bayview, Texas, for subscribing to AMJ; Lydia is number 116 on the growing list.

***

“The Past Can Only Be Found In The Present”

The heading on this comes also from author Natalie Goldberg. I chose to use it even though her description of memoir also is the featured quote at the top of this edition of A Memoirist’s Journey.

The quotations are taken from her book, Old Friend From Far Away, The Practice of Memoir Writing, which I enjoyed reading this past week.

By way of a brief review, “Old Friend …,” published in 2009, provides deep insight into the meaning and purpose of memoir writing, while a sizeable portion comprises writing exercises.

In the exercises, Goldberg poses cogent and pedestrian questions designed to remove the cobwebs that dull our creative minds from disuse while improving memory development and descriptions of past events. There are numerous exercises, and she suggests that readers take only 10 minutes to complete most of them.

I skipped the exercises, being more anxious to read what she had to say about the practice and structure of writing a memoir. However, I realize their value and intend to return often to them.

I highly recommend Old Friend From Far Away for aspiring and practiced memoirists alike to hone their skills in the craft of memoir.

What I found most inspiring in Goldberg’s writing created a breakthrough moment for me in her discussion of the importance of expression over the reliance on rules for memoir writing.

I had hit a mental roadblock in my memoir project after infusing my mind with so many of the prescriptions for a successful memoir from the legions of writing “coaches” and advisers who peddle their instructions in books and online.

I discussed this in a previous AMJ edition and mentioned the words of the great jazz artist John Coltrane, who once replied to a question about the composition of his music, “Damn the rules, it’s the feeling that counts.”

Unfortunately, I had let Coltrane fade into the deep bog of online instructions that make it sound so easy if you would only apply this rule or that in the “structure” of your memoir.

Goldberg helped pull me out of the mire to engage more feeling and freedom in my writing and fewer rules of building structure into it, which got me rolling again down the happy memoir-writing road.

It felt as if Goldberg were talking directly to me about how to write this book. It was an immense amount of help, critical for its impact on the story and its meaning to the reader.

Travel well, my friends.

***

Don’t Forget to Tell Your Friends About AMJ

New subscribers can sign up easily on my website, realontheroad.com. Add your name and email address to the form accessible in the main menu under A Memoirist’s Journey (Newsletter).

Or, if you choose, send me your name and email address directly at davidhunterbishop@gmail.com. I will add you to the list.

Also, I’m always open to comments and questions, so don’t hesitate to contact me any time via email at davidhunterbishop@gmail.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

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Oct. 2, 2023/Issue #13

I write to better understand the connection of mortality to life, of life to mortality. What does it really mean to live and die? – DHB

My Eulogy For A Friend

(Note: While the following is not necessarily about memoir, it could be. I’d like to share it with you.)

The memorial service was the reason I altered my continuing world journey and returned to my roots in South Jersey, where Craig and I grew up.

Craig’s widow, Maria, also my lifelong friend, asked me to be one of four speakers offering eulogies to Craig. It’s something I’ve never done, but I was honored and pleased to be asked.

Each speaker offered warm, poignant, and often humorous memories of Craig in their presentations, making an impressive display of love and respect for such a special person in our lives.

And though I was a bit apprehensive about writing the eulogy, I couldn’t refuse. Then I found that the stories of the great times Craig and I had together flowed easily, and I was gratified by the impact my words had on so many who were kind enough to tell me afterward.

If you’re interested, here’s a link to a printed copy of the eulogy I presented.

***

The AMJ Archive Now Available

In archival news, I’ve created the complete AMJ Archive on my blog site, realontheroad.com.

Click on the “AMJ Archive” in the main menu of my blog site and you’ll find copies of each of the first 12 issues of “A Memoirist’s Journey.”

And I’ll be adding each new edition as they are published.

***

TNN Video Presentations Also Available

I’m also pleased that two video presentations about my travels that I made for The Nomadic Network are available again for viewing. Click on the links for each of the titles:

“How Travel Can Change Your Life in Retirement” https://youtu.be/Rrxw36XR4Dk?si=CV_rzW8WBf55PpYX

“Retirement on the Road: Senior Solo Adventure Traveler” https://youtu.be/2IgFAi19EIM?si=TOIqDW1rsZ01YV

***

Thanks for subscribing to “A Memoirist’s Journey.”

And tell your friends. The free, twice-monthly newsletter about writing memoirs is available by subscribing to the link in the main menu of realontheroad.com.

Contact me anytime with questions or comments. I am always happy to answer my readers.

Travel well, my friends.

***

September 18, 2023/Issue #12

“The problem (with memoir) is figuring out how to examine and dramatize ourselves without forgetting to pay the same attention to the larger historical and spiritual forces that have made us.” – New York Times’s critic Margo Jefferson

Back Where The Journey Began

I’m writing this edition of A Memoirist’s Journey while back in the United States, enjoying the warm hospitality of my dear, long-time friends where I grew up, such as Ken and Linda Ridinger, in their home in East Greenwich Township (Gibbstown), New Jersey.

The last time I was in the U.S. was February 2020, when I became nervous about traveling and fled to Hawaii where I stayed with friends and my son for a few months.

That was in the early days of the Covid pandemic, and I was even wondering whether I should reconsider my adopted life as a world nomad, which was then less than three years old.

Eventually, I migrated to Merida, Mexico, on the Yucatan Peninsula, where there were no travel restrictions for entry. I was planning to visit my other son in Alexandria, Va., USA, where I would arrange to use his address and contact info to get vaccinated.

That plan was interrupted when I tested positive before boarding my flight to Alexandria. Having no symptoms, of course, did not matter, except that I had to spend another 10 days in my room in Merida before rebooking my flight. Thirty days later in Virginia, I was successfully vaccinated and feeling as good as ever.

With that, my next stop was Istanbul. It was June 2020. I was back on the road, and it was exhilarating.

Since then I’ve spent time in Spain, the nation of Georgia, Armenia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Egypt, Greece, India, Nepal, Finland, Estonia, Albania, Bulgaria, and France.

Now I’m back in Southern New Jersey, USA, where I spent almost the first 30 years of my life before moving to Southern California for nine years, then living for 27 years in Hawaii, where, instead of retiring in Hawaii, I became a world nomad.

My only ID now is my passport. I let my Hawaii driver’s license lapse soon after leaving the Aloha State. I lost my Social Security card somewhere. I never enrolled in a U.S. healthcare program because they don’t cover you for medical care needed outside of the county.

So why am I here back in Jersey?

If you’ve been following this newsletter lately you read about one of my oldest and best friends, Craig Tahamont (see the Sept. 24 edition of AMJ by clicking “AMJ Archive” in the menu bar at realontheroad.com).

Craig died in July of complications from Alzheimer’s Disease, and I was honored to be asked by his widow Maria, also a dear friend, to be one of several speakers to offer eulogies for Craig at the memorial service being held this Saturday, Sept. 23. I could not refuse.

So without insurance or a driver’s license, only the care and love of my oldest and best friends, the best people I know in the world, I’m paying my respects to this man with whom I spent some of my earliest formative years.

Following a series of life events toward the end of my working career that led me to begin traveling in search of a different, deeper life experience on the road than what I saw ahead if I retired in Hawaii, I found the long road of solo travel to be a process of healing.

Most of the trauma of my mid- and late-life crises have come and gone, as I have given myself time to reconsider, think more deeply about, and reflect on my choices. I’ve discovered reconciliation, and with it, a better understanding of life. I found a new direction while falling in love with a freewheeling lifestyle of travel in the world.

Nevertheless, I’m finding now that with good leather still on the soles of my shoes and the urge to travel still beating strongly in my heart, however trite it may sound, the long road of life leads forever home.

***

The AMJ Archive Now Available

In archival news, I’ve created the complete AMJ Archive on my blog site, realontheroad.com, which also features a new post on my recent stay sojourn in France. Click on the “AMJ Archive” in the main menu and you’ll find copies of each of the first 10 issues of “A Memoirist’s Journey.” Then I’ll be adding each new edition as they are published.

***

TNN Videos of My Journey Also Now Available

I’m also pleased that two video presentations that I made about my journey that I made for The Nomadic Network are now available for viewing:

“How Travel Can Change Your Life in Retirement”

and,

“Retirement on the Road: Senior Solo Adventure Traveler”

***

September 4, 2023/Issue #11

“(T)he changeable present … is always exercising its dominion over the past.” – Thomas Larson

Can The Present Change the Past?

I’m reading a fascinating book called “The Memoir and the Memoirist,” by Thomas Larson, subtitled, “Reading and Writing Personal Narrative,” originally published in 2007.

Larson makes the interesting observation that memory may not be all in our power to control, and reviews the memoir-writing techniques of authors mentioned here in earlier editions of “A Memoirist’s Journey,” such as Mary Karr, and others.

Meanwhile, what we may learn in memoir writing is that memory has far more of its agency than we thought, and that the very act of remembering may alter what actually did occur.

This altering, Larson says, is key to memoir writing even among the best of memoir writers.

“Since my past only truly exists in the present and since my present is always in motion, my past itself changes too – actually changes – while the illusion created is that it stays fixed.

“If the past is both fixed and unfixed, then it is always in process. And, not surprisingly, this process lies in the present where our minds and feelings make sense of the past as we recollect the past.”

Larson calls this active participation with memory “presentification.”

“This presentification is not a distortion of any so-called real past; “this is the only way ‘my life’ comes to me,” he says.

My Parents’ Deaths

This comes to me as a welcome explanation of my difficulty recalling a significant moment in perhaps the most important emotional turning point in my life.

It was my father’s death in 1996, and my mother’s death eight months later, both from cancer, that have been instrumental in the course of my life to this day.

I recall clearly in my mind the story I’ve told and written about many times which includes “pulling the plug” on the machines in the hospital that were theoretically keeping my father alive. I have a vivid memory of leaning over to reach the plug in an outlet near the floor in the room where my father lay comatose, attached to the life-support machines without which he was little more than a corpse.

I recall in the scene that a nurse in the room, where my brother and mother also were gathered, instructed me to pull the plug. I did, and the machines began shutting down, their graphic green lines and bars slowly winding down the measurements of life remaining in my dad.

Over the years I’ve come to question my memory of that event. I find it hard to imagine now that there was even simply one plug that shut down the vast array of electronic machinery keeping my father “alive.”

I began unbelieving that the hospital staff would direct me, alone, and not one of the hospital staff, to take that action in the first place.

And now I have no idea who the hospital staff were in the room that day, and my brother and mother are both deceased now, making all their memories of no use.

Now, my reading of this book describes the possible fallibility of memory in the events of even the greatest importance to us, putting in doubt all memory of such intimate, personal events.

“Our present situation means everything to how and what we remember,” Larson suggests, and “what we remember may or may not be accurate. It has been altered and may be altered again by our recollecting.

“The past may impinge on the present, but the present can also direct the past with a purpose.”

The description of me pulling the plug adds drama to the scene, though it might never have happened that way.

This is a remarkable theory of memory that Larson goes on to apply to other memoirists’ work in the book, which I haven’t yet completed reading. It calls on me not necessarily to question my memory, but to allow the present ramifications of it to suffice for memoir; it is what it is, the only memory I have to work with now. I’m just less bothered by it.

Besides, in any manner that I look at that scene in the hospital, whether I bent down to pull the plug that ended my Dad’s life or not, my brother, my mother, and I were there – that much is indisputable – and we were all in agreement about the desired result of what we were there to witness.

***

The AMJ Archive Now Available

***

TNN Videos of My Journey Also Now Available

I’m also pleased that two video presentations that I made about my journey that I made for The Nomadic Network are now available for viewing:

“How Travel Can Change Your Life in Retirement”

and,

“Retirement on the Road: Senior Solo Adventure Traveler”

***

August 21, 2023/Issue #10

“… life on the other side of loss is not only livable but may be better, richer, more meaningful.” – Maggie Smith

Memoir, Autobiography, Fractured Structure

After reading the essay published in the previous edition of AMJ (8/7/23), a reader asked how I see the difference between memoir and autobiography, asking whether autobiography is seen as endorsing the view that anyone has the definitive say over the truth of their life.

And, by comparison, does a memoir allow for more of an emphasis on subjective perspective with less pressure to write something cohesive and strictly logical?

I answered these questions by suggesting that an author defines the truth of their life story in both the memoir and autobiography genres.

The difference is that memoir has a more literary approach to the structure and style of the narrative, often said to be taking only a slice of a person’s life, an important event or turning point and focusing on that, providing insight that gives meaning to the message of hope, inspiration, redemption – whatever the message is – for the reader to take from the author’s experience.

An autobiography, however, is generally the story of the author’s entire life, from birth to present, a recitation of events without the deeper introspection or “takeaway” given to the reader in a memoir.

The interaction of the genres is fluid, however, and often the characteristics of one flow into the other. There are no rules.

My book in progress will combine elements of both in examining the origins of the debilitating grief I felt over my role in the cancer deaths of my parents and brother and the journey I took toward redemption and healing.

I also intend for my book to send an inspiring message to the 70+ million men and women of the baby boomer generation in the U.S., who are now beginning to recognize their own lives in the mirror of life’s end game.

***

Otherwise, one of the books I’m currently reading while surrounded by the quiet beauty of the French countryside, living now in the lovely village of Évecquemont about 40 km outside of Paris, is Blueprint For A Memoir, a recent release from the accomplished author and book coach Jennie Nash.

Nash talks about using a “fractured structure” in the chronology of a memoir. That is, not relying on a chronological telling of the story but creatively moving back and forth in time as needed in the narrative. This was a new concept for me and a welcome development in my thinking about how to write my memoir.

I found the idea intriguing and helpful in reconciling the multiple inflection points I see as critical to my story. I now see the possibility of moving in and out of time without having to conform to a linear telling of events, easing the flow of the narrative without sacrificing meaning, perhaps even enhancing the element of time along my journey.

Nash provides exercises to guide authors through this writing style should an author choose to explore it.

One of the exercise questions she posits is, “Where are you (the author) standing in time when you tell your story?” I thought I’d share my answer:

“I don’t see myself standing in time; I am moving, I am on the road, always moving, traveling.

“Things move to live; the more they move, the stronger they get,” said the late martial artist and philosopher Bruce Lee, whose words I took to heart as I embarked on my journey.

The oft-asked question of whether I was running from something, or pursuing something else, took a long time to answer. Initially, only the act of movement itself was all that mattered.

But now, life on the road has been my only life since fleeing from retirement in Hawaii in 2016. I don’t know that I would have survived this long had I stayed in Hawaii.

But in the guise of a traveler, a nomad, I began a continuing journey that I remain on today. Eventually, I realized that my journey was a quest, and after periods of deep introspection on the road, I found what I was looking for.

I was able to soothe psychic wounds that once felled me, and I kept moving; I overcame a serious lung disease and kept moving, and I made an uneasy peace with the events that led me to flee from the standard conventions of retirement life, and I’m still moving.

As the question might imply, I am not “standing in time” as I tell my story. I am moving and reflecting on life in the rearview mirror of my mind, always trying to make life’s miseries grow smaller in the distance, yet finding only that the mirror reflects a mirage, not clarity or truth.

The truth, I found, is that life, past and present, always looms large, never diminishes, and I only survive now one step at a time, along the roads I choose, with the memories that push me forward.

My vantage point is always from the place I am on the road; it’s never from the end of the road because the road I’m on never ends.

I just keep moving along it, wherever it takes me.

***

I’m grateful for questions like those above, especially from readers, that allow me to think more clearly about your interests and mine in writing my book. I hope my answer helped you, as it helped me and others who may struggle with these concepts of autobiography and memoir writing.

Travel well, my friends.

***

August 7, 2023/Issue #9

Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history’s night. — Patricia Hampl

How The AMJ Newsletter Began

On Friday, I spoke at a roundtable discussion on memoir writing at the Rolf Potts Travel Writing Workshop in Paris, where I was attending the five-day workshop for a second consecutive year.

It was there last year that I was inspired to write a memoir of my life and travels, but I was ill-prepared for the task. I’ve always enjoyed reading books but was never enamored with the non-fiction memoir genre.

Since then, I’ve been reading memoir after memoir, watching and reading hours and hours of online print and video presentations about memoirs, and reading enough memoir how-to books to confuse anyone about the genre. It was all worth it.

While I don’t pretend to be an expert, I think I now have a fair understanding of what the basics of writing a memoir entail.

A few months ago, I began writing a twice-monthly newsletter to share my thoughts with others interested in memoir writing. The newsletter is part of an author’s platform to help me pitch my book to literary agents and publishers when it’s ready.

At this year’s workshop, I was asked to discuss what I learned about memoirs over the past 12 months, and I’m using this edition of AMJ to share some of my thoughts, which are not necessarily what I presented at the workshop.

I think the most valuable “intangible” that is crucial to writing a compelling memoir is honesty; that is, being true to yourself in your thoughts and words. By embracing honesty, you also will be true to your readers, which they will recognize, fostering a powerful sense of mutual trust and understanding between you and readers that will be beneficial to the success of your book.

Don’t make the mistake of being less than truthful for any reason. Cement that bond of trust with your reader early and often, and the rewards will be yours.

A successful memoir should also include a compelling story, interesting characters, and a well-written narrative. In addition, and perhaps most important of all, it must deliver a revealing, underlying message that will resonate with readers, make them think, become inspired, or feel the need to heed a call to action after you, the author, share with them a heartfelt message or a universal truth that adds value to their lives.

That part’s commonly called the “takeaway,” essential in a successful memoir.

The items above are the intangible factors in the memoir that you want to write. While there remains much to learn about writing a memoir, the question is how to gain the knowledge.

The memoir genre’s grounding in style, content, and presentation is still in a place that can muddy up your shoes. You won’t necessarily “learn” from an instruction video or by memorizing structural techniques from a “how-to” book.

The best way to begin learning is by starting to read the works of accomplished authors who have made their reputation in memoir writing, such as Cheryl Strayed, Mary Karr, Maya Angelou, Helen MacDonald, Frank McCourt, Linda Joy Meyers, Rick Bragg, Elizabeth Gilbert, Marion Roach Smith, and many others.

Take note of how they structure their stories and what their “takeaway” message is – you don’t have to copy them. Just reading carefully, thinking about what you’re reading, and absorbing the qualities of great writing will improve your own writing.

Also, search the internet for lectures, interviews, and conversations involving great writers about how they go about the process of writing and came to write what they did.

I came into this genre knowing practically nothing about the form or practical aspects of writing memoirs. I’d heard of Mary Karr and for a long time wanted to read her book, The Liar’s Club, but hadn’t. Now I have, much to my benefit.

I’d also heard of Jim Frey, who shamelessly embellished his memoir for dramatic effect and was famously called out publicly for it by Oprah Winfrey.

Now that I’m writing a memoir, trying to learn as much as I can about memoir writing, practically all that I read are memoirs and how-to books on writing memoirs.

It’s the latter, including a vast trove of online videos touting how-to and how-not-to write a memoir, where I often felt confused about memoir writing. It seems that nearly everyone who’s ever written a memoir has a course of instruction to promote writing your own memoir. At a cost, of course.

Many authors trot out that one book or two, perhaps, that they had published in the past and use them to entice new writers to join their costly online video courses and seminars.

The money’s in the “telling” about memoir writing, not “showing” that you really know what you’re talking about.

Learning from reading and absorbing the methods of great memoirists is, I think, the better way to get a handle on writing a memoir because that handle can get slippery.

Glean for yourself what’s good about a purported memoir and what isn’t. Pay less attention to the one- or two-and-off memoir author touting the need for a three-act structure, or 12-act structure, interiority, the Hero’s Journey, the premise, the promise, the hook, the prologue, the epilog, the hungry dog, whatever.

For example, early in my search for memoir guidance, the “experts” convinced me that a memoir must comprise only a small slice of a long life to have value and meaning for the reader.

I think Rick Bragg helped me put that myth to rest in “It’s All Over But the Shoutin’.” It’s a well-written, heartfelt memoir that grabs your attention, but it’s thin on the dramatic narrative arc of the story. What it does have is Bragg’s gut-wrenching honesty throughout about a tough life growing up in the South, the result of which resonates deep in the bones of a reader.

On the other hand, a plodding slog through the battlefield strategies of Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant, one battle after another, could interest only an ardent fan of the military arts sans the insight of a future president. It’s a memoir in name only, as I learned to my disappointment.

I was still in the sway of those who tout various formulas and trendy memoir techniques, however, when I picked up what looked like an interesting book by Gloria Steinem, a well-known American feminist/activist/magazine publisher and chronicler of events of the Baby Boomer generation, even though she was born in 1934, 12 years before the Boomer Generation was so-named.

Steinem’s book said, “MEMOIR,” right on the cover! And because lately, memoirs are largely all I read, I began to get a little stuffy about Ms. Steinem starting her book with tales of her childhood, her eccentric and entertaining father, her life growing up, going here, going there, and then this, then that, on and on.

I noted in my newsletter that while beginning to read this book, it didn’t seem like a memoir at all!

“It’s autobiographical, for goodness’ sake! What heresy to call this a memoir right on the front cover,” I righteously and naively thought to myself.

But I kept reading it because it was interesting. The slice of the life that Steinem carved out was nearly the whole watermelon. Yet she wrote with penetrating insight about everything she was involved in, specifically, the culture and climate of the times that shaped her views and an entire culture’s, providing quality insight, messaging, and what I’d call sound “takeaway” for readers in the thoughts of a courageous cultural crusader.

Here’s an example I posted in the July 10, 2023, edition of AMJ. It’s what Steinem says about her book in a review written by Marilyn Gates for the New York Journal of Books.

“Taking to the road … changed who I thought I was.

“The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories – in short, out of our heads and into our hearts. It’s right up there with life-threatening emergencies and truly mutual sex as a way of being fully alive in the present.”

I may be relatively new to memoir, but insight like that feels like a quality “takeaway” to me – honest, genuine, revealing, instructive, and deeply felt.

After all that I’ve read extolling the differences between memoir and autobiography, at times not so kind toward the latter, Steinem’s “Life on The Road” gives me pause to re-think the supposed boundaries of memoir and not worry too much anymore about breaching them.

Above all, my learning so far has been reduced to the facts that memoirs must be well-written and interesting about a facet of life that is universal to human nature. And they must be written honestly.

My final take on the question in the title of this piece, “What Have I Learned About Memoir Writing?” from my short-lived deep dive into the world of memoir, is that care must be taken to write well enough to make the book engaging and interesting for the reader, and that it must deliver a powerful takeaway message, whether it be about grief, loss, insight, inspiration – whatever that important human condition is that gets distilled by the author and taken in by the reader – either from a small slice of the whole or the full buffet — it must be satisfying, insightful, and meaningful for the reader.

It’s what matters most in a successful memoir.

Read and enjoy!

***

July 24, 2023/Issue #8

“Whatever the limits and travails we face, we want to retain the autonomy—the freedom—to be the authors of our lives. This is the very marrow of being human. — Ronald Dworkin

Rolf Potts’ Travel Writing Workshop

I’m leaving Istanbul for Paris on Saturday to attend the Rolf Potts Travel Writing Workshop.

This will be my second time attending this workshop, and I feel much better prepared this year than last year when I didn’t know what to expect.

I’ve done much work this past year, reading, writing, and learning about memoir, after getting the bug to write my own at last year’s workshop.

Many of the same people who attended last year’s workshop are returning, and it’s a talented, lively group of people that I look forward to working with again.

I’m also pleased to participate in a panel discussion of memoir writing on Aug. 4, the final day of the five-day Paris workshop.

I’ll talk about what I have learned about the genre since I started seriously planning the book and writing a twice-monthly newsletter, “A Memoirist’s Journey,” 10 weeks ago. I’m honored to have this kind of recognition for my project.

As I’m now actually begun putting my story onto written pages, I’m moving toward more of an examination of the modern industry of end-of-life care and dying, and away from the story I’d originally planned, which was more of a woe-is-me tale of my personal grief and shame in the wake of my both my parents’ deaths.

I won’t ignore that part of my story, but I think it’s important to examine the medical industry that is sometimes reluctant to recognize the needs of the dying and their families in the face of pressures from powerful religious interests and the medical industry eager to profit from the costs of keeping people “alive” against the odds.

I will begin to explore those aspects of the “Death With Dignity” movement in upcoming issues of AMJ, as I’ve recently collected a small new library of related books on those topics.

Currently, I reading “Being Mortal,” by Atul Gawande, and rereading the late Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s poignant story of his own death from cancer, “When Breath Becomes Air.”

***

Losing My Oldest and Best Friend

Sorry for this newsletter to be of such a somber note, but I was also asked to present a eulogy in September for my oldest and dearest friend, Craig A. Tahamont, who died July 11 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

We met when we were both about eight years old in New Jersey; we grew up together, went to the same schools, played on the same teams, took the same journeys, and enjoyed an adventurous young life that was a precursor to the wanderlust I enjoy now so late in my life.

Craig loved music and books; more than anything, he loved to have fun, and we probably had more than our fair share growing up.

I owe him at least the words he deserves on the day we pay tribute to the big heart and warm soul of this wonderful human being. He was 71.

So sometime soon after the workshop in Paris, I will be heading back to Southern New Jersey, USA, for the memorial services on Sept. 23. I may make a short trip elsewhere first, but haven’t planned that out yet.

I can also do memoir research in Paulsboro, N.J., the town Craig and I grew up in, and there are many good old friends there for me to meet up with.

***

July 10, 2023/Issue #7

“That irreparable change a death makes in the course of our daily thoughts can be felt in a vague and poignant discomfort of mind.” — Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

Advocating for Dignity in Death

Greetings to my growing list of AMJ subscribers!

I knew how unpleasant the opening of the June 26 edition of AMJ might have been for some readers, but I didn’t anticipate the near-complete silence it generated.

One reader responded with a comment sent to me via email, telling me the opening was so offensive that if he’d read it in a book, he would have closed it after that first paragraph and never have gone back.

That was the only comment I received. I suspect other readers felt the same way.

It was sensational and provocative. That stunned lack of response revealed to me how powerful it was, perhaps too much so, although it was an authentic glimpse into the frightening state of mind my brother and I were driven to in the wake of our father’s sudden collapse from cancer, his death in a Southern California hospital, and my mother’s tortured care in the hands of the medical industry eight months later in Hawaii.

These events were poignant and painful. Neither of our parents had any chance for a meaningful future. They both wanted to die. But we were up against long-held religious beliefs and a powerful medical industry.

Nevertheless, my mother was convinced that her husband of more than 50 years, whose care had kept her alive and at home for four years, was waiting for her on the other side of this life, and that when she died they would be reunited for eternity. But her hospice doctor refused to increase her morphine dosage; the doctor was willing to allow her only a slow, agonizing death, lest they run afoul of any laws or religious strictures prohibiting a dignified death.

My brother and I were terribly conflicted, nearly out of our minds with the futility of our efforts to grant our mom her wish, putting our legal status in jeopardy by attempting to help her die in Hawaii.

That was oddly in contrast to the permission we gave nurses, eight months earlier to pull the plugs on the machines that were keeping my dad alive – a condition he told us often that he never wanted to be in.

Thus, we were assisted in taking the action that killed our comatose father in the hospital, but prevented from taking any action that would have helped our willing mother to end her suffering. What was the difference? Only the location. Dad was in the hospital. Mom was at home.

These issues have come to the fore more openly since my late brother and I confronted them in the late 1990s, but they are no less emotionally wrenching today as society debates the fate of our loved ones in their final days.

No one likes to contemplate our loved ones’ deaths in such stark, revealing detail. We wish these deaths were quiet, peaceful events, at home in the comfort of our beds, close family members at our side in the peace of our final moments, as in a Norman Rockwell portrait.

Yet too often, these scenes become frantic efforts to keep a grievously suffering, dying patient alive, often transporting them to hospitals where teams of medical professionals strive to keep them alive at all costs, and the costs are high. Really, to what end?

American humorist Mark Twain noted wryly that everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die to get there.

My parents were an exception. They both wanted to end their misery here. My mother believed in her heart – she told my brother and me often – that her beloved husband George was waiting for her in the afterlife. She needed to go and find him.

Extending the lives of the dying against lost hope for a better, healthier life in the present is partly the result of a religion-based reverence for the “sanctity of life,” and sometimes a cruel form of medical research.

Doctors themselves often take the necessary precaution of putting in writing what they want and don’t want, involved in their end-of-life care because they know better.

The acclaimed late neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, author of the remarkable memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, knew this well and, as a doctor, prepared to have an adequate supply of morphine available to be administered to him by his wife in their home, which brought to bear his death and the end of his tragic suffering from cancer.

There is an evolving debate about the practice of end-of-life care in the United States and other countries, but reforms can be slow to develop, and difficult to navigate if they are.

Ten States and the District of Columbia have enacted laws to allow “death with dignity” in the United States. Still, there are complicated hurdles to the procedures involved before carrying out such a procedure for a patient.

The issues are a minefield of complications and legalities. A friend warned me that speaking out about my role in my mother’s death 27 years ago could put me in legal jeopardy should an ambitious prosecutor decide that what my late brother and I did to help our suffering mother in the shadow of the medical industry’s indifference could be construed as an attempted murder, for which there is no statute of limitations.

These issues would be part of the memoir I intend to write, advocating for increasingly liberal enactment of “Death With Dignity” laws in the United States.

I see in this an opportunity to influence a more enlightened, continuing debate concerning euthanasia and assisted suicide, to help remove the stigma and make the practice better for all in the knowledge that when your time comes, and you are prepared to die, that there will be people to help and a system in place that can eliminate the pain and suffering and establish a dignified, effective means of ending one’s life.

That’s why I choose to discuss these sad and gruesome events to write about in my memoir so that there is hope and opportunity for others who desire to self-determine their end-life care with the human dignity each of us deserves.

It would also help family members like my brother and me, who were severely affected and confused by how our parents were treated by the medical industry, causing us to take matters into our own hands with devastating consequences.

When I mentioned social activism through memoir in the previous edition of the AMJ newsletter, these are the issues I was talking about.

Gloria Steinem: Memoir or Autobiography?

I mentioned in the June 26 AMJ that I was reading Gloria Steinem’s book, “My Life on The Road,” wondering why it’s billed as a memoir when its structure was at odds with all the memoir instruction I’ve been reading about since beginning to write my own book.

But I kept reading Steinem’s book because of my interest in her writing style, story, and all she’s done as a life-long social activist.

I enjoyed it, and I think I learned something important about the author and the memoir genre.

I learned that the order of events is not necessarily important as long as the events are compelling. The “takeaway,” the understanding of an important, underlying message to readers in a book, is important to a memoir, but how it’s presented is not.

A book that starts early in an author’s life and recounts life events in near chronological order does not necessarily disqualify it from the memoir genre. Blending the takeaway into the events themselves does not detract from the message. Sometimes it enhances it.

Steinem’s book smudges the lines between memoir and autobiography that some memoirists like to draw in defense of memoir as a superior literary genre.

But I found that Steinem’s also handy with her pen and that there’s still plenty of takeaway in her story, even with its autobiographical tilt toward a time-driven sequence of events.

Listen to her speak about her book, from a review written by Marilyn Gates for the New York Journal of Books.

“Taking to the road … changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories – in short, out of our heads and into our hearts. It’s right up there with life-threatening emergencies and truly mutual sex as a way of being fully alive in the present.”

I may be relatively new to memoir, but insight like that feels like quality “takeaway” to me – honest, genuine, revealing, instructive, and deeply felt.

After all I’ve read extolling the differences between memoir and autobiography, at times not so kind toward the latter, Steinem’s “Life on The Road” gives me pause to re-think the supposed boundaries of memoir and not worry too much more about breaching them.

***

June 26, 2023/Issue #6

“When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say, because I travel. — Gloria Steinem

A Memoir ‘Takeaway’ Moment

“When my brother and I decided to kill Mom, it was not our proudest moment. It wasn’t the idea so much that repulsed us. It was that we botched the job.”

How would that lede paragraph strike you upon opening your next book? Would you want to continue reading, wanting to know more about what’s going on?

That would be my hope in the memoir I propose to write because the quote is a critical part of the true story of death, suffering, and profound grief that wracked my family in the late 1990s.

That opening also attempts to explain a large part of the depression I suffered in Hawaii as I headed toward retirement 15 years later.

It would be the opening of my story arc, the crux of my anxiety, like the end of the chain-reaction crash of events piled up in a heap of wreckage; the final chapter of my boomer arc loomed large in Hawaii.

Several life-draining events occurred during the last stages of my remaining work years, roughly from 1996-97, when my parents died of cancer within eight months of one another, to my ultimate decision in 2016 to leave my troubles behind in Hawaii and seek a new life as a solo world traveler.

That event marks the end of the first epoch in my late-life journey.

But the script for that traveler’s walk for redemption essentially runs on empty. I had resolved some problems, but I’d done nothing about the weed and alcohol habit that still cast a dark shadow on my future. It was the palliative mask I wore, hoping to forget the pain of everything else that was bothering me.

I was still pretty much a walking train wreck when I left Hawaii.

Aside from my parents’ deaths, traumatizing events leading to my departure from the islands included a seven-year court fight to regain my job with the local newspaper that fired me illegally in 2005. We won the war, but the battle was exhausting.

When I opted to return to work in 2012 to sharpen the point of our labor union’s smashing victory against the company, it resulted in the worst soul-devouring year of my entire working life.

My only brother, an accomplished jazz artist, age 58, died in 2005, the same year I was fired. Doctors said he had the same supposedly rare cancer that killed our dad. Huh?!

The mountain of misery and stress I was sitting on took its toll on me, and my wife, too, as our 40-year relationship crumbled toward divorce.

While I’ll save the details of these events for the book; let me just say that it was a rough time for my physical and mental health.

Despite a wealth of good friends in Hawaii, all I could see when I looked down the path of retirement in paradise was a dark downhill ride to an early date with my final demise.

That’s essentially a synopsis of my memoir, at least the first part: How would I reconcile my lingering despair with the bleak look of retirement life in the Aloha State?

So I decided to leave Hawaii, and travel life helped my disposition. But Part II brought a renewed crisis to my new life on the road. I’ll talk about that later, too, as it prompted more thought about dividing the book into parts I and II, which I mentioned in AMJ Edition No. 5.

Part II could be written as an epilogue, but I’m not sure that’s the correct approach. I don’t see many epilogues in the memoirs I’m reading.

One of my two intelligent sons has also already weighed in on the question of Parts I and II, however, suggesting via an email from Oklahoma that I move back and forth in time, “braiding” the events together in the two stories.

“Don’t let the arrow of time impede the intrigue,” he wrote. I may have him ghostwriting for me soon!

A Newly Revised Hook With Takeaway

I have, however, written a new premise, or hook, that reflects the entire scope of the book in both its parts as I continue to develop the structure.

Here’s how I bring the two parts together in the synopsis, hook, or “elevator pitch,” as it’s variously termed, which becomes a critical component of a memoir proposal that goes to literary agents and book publishers:

A deeply troubled career journalist sees doom in retirement and flees his Hawaii home to find freedom, adventure, and healing on the road, but he soon discovers that he’ll never leave all his troubles behind when told he has a potentially fatal, incurable lung disease.

Unlike my previous pitch, this pitch reveals an all-important “takeaway” for the reader that we’ve been discussing, which is the universal truth that will resound in a reader’s mind, such as:

No matter how far you run or how fast, you can’t escape your problems that way. Sooner or later, there will come your day of reckoning, when you must confront and defeat your demons before turning them out of your life and moving on in peace with yourself.

Now that I’m actively beginning to put these pieces of my story together, it’s become easier to discuss what readers take away from my book.

I’m feeling more confident that I can make this book work now, feeling good and inspired again, recalling one of my favorite quotes from the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane:

“Damn the rules; it’s the feeling that counts.”

***

June 12, 2023/Issue #5

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou

A Mixed Bag of Memoir

Since the last issue of AMJ, I read “Everything All At Once” a recently published memoir by Stephanie Catudal that I commented on somewhere – Goodreads? or maybe, “Writers Write” on LinkedIn? — I can’t remember.

But briefly, it was a serious drama held together by a young American couple’s strength, perseverance, and love through emotional distress stemming first from the death of the author’s father, and then a long tragic and complicated bout with life-threatening cancer and other health issues that nearly took the life of her husband.

Much of the story had already been chronicled on Instagram in near-real time and is included in the book, which overall, I thought suffered in the editing. I found the narrative difficult to follow at times, often wordy, and unnecessarily pretentious in its tone.

I then started reading author and writing instructor Linda Joy Myers’ book, “The Power of Memoir,” and while examining the use, construction of, and importance of scenes in memoir writing, I found Helen Macdonald’s recent book, “H Is For Hawk” to contain a vivid melange of scenes in a memoir of grief and a young woman’s attempt to overcome it by taming a ferociously beautiful wild bird.

I look forward to completing Macdonald’s book soon but I’ve been on a book-buying binge this week (I have points), also downloading Gloria Steinem’s so-far-excellent memoir, My Life On The Road (published 2015).

Bending my budget like that continues the discussion of the idea that what’s important about a memoir is not the author; rather, it is the message that readers “take away” from reading the memoir. It means there should be a compelling story, consisting of scenes that “show” the memoir’s message instead of simply having the author/protagonist rambling on, “telling” the story. This means drawing the reader into the story with imagery and the building of scenes.

This is important to me since I’m now starting to write scenes, starting with the trove of sketches and essays sitting in my Google Docs files as a foundation. They will need refinement to build a solid structure for the scenes to inhabit but this is a milestone moment in my memoir journey. Until now I’ve been reading acclaimed memoir books and learning from online videos and books about memoir writing, which I’ve shared in this newsletter.

The memoir, remember, is not an autobiography; it is not supposed to be the author’s recitation of everything that happened in their life in chronological order, which likely induces gaping yawns in a reader while they are placing the book back on the shelf.

The memoir, as everything I’m reading now tells me, needs to be written as a story, structured like a novel, with scenes that give depth and meaning to the characters and their part in the story if they are going to resonate with readers.

Scenes are constructed of observations and detailed descriptions of the time, place, events and characters that appear in a book, and not just in broad strokes, but in notes from the senses – touch, taste, feel, smell, sounds, sight – written to pull a reader into a scene with the author, providing depth, advancing the plot, and keeping readers in suspense, wanting to know what’s coming next.

Initially, I was confused and a little annoyed at this part of the discussion on scene writing, it being more like writing a novel than I expected. But soon I understood that while memoir may borrow this technique from the novel, the result still represents actual events, only written in a way that make them more compelling to read. It’s not just my story that makes the memoir interesting to the reader, it’s the takeaway, the message, that a well-written story impresses upon the reader, adding what author Marion Roach Smith calls “depth and universality” to the narrative.

Now that I think I’m grasping these concepts, I’m ready to scratch my itch to start writing, because my story won’t materialize by itself. I need to start punching the keyboard, applying what I’ve learned, to see how my memoir boat sails into the sea of words I’ve compiled.

I have literally tens of thousands of words filed away in my computer cloud that’s getting heavy with the precipitation of my life and travels since 2016 – notes, essays, thoughts, ideas, stories, vignettes – and it’s time for rain from that cloud to begin falling on the fallow field of my computer screen and start growing into my story.

I’m excited now to be at this stage, but will continue looking to the best authors and their books for inspiration and instruction as I move on to this exciting new phase of my book journey.

All of that said, I’m pretty sure the memoir project is going to take more time than I optimistically imagined it would. I may have an outline, even perhaps a chapter or two, completed by my original goal of August for the completion of a book proposal. But the more I read, write and learn about memoir, and discover more about myself and my journey, the more I realize this project could take up to a year or more.

I am neither discouraged nor daunted by that prospect, however. I’m enjoying this journey and looking forward to completing this project no matter how long it takes.

This is where I need you, my subscribers. It’s your comments, observations, and input that help keep me on the course I intend to take on my writing journey, describing the scenes of joy, hurt, pain, sorrow, delight, satisfaction, wonder, realization, discovery, and triumph, and all else that I am still finding out about the world, and deep within myself, along the way.

So I encourage you, as my friend Walt Whitman asked his readers in “Song of the Open Road“:

“Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?”

Together we can travel and learn, and make this humble story of mine proclaim its “takeaway” loud and clear.

***

In the June 26 edition of “A Memoirist’s Journey,” I will discuss the key takeaways that I believe will come from my memoir, including the complexities of grief and dying, that have led me to write my story.

***

May 29, 2023/Issue #4

“Very few people are reading your memoir because they care about you.” – Marion Roach Smith, author of The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life

The Question of A Book Title

I said we’d talk about my book’s title this week, and we will. However I had two experiences with authors in the past two weeks who’ve made me readjust the focus of writing my memoir.

We’ve talked about the hook, which for memoir, is designed to summarize what the book is about for agents and publishers, and let the marking departments determine whether the premise will make book readers want to buy and read the book.

I thought I had a succinct, pithy, 22-word hook for the book that would provide the book’s basic premise and invite readers into its pages.

Then I read Marion Roach Smith’s book (quotation above), which taught me the fundamental truth that a memoir is not about the author, but about the reader, and what’s important is whatever the reader can “take away” from the author’s story that resonates in the reader’s life. Hence, the term, “takeaway”!

In the past two weeks I also watched, “Takeaway, the Heart of Memoir,” with Brooke Warner on YouTube. Warner was just as persuasive about the power of takeaway and I was awestruck by her presentation.

The power of memoir lies in the message that a reader takes away from the story, much less than from the exploits of the author.

Smith wrote, “It brings depth and universality to your writing. It is the heart of memoir.” That’s the takeaway.

Meanwhile, it also occurred to me recently that my story involves two dramatic inflection points that weren’t reflected in the 22-word hook I was so proud of two weeks ago.

So I took another look and came up with this 27-word hook, or premise for the book proposal:

“A deeply troubled journalist foresees doom in retirement, flees Hawaii for travel, adventure, and healing on the road, but there encounters a real threat to his life.”

I think it’s better – more descriptive, much more intriguing. Why, for example, is this journalist living in the paradise of Hawaii seeing “doom” in retirement there? And what in the name of aloha happens to him on the road?

But rather than spoil the suspense, let’s take a look at this title conundrum.

Until I started understanding the importance of takeaway, every potential book title I had written down was about me. For example, Staying Alive By Not Staying Still, or The Mailman’s Son, or Retirement On The Road, and many more in a similar thread. Each one a reference to me – not to the bigger picture of the story, which we’ve come to find out is the takeaway.

So I need to do some rethinking more about the universal message of the story I have to tell and less about my role as bearer of the message.

As I began thinking more along these lines in the past two weeks I came up with only one title possibility that I really like. There will be more that come to mind, I’m sure, and I haven’t come up with a subtitle for it yet, but this one really hits home for me.

Growing up with my small family in a small house in the small town of Paulsboro, New Jersey, I don’t recall much in the way of strong emotions being expressed there about anything except music.

My mother played piano and accordion; my brother played the clarinet and the piano; I played piano and trombone. The three of us all had taken formal music lessons. Only my father hadn’t, having grown up poor in Paulsboro.

But when we gathered to sing and play, which we often did, no one shined with a brighter light of musicianship than my Dad, who could play a pair of spoons, clicking and clacking them together and against his thigh with remarkable rhythm and more spirit and pure joy than anyone on any instrument that I’ve ever seen or heard perform.

Those homespun jam sessions are some of my favorite scenes from childhood, and now when I think about writing my book with the benefit of good advice, without my ego and persona getting in the way, I think of things like that.

What better could explain some of the passion that all four of us had for music in our home than that? I could build on those music sessions for a scene in the book that would explain by showing, not telling, where my deep love of music comes from and how I still keep that love with me in my travels through periods of grief and suffering, and as a dear friend when sometimes life gets lonely.

I’ve written often about how my travels have taken shape from how I have learned to keep my emotions under control as a solo traveler by allowing myself to sing, dance, laugh, and cry every day, without reservation, because I believe it helps keep me on a more stable emotional keel.

As a result, the only title for my book that I have in mind now is the one I came up with this past week that would be a tribute to those musical memories from the home of my youth in Paulsboro:

“Dad Played The Spoons.”

***

NEXT IN AMJ: This segment ended with a discussion of a scene, and a mention of using scenes to “show” rather than “tell” what a book is about. On June 12 I hope to examine this concept further and see how it helps bring a memoir to life. Let me know what you think, and whether you have any questions or memoir topics you’d like to talk about.

***

May 15, 2023/Issue # 3

“I believe that memoir is the novel of the 21st century; it’s an amazing form that we haven’t even begun to tap … we’re just getting started figuring out what the rules are.” — Susan Cheever

A Closer Look At Memoir Comps

Reaction to our recent discussion of comparative titles was encouraging, so I’d like to talk a bit more about the selection of comp books I’m searching for in a memoir book proposal.

Thanks to everyone who responded with a possible comp title.

Connie Fenty referenced a book I hadn’t heard of by Dr. Terrence Real, titled, “I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression.” It’s about chronic depression in men, and amplifies the discussion of why more men don’t travel solo in retirement or write more about their feelings and problems upon entering their retirement years.

I haven’t read Dr. Real’s book but he pinpoints the depression that hung over me as I looked at retirement.

Perhaps a unique aspect of my story is the triple whammy of grief, guilt, and substance abuse.

I partially overcame the first two and went on the road with my pot and alcohol habits still raging. It was a dangerous scenario that I was foolishly cultivating, risking serious health and legal repercussions.

Not until I was diagnosed with a potentially fatal lung disease in 2019 did I realize how stupid I was and cleaned up that aspect of my life, making travel perhaps less adventurous but much safer, and less costly.

It reduced the focus of my memoir to one sub-genre, that being “soul-searching travel.”

Now the book can be divided into two parts. The first would be the events that made me question my life and desire for the conventional retirement lifestyle.

The second part would be about my life on the road since leaving Hawaii in 2016, and the grief and remorse that I wrestled with on the road, along with the adventures, good times and revelations. That division simplifies the organization of the book.

Accomplished children’s book author and renowned travel writer Rita Golden Gelman, whose 2001 memoir, Tales of a Female Nomad, also helped inspire my post-retirement journey, long ago realized the same shortcoming among men that Dr. Real identified.

“Older men, it seems, are not as courageous as women,” Gelman wrote. “All those years of being responsible have diminished their capacity for adventure.”

I went for the adventure in retirement, anyway, and found the opportunities that solo travel provided for introspection and self-examination to be a soothing tonic for overcoming most of my demons.

As a result, my book proposal in progress is of the “soul-searching travel” sub-genre of memoir, so here’s where I unveil the latest “hook,” or basic premise for my pending book, which is:

A deeply troubled career journalist sees doom in retirement, and flees Hawaii to seek healing and adventure as a solo world traveler.”

That’s it — the protagonist, his conflict, and his way out of the woods — in 22 words!

Take your time. I know you’re counting them.

But would it make you want to read the book? Or are you already asleep? Tell me later.

***

I’m grateful for the help of AMJ readers Kathie Rogers and Chris Loos, who both pointed me to Luke Russert’s recently released memoir, You Can Meet Me There, in which he grieves his father Tim Russert’s sudden death from a heart attack in 2008. Tim Russert was the widely-known journalist and host of the Sunday morning news show Meet The Press.

The younger Russert worked as a news correspondent at NBC for eight years, then quit to travel and reassess his own troubled life in the years following his father’s death.

I immediately downloaded “You Can Meet Me There” and found it probably as close to any comp title for what I’m writing as any book I’ve read yet.

But while the young Russert and I both took grief over our father’s death on the road, that’s where I saw the similarities with my story end.

Luke Russert is of course, much younger than I am. And he has a net worth of $9 million after making close to half a million a year for eight years at NBC, according to richestlist.com. His style and manner of travel as a result, were more extravagant than mine.

And while I admired Russert’s candid portrayal of his character as a traveler, it consisted too often of inexcusably boorish, ugly American-type behavior.

I could be rude to touts in foreign tourist destinations who pursued me aggressively after I asked to be left alone, but I never bullied and assaulted anyone as Russert describes he did to a French man on a beach in Sri Lanka.

And he offered no regret or remorse, sorrow or reflection on such incidents, apparently satisfied in his justification for them, believing for example that in the case of the French man, he was in Russert’s estimation, harassing turtles by photographing them too closely on the beach while they were laying their eggs.

While there are some correlations between Luke Russert’s memoir and mine, there are as many or more differences.

At least, I give him credit for coming forward as a man with a deeply felt need for a public, soul-searching look at his life. And he has given me an appropriate title to include in my book proposal.

I’ve compiled a list of some of the other worthwhile books I’ve read in the past six months for instruction or inspiration in writing memoir, which include:

When Breath Becomes Air by the late Paul Kalanithi, whose last name I regrettably misspelled in the last newsletter. I apologize for that.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed. I would include this as a comp if it wasn’t such a big seller and now more than 10 years old.

The Liar’s Clubby Mary Karr, one of the biggest names in the literary genre, from whom I’m learning a lot.

All Over But The Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg. Another case of an appropriate comp — he’s a journalist, I’m a journalist, and we both acknowledge the remorse we fell now thinking our jobs were more important than visiting our families. But it’s another title that’s been on bookstore shelves since 1991.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. An outstanding book but with few parallels to what I’m writing.

Mountain Lines by Jonathan Arlan, a wonderful account by an American literary agent, with whom I happen to be acquainted, who challenges himself to an arduous hike through the French Alps, but it’s not really a comparable title.

To Shake the Sleeping Self by Jedidiah Jenkins A young gay man takes an amazing bicycle trip from Oregon to Patagonia but wrestles constantly with his Christianity and an overbearing mother who follows him and refuses to accept his sexual preference. Few comp similarities here.

Oldly Go: Tales of Intrepid Travels by the Over-60s, by numerous authors, foreword by Dervla Murphy A compilation of interesting travel stories but of little or no value to my search for comp titles.

Writing Life Stories by numerous authors, edited with foreword by William Zinsser. Not a comp title.

South to America by Imani Perry. An amazing journey through the American South examining how black culture has shaped America.

Retirement Your Wayby Marilyn L. Bushey and Gail M. McDonald, This book just might be a comp! Published in 2019, I’m reading it now. It advises readers on taking control of their retirement years and doing what they really want to do, instead of succumbing to the norm.

Books About the Craft of Writing Memoir

I’ve also been delving into the trove of books available on the craft of writing memoir not to mention the wealth of information available online, which you’ll just have to search for with the obvious keywords. I’ve read these books and found them all generally worthwhile:

The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

Inventing The Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir by William Zinsser

Breaking Ground on Your Memoir by Linda Joy Meyers and Brooke Warner

On Writing: A Memoir of The Craft by Stephen King

Finally, here are some other memoir titles I’ve read in the past two or three years or more. There’s a lot of value in these books, just not for my comp book title purpose.

Blue Highways: A Journey Into America by William Least Heat-Moon.

Out of Istanbul by Bernard Ollivier

Ten Years A Nomad by Matt Kepnes

Marco Polo Didn’t Go There by Rolf Potts

Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Morgan

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

Tales of A Female Nomad by Rita Golden Gelman

Go Now! By Nick Zoa

Eat Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Informational sources:

The Rise and Fall of Baby Boomers by Lawrence R. Samuel. Being in that demographic, there is information here that I will likely use in my book proposal to indicate the potential for interest in my book.

***

Next on May 29: We’ll tackle the search for the title of my book (I have a million of them – titles to choose from for my one book, that is).

***

May 1, 2023/Issue No. 2

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.– William Faulkner

A Discussion of ‘Comp’ Titles

Another important part of a memoir proposal to literary agents and publishing houses is the section on comparative, comparable, or simply, “comp” titles.

These are the published books that are similar in theme to the one you are proposing. Agents and publishers want to know what your proposed book will be up against in the marketplace of memoir proposals. They leave it up to the authors proposing a memoir to ferret out the titles that are most like their own.

Of course, no two memoirs are exactly alike. But they may share similar appeal to a particular audience, giving those who follow the marketplace some idea of how your book might be marketed, and how it will fare among the competition in terms of sales.

It’s not an easy task. I’ve found so much of choosing a comp title is speculative and imprecise. I’ve been struggling with the task now for months. Of course, I’m new at it so some difficulty might be expected. I’ve been perusing the many guides to choosing comp titles online without much success.

Many guides to memoir-writing proposals suggest that five-to-seven titles are sufficient. Some recommend more, some less. But the selection is limited by qualifications such as having been published within the past two or three years; having a similar genre, in my case, memoir, or travel memoir; having a common theme or focus; and sharing similar audience demographics (e.g., senior travelers and baby boomers eyeing retirement).

Also considered is the relative success of your comp title, meaning it needs to have been successful, but not too successful, because most books are unlikely to approach the sales of the rare blockbuster like Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild,” for example. (I told you it’s complicated.)

I’ve also been reading many memoirs lately, scouring best-seller lists and sites like Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, as well as online “best memoir” lists, seeing what people are buying, reading, and reviewing; and finding some good and not-so-good titles with only a few that share similarities in theme or focus with the story I’m telling.

So, What’s The Theme of My Memoir?

As I examine the outline of the story I’m putting together, I see a mid-60s male taking stock of his life as he prepares to retire, and being shocked at the compilation of disturbing events he finds, leaving him to wonder how he’s survived with himself for this long.

I’m looking for memoirs mostly by middle-aged and older men facing retirement with a sense of loss and despair, seeing it as a road to their quick demise, physically and mentally, and desperately looking for a more rewarding life in retirement than the one they see prescribed for them in the conventional boomer scheme of education, career, family, retirement and death.

The grief over the one-two punch of my parents’ ghastly deaths; the regret, guilt, and remorse over feeling I had not done enough for them while they were alive, and failing them in their end-of-life desires, and finally participating in their deaths, took its toll on me. Not to mention the life-long substance abuse habit I used to assuage my guilt and pain.

My story lies in realizing that retirement at the end of a tumultuous career in journalism, a failed marriage or two, getting fired, and enduring a long, arduous work-related lawsuit, and health problems, does not necessarily mark the beginning of the last chapter of your life.

But the problem with sorting our comp titles for my life story is that most men if they do travel in retirement, it’s with their spouse. And if they write about their travels, it’s a how-to, where-to-go, travelogue type of book.

Men tend not to dig too deep into any serious examination of emotional or physical suffering, addiction, or conflict that might prompt a significant change in the late stages of their life, and how they came to grips with it, the factors that embody so much of the inherent conflict, and thus the appeal, of a compelling memoir.

So there aren’t many male authors in the tentative list of comp titles that I have compiled so far.

And I could only dream of achieving the massive popular appeal of Strayed’s book, despite a similar storyline; it also was published more than 10 years ago. So hers is likely out of the running as a comp title in any proposal pitch I make.

My story is more likely to have an affinity with Rick Bragg’s memoir, “It’s All Over But The Shoutin’,” about his tough upbringing in a dirt-poor region of the American South and his subsequent success as a journalist, ultimately winning the profession’s most coveted honor, the Pulitzer Prize.

Braggs and I share the same career, journalism, and we admit to deep pangs of guilt for allowing our feelings of self-importance in our work to override our responsibilities to family. But there’s little more than that in the comparison. It is, however, a rare glimpse into the feelings of a male in the contemporary memoir genre that currently puts Bragg’s “It’s All Over But The Shoutin’” on my comp list.

Two days ago I finished “When Breath Becomes Air,” a memoir by an extraordinary American neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who, while in his 30s, discovers that he himself has a deadly cancer that would take his life. It’s a heartbreaking story told courageously by Kalathini who left behind an infant daughter and a loving young wife.

I’m not sure how I could ever compare Kalathini’s story to mine, but I mention it because I was moved by it like no book that I can recall. And I’d certainly recommend it to anyone. Comp title or not.

I have at least a dozen more titles that are borderline comps but none that really carry the theme that I do into my retirement: Mid-60s male looks back at his life and rejects his pending retirement as a black hole leading to nothing but his early demise. So he decides to seek redemption and renewal in a new life as a nomadic world traveler and succeeds beyond all his expectations.

I know there are many readers among my growing list of subscribers so if anyone has any suggestions of books I may want to look at as potential “comp titles,” please add a comment on this page or send me an email at davidhunterbishop@gmail.com.

In the meantime, look for the next edition of “A Memoirist’s Journey” in your mailbox on May 15.

Take care, stay well, and travel well.

***

April 17, 2023/Issue # 1

“Memoir is like knocking yourself out with your own fist. – Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

Mary Karr: Queen of the Genre

Hello friends, and thank you for subscribing to my newsletter, A Memoirist’s Journey, in which I discuss the process of writing my memoir with you, the reader.

A quote from Mary Karr tops today’s AMJ newsletter. The poet and author of three memoirs, including the classic “Liars Club,” is an esteemed teacher of the genre and often called the “queen” of memoir.

Anyone writing or even thinking of writing their own memoir would do well to read her work and listen to her speak about memoirs. She’s feisty, irreverent, entertaining, and smart.

I’ve been devouring as much from Karr as I can lately as I’ve begun writing my memoir, and I’ve been impressed with how much she’s helped me.

Purchase her books wherever books are sold or just type “memoir” in search on YouTube to find several interviews. And get your hands on her books.

A masterpiece, Karr’s “The Art of the Memoir,” is where I started, and I recommend it. Now I’m well into “Liars Club” and having a great time with that.

That quote at the top of this page alone should tell you something about Karr. It’s pithy, and colorful and draws you into what follows, which is the aim of one of the key elements of memoir proposals: the synopsis or elevator pitch for your book.

The synopsis, or premise, focus sentence, or “elevator pitch,” whatever you choose to call it, will be crucial to your writing journey. It summarizes in a few words what your book is about. If done right, it keeps your focus on what is essential to your story throughout the writing process, helping to prevent you from straying too far off into areas of your life that are not important to the telling of your story. It becomes your beacon at night, keeping you on course to complete a compelling memoir.

My memoir is taking shape as an examination of grief that I’d accumulated in my life due to my close involvement in the deaths of my parents and brother, and my self-centered dependence on substance abuse at the expense of family relationships.

As I looked at my prospects for a meaningful life as a retiree in Hawaii, where I lived and worked for nearly 30 years, I started having other ideas about what to do with my suffering. I started fearing for the worst in my mental state if I stayed in the Aloha state.

I decided I’d be better off traveling the world for a while and perhaps gain a new perspective on my life, which I did.

Now I’ve whittled down my memoir’’s premise to 18 words:

A troubled journalist rejects retirement in Hawaii to wander the world in search of healing, redemption, and renewal.

That’s the essence of my story, the premise, just enough to pitch to someone in a short ride on an elevator.

Memoir author/instructor Brenda Smit-James challenges her students to reduce the pitch even further, to six words or less, so I took the challenge:

Reject retirement; travel for your life.

Yet, as memoir is not a chronological account of one’s life, I’ve been thinking of which event or scene in my life would be most appropriate as the opening of my story. Here’s one possibility, highlighting the utter pathos of a seemingly outrageous act:

“The day we decided to kill our mom was not my proudest moment. But it wasn’t the idea that was so bad. It was that we botched the job.”

Here’s another, longer option, for a different part of the story:

“Plump, ripe, dark-green avocados dropped from the trees in the rain forest to the delight of the two black labs who ate them like candy.

“I watched them through bay windows with a cigar-sized joint hanging from my lower lip, keeping time breathing to the beat of the rope I was jumping.

“Four skips of the rope to inhale, four more to exhale. An easy, rhythmic warm-up to my morning workouts with just the dogs and me at home.”

Either one needs explanation, of course, but that would be by design to draw you into the scene and the story.

Would an opener like either one of those two make you want to read further?

Drop me a comment at davidhunterbishop@gmail.com.

Meanwhile, other memoirists such as Louisa Deasey and Brenda Smit-James are online dispensing worthwhile advice about memoir writing, as well as many others. Still, I wanted to bring Karr to your attention as she is probably at the head of the class of contemporary memoir writers.

I especially enjoyed this interview, Point Loma Writers: Mary Carr on YouTube.

I hope you took something of value for yourself from this edition of A Memoirist’s Journey. The next twice-monthly edition will be sent to your mailbox on May 1, so don’t forget to look for that.

And don’t hesitate to send me your comments and questions at davidhunterbishop@gmail.com. I love hearing from you and will answer each one.

In the meantime, I’m dropping a few short stories on my travel blog, www.realontheroad.com, if you’d like to take a look.

Take care, stay well, and travel well.

***

The Archive of A Memoirist’s Journey

A Memoirist’s Journey

Livin’ On A Prayer

Coping With Solo Travel

Now, Your Turn To Cry!

The Problem With Race

What I’m Reading:

February 19, 2024 / Issue #22

Sing, Laugh, Dance, Cry

Woe To Those Needing Travel Health Insurance

A New Year, An Ongoing Journey

Memoir Book News

Travel With A Terminal Disease?

Why Do So Few Men Write Memoirs?

Don’t Forget to Tell Your Friends About AMJ

Another New Subscriber

“The Past Can Only Be Found In The Present”

Don’t Forget to Tell Your Friends About AMJ

Recommended Read: Vivian Gornick’s “The Situation and the Story“

My Eulogy For A Friend

Back Where The Journey Began

Can The Present Change the Past?

Memoir, Autobiography, Fractured Structure

How The AMJ Newsletter Began

Rolf Potts’ Travel Writing Workshop

Losing My Oldest and Best Friend

Advocating for Dignity in Death

Gloria Steinem: Memoir or Autobiography?

June 26, 2023/Issue #6

“When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say, because I travel. — Gloria Steinem

A Memoir ‘Takeaway’ Moment

A Newly Revised Hook With Takeaway

A Mixed Bag of Memoir

The Question of A Book Title

A Closer Look At Memoir Comps

Books About the Craft of Writing Memoir

Informational sources:

A Discussion of ‘Comp’ Titles

So, What’s The Theme of My Memoir?

Mary Karr: Queen of the Genre