Choosing Chapter One
How I Wrote a Memoir: Part V
What Does a Writer Do When Two Talented Authors Provide Contrasting Feedback?
In spring 2008, I ended an engagement a month before my second wedding and flew home to California from Georgia with the tags still on my bridal dress. I was single, despondent, relieved, and ready to write again. At thirty-five, I was about to make a slew of dubious decisions that would become material for my future memoir manuscript, but I had plenty to write about already when I signed up for a Gotham Writers Workshop Memoir I class.
During the second week of that online workshop, I wrote a one-and-a-half-page single-spaced draft of a somewhat sketchy incident that occurred on New Year’s Eve when I was eleven when three boys talked me into playing what they coined Strip Trivial Pursuit. I would again write this same story as a seven-and-a-half-page double-spaced first chapter for my memoir in 2021. I rewrote it after receiving feedback from an author who is recognized as an expert on traditional publishing. At the beginning of 2021, I quit querying agents after ninety-six of them either passed or didn’t respond. (One said “maybe” until her father died.) I hired the author to read my first chapter and query letter to provide feedback about why I wasn’t gaining traction. The first chapter she read was about a much sketchier night in 2000 when I crashed a wedding and didn’t return home until 11:00 a.m. the next day. In 2017, a different well-respected, oft-published author suggested that chapter should go first.
Author Two’s Reaction
In 2021, I made the wedding crasher story chapter two because Author Two felt “adrift” after reading it.
“As a reader, we feel we are being told a funny but kind of disturbing story, but we don’t understand why,” she wrote. “Your memoir needs to be framed in some way, and in that framing, the reader understands how they are supposed to hear your story.
“If your memoir is framed as a single-girl survival story, then we understand we are witnessing someone who has not yet established boundaries around and for her sexuality. She’s still exploring it, but we know—because the back of the book (or query letter) tells us so—she [will] reach a point where she changes her behavior and starts living her life for herself first.”
I wrote in the margin, “Yes! This!” because that’s what my memoir tries to do.
She felt “uncomfortable while reading the material.” She wondered, “I’m not sure what to do with the information I’m being given—SOS!” She said “gatekeepers (editors and agents)” may have the same reaction.
She provided two examples that worked well, one a memoir and one a novel: “Both of these books introduce us to female narrators who are a hot, hot mess, but we are meeting them on the page because the back of the book has promised they are going to get out of the hot mess by doing X for Y.”
But What If Making the Reader Uncomfortable Is the Point?
In 2017, after reading the essay collection I would soon convert into a memoir under his guidance, Author One said this about the main character from the night I crashed that wedding—who, at the time, appeared on page seventy-six: “All right, Motherfucker. You’re going to start my book.
“Make readers curious about the next chapter. It should be fucking serrated,” he said.
In contrast to what Author Two would later say, Author One advised, “Play up moral ambiguity. Use the reader’s curiosity against her. Don’t offer easy answers. Push up the juicy morsel to the front without context. Why is Chelsey putting herself in this situation?”
The astute reader should trust the author will explain everything in due time.
“At weddings, everyone is happy,” he said. “Yet, I have never been to a wedding where someone doesn’t do something shameful. Make readers curious about chapter two.”
Tearing apart chronological, standalone pieces, reorganizing them, ditching some, cutting others, adding new material, and sewing everything back together in nonchronological order was exhilarating. An avid reader of his books, I trusted his advice and did the best I could to adhere to it. If he thought the night I crashed a wedding should go first, it should go first.
And yet . . .
The Old Version of a New Chapter
In 2008, I got right to the point in the first sentence of the New Year’s Eve story: “My lifelong trouble with boys started when I reluctantly agreed to play Strip Trivial Pursuit with three of them when I was eleven . . .”
On December 31, 1984, our parents left us alone while they went to a party down the street with my infant sister because they trusted us. I knew two of the three boys well—and still do; the older one was thirteen. We had never given them any reason to believe we’d get in trouble while they were gone. The boys were resolved to change that.
In the early version, much like with the drive-through debacle, I provide descriptive details and show what happened, but I do not offer insight about what this all means from the vantage point of a mature adult who feels protective of her younger self. I do, however, notice my voice taking shape, as the embarrassing similes and clunky adjectives of the prior pieces recede—sometimes.
That night, the younger brother—my same age—thought it was a swell plan to unscrew Christmas lights from their neighbors’ homes. In the 2008 version, I participate: “He amassed them, and we slung them into the street, enjoying the crisp popping sound as they hit the pavement. The quiet suburban road was swiftly blanketed in crunchy holiday glass . . .”
In the 2021 version, I am an innocent, dismayed bystander: “I watched from a vigilant distance as he littered red and green glass across the asphalt, gleeful over the satisfying sonic pop when the bulbs hit the ground.”
Did I participate, or did I watch? I no longer remember which version is correct, which makes me wonder how much of my memoir is flawed.
We do the best we can with what our brains tell us is the truth.
Next, the three boys and I traipsed through a rushing creek bed to a different neighborhood with armloads of toilet paper to decorate cars. I briefly mention the new black leather flats I ruined walking through dirty water, exaggerating about my how “my mother would kill me” for wrecking my pristine shoes.
Back at the boys’ house, they busted out the Trivial Pursuit board game and announced each time a player missed a question, an item of clothing would come off. I was a skinny child who hadn’t hit puberty yet, wearing only jeans, underwear, and a flimsy blouse. I remember saying, “I’m eleven! Why would you want to see me naked anyway?” They pressured me into playing because I was the only girl in the room and kindly grabbed one of their parent’s windbreakers from the closet, which I threw on and zipped up. I tried to think of ways to get out of playing because I had zero plans to take off my clothes. When I didn’t know the answer to the first trivia question, I unzipped the jacket, and halfway down it got stuck. I had my out. Once the youngest boy was running around the house in his underwear, the game ended.
That’s when they started drinking. “Wanna do shots?” one of them asked.
I politely declined and “planted myself in the corner of the pillow-top couch and turned on MTV. I stayed put until my parents returned after midnight . . .
“It made me nervous” to watch the boys get intoxicated. “I was homesick and sleepy. When the boys beat pots and pans to ring in 1985, I was silent, a meek child not ready for the mysterious world of grownup parties.”
In the early version, that’s where the story ends.
A Revision Thirteen Years Later
On the advice of Author Two, I wrote two new paragraphs to start my manuscript to provide the framework for how the reader should approach my memoir:
“When I was a child, I not only envisioned being a doting mom and wife in a similar enviable family to the one I grew up in; I expected it to drop out of the clouds and smack me in the face—in the right order, at the right time, in the right place . . .” I describe myself as a “compliant, rule-following child” who “worried [herself] sick over grades . . .” I write, “I never wanted to disappoint anyone then, much like I never wanted to inconvenience men in the future,” and “I was a fierce people pleaser,” but I also had firmer limits as a child than as a young adult, which is why I held my ground when I felt uneasy on New Year’s Eve.
The stakes ratchet up in one paragraph from early in the evening playing Crossbows and Catapults on the tile in the entryway of the house, to stealing Christmas lights, to toilet-papering cars and ruining my shoes in the murky creek bed. I attach significance to the dirty, wet shoes in the next paragraph to provide context:
“I feared my parents’ frustration, despite how few times they’d ever been angry with me . . .” These shoes were one of my first pairs of “adult” shoes. I recall the “fluorescent pink ‘clown shoes’” kids at school made fun of, adding, “My giant feet didn’t match the rest of my stick figure body. . .”
When the boys set up the Trivial Pursuit game on the kitchen table, my writing slows down, and I expand on the original:
“I was more annoyed than angry in a situation that could have been very scary under different circumstances with less cool people.” As the zipper got stuck on the fabric, “. . . I envisioned my parents cutting me out of the jacket when they returned after midnight and taking money out of my allowance to pay for a replacement. I was flooded with relief while trying to extract myself from the garment . . . I would now live in this magical, protective windbreaker safe from the whims of wild boys forever . . .”
When the boys climb the cabinets in the kitchen to pull alcohol out of the cupboards, I retreat to the couch to make “myself so small and quiet as to almost be invisible—something I’d do as a theoretical gesture over and over again in the coming decades, so as not to make waves and take up space with my overwhelming, intense emotions.”
I explain my parents will return to scoop me safely into the car and take me home to our sanctuary, the house “we’d lived in since 1978, the same house I’m sitting in now writing this in 2021.”
I spend more than a page using a repetitive tactic to provide morsels of what’s to come in the rest of the memoir: “Don’t tell that eleven-year-old girl . . .” all the traumatizing experiences she will live through. “Don’t tell her love isn’t always enough. Don’t tell her . . .” this. “Don’t tell her . . .” that. Instead, “Tell her . . .” this. “Tell her . . .” that. I give advice to my younger self I wish I’d known before making so many mistakes. That eleven-year-old girl was in some ways stronger than the thirtysomething woman I would become. I had an easier time saying “no” then than I did between eighteen and forty.
While this section is perceptive, I give too much away too soon—something Author One would have advised against, which jives with the comments of an independent publisher in a September 2022 rejection email.
So, Which Author Was Right?
They both were. Every reader brings unique experiences, tastes, and preferences to a book. That’s why not everyone is a writer’s ideal reader, and once a book is in the world, the reader is as much a part of the meaning of the text as the author.
How did I decide which chapter should go first?
The Tiebreaker
The project director for a coveted independent press recently sent me a personalized rejection when the judge for their nonfiction book contest didn’t choose my manuscript. I was elated. Personalized feedback in a rejection? From the publisher himself? That never happens!
Here’s an excerpt of what he said:
“Your writing is wonderful here. It's fun, shocking, the life is interesting, the development strong. Our concern was the opening, which failed to grab the reader. It was too verbose, and it wasn't a good example of what is, in the rest of the book, swift and clean narration. Bring that same technique that's in the rest of the book up front and strong.”
He liked my manuscript—all except for the New Year’s Eve chapter, written as an afterthought based on Author Two’s fresh take.
So, I cut it. The tale of an eleven-year-old girl who worms her way out of drinking and shedding her clothes landed in the “reject” folder on my hard drive, and the twenty-seven-year-old woman who crashed a wedding and instigated scandalous behavior at an afterparty returned to its rightful place as the first chapter, as Author One suggested.
The reader will receive the answers she craves, but not all at once from the outset.