Proto-Cyber-Courtship to Real-Life ‘Relationship’

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XIII

Two Beginnings, Two Endings, Tangential Characters, and Toying with the Timeline

At this point, you may be wondering, “How many dudes can this silly girl fall for before she gets it right?” Will I ever get it right? I get it wrong way less often than I used to, and I now have a better understanding about why I got it wrong so many times, in part because I wrote a whole book about it—kind of the point!

Take for instance the guy I met online long before dating apps became the norm. In my essay collection circa 2014 to 2017, a twenty-eight-page piece about this same-aged man starts at the beginning of our story, the night before my twenty-sixth birthday in 1999 when we were playing Hearts on Yahoo! with a couple other strangers. He sent me an email after the card game to wish me happy birthday. We then wrote long emails back and forth nearly every day for a couple months. He didn’t know what I looked like. I didn’t know what he looked like. If you remember life before social media, you understand.

I gave my online pen pal too much real estate in the essay collection. Also, it wasn’t prudent to start at the beginning. In the revised version, I begin our tale on a dirty shag carpet in the basement of his friend’s house in the mountains of Virginia on New Year’s Eve 2001 because it’s more interesting to watch him stroke my hair while I lie on the floor than read our instant messages about hockey the night we first chatted. In the memoir, I reduce our initial cyber-courtship to a brief mention, incorporating it into a scene in the mountain house in Virginia two years later. It speeds the story along and gets the reader to the “good stuff” more quickly—the necessary stuff to understand how this relationship played out.

I Should Have Saved Those Emails

That said, it may have been useful if I’d saved the digital correspondence from when we first “met.” It would no doubt be an enlightening glimpse into my twentysomething psyche and how I interacted with someone I considered a “friend” before we ever came face-to-face, something that happens regularly in our world now but was much more anomalous then. When I switched from Yahoo! to Gmail twenty years ago, I printed our email exchange and saved it in a file in my closet. One day—most likely during one of my many moves—I shredded it and put it in the recycle bin.

I do, however, still have the emails we swapped in Gmail in 2008, and I include relevant portions of them in the manuscript. They were crucial to writing a memoir, dredging up pain I didn’t want to relive but had to relive; a writer signs up to relive pain when she writes a memoir—it’s part of the deal.

Girl Meets Boy—Then Meets Him Again

Back in 1999, after we mailed photos to each other, I dragged my best friend to San Francisco to meet him in person when he was visiting friends. In the essay collection, a few paragraphs explain my crappy navigation skills—pre-GPS—and how my best friend and I pulled the cord on the bus several blocks too early. The reader takes the long trudge up a steep San Francisco hill with us in uncharacteristic heat. I yank the reader out of the story to explain our terrible public transportation skills: “The way we get blatantly ignored trying to hail a cab in New York City is YouTube-worthy.” The forward momentum of the story lags—at the same slow speed as our trek up the hill.

When we finally make it to our destination, my pen pal is standing in his friends’ living room holding a welcome gift: a new blue Washington Capitals cap. (I still have it.) On page four of the essay, the story moves at a more rapid clip. I blaze through the trip to San Francisco in one paragraph, adding, “I’d hastily put Archer into the ‘friend zone,’” a line that later inspired the current chapter title: “Out of the Friend Zone.” In the essay collection, I include two scenes about meeting him: the online meeting and the in-person one. It’s excessive.

Ditching Peripheral Characters

The next seven pages are devoted to New Year’s Eve 2000, an unflattering, extended incident in a La Jolla dance club, where free vodka cranberries and immaturity spurred careless behavior. I wore a shiny purple tank top I called my “lucky shirt,” and I danced and kissed Archer’s friend’s roommate. There’s dialogue, conflict, a clear setting, physical gestures, humor, and humiliation. It’s a fully fleshed-out scene, but in the end, my apology to Archer eight years later in his apartment is more important than detailing what happened with a fringe character I’d never talk to again.

Instead of this . . .

“. . . [the stranger] gave me a piggyback ride, my long black skirt stretched across his back. As I bounced on him, he hailed us a cab back to his house.

‘You don’t even know my name, do you?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I do. You’re the girl on my back!’”

. . . there’s this:

“‘I was such a jerk eight years ago that night I kissed your friend at the bar. I’m still sorry about that,’ I said.

‘You didn’t owe me anything.’

‘Yes, but that was still a really shitty thing to do. I wasn’t a very good friend.’

‘It’s okay. I haven’t lost any sleep over it lately.’”

I was able to condense the long New Year’s Eve segment into a couple sentences, referencing it in a more emotional, retrospective context the summer Archer and I finally dated eight years later. He and I are the stars of the story, not the acquaintance who never mattered to me.

Tinkering with the Timeline

The linear structure of the essay collection from 1999 to 2008 is fine, but it leaves too much room for the kitchen sink method: I include every detail about everything that happened between me and my long-distance pen pal without considering if each scene earns a rightful spot in the text. When I revised the material, the summer of 2008 became the anchor I kept returning to because that’s when most of our important interactions took place.

So, the current memoir structure is this: New Year’s Eve 2001 (I did something shameful. My pen pal took care of me!); summer 2008 (We dated!); 1999 and 2001 (We met online—a truncated version! Before I did something shameful on New Year’s Eve, we had a friendly week in DC!); summer 2008 (We continued to date but still used email as our primary mode of honest communication!); summer 2008 (Foreshadowing: I almost met another man at a wedding—a pivotal figure I would meet two years later!); summer 2008 (Everything falls apart with my pen-pal-turned-almost-boyfriend!).

In the latest version, while moving back and forth in time, I provide context about where we are and when we are, explicitly linking the nonlinear scenes together, so the reader (hopefully) doesn’t get lost.

I also provide deeper insight into my own character—something that was absent when I was too close to the material. Writing when the emotional experience was fresh—so as not to forget the details—was beneficial; editing from a temporal distance once I “saw” what the experience meant was key.

Writing Toward Self-Awareness

It took several years and several revisions to understand something fundamental—and really obvious—about myself: I pursued emotionally unavailable men because I, too, was emotionally unavailable. Toward the end of the essay collection, I discuss a story Archer wrote about a man who calls his best friend after a catastrophic one-car crash to tell him he’s in love with his wife. I write: “Even in fiction, the protagonist wanted what he couldn’t have. Maybe this was Archer’s modus operandi. I’ll never know.”

After our relationship comes to a halt, I avoid him at a hockey game—a bonus ending!

Here’s the current ending, sans hockey: “Even in fiction, the protagonist wanted what he couldn’t have. Maybe this was Archer’s standard operating procedure. Maybe it was mine too.” This sets up a four-year romantic tailspin—coming right up.