Ending a Memoir When the Story Isn’t Over

How I Wrote a Memoir: Part XVI

A Tale of Four Endings: Real Talk at the Birthday Party, Mourning My Unborn Children, Nocturnal Upstairs Neighbors, and 2-D Dating Profiles

I wrote several endings for my manuscript in a nine-year period, including an early one about a conversation I had at a backyard birthday party with a lovely woman who was happily married, her four-year-old daughter dancing in the living room to The Go-Go’s. I was envious of what I perceived she had. She said she never planned to marry, but here she was. I wanted to marry (again) and have a daughter like hers who danced to The Go-Go’s in the living room—the way I did in the eighties. I felt like a forty-year-old disappointment because I hadn’t checked all the boxes on an arbitrary timeline.