Stories I can't stop thinking about
June 10, 2021
Who are you when you do not belong to any country?
Just finished reading "Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen" by Jose Antonio Vargas. Startling, informative, compelling memoir about a 12-year-old boy from Philippines who finds out at 16 that he is illegal. Two mistakes by his grandfather, who came over legally, condemned him to live in a Legal No-Man's Land. I was struck by his emotional journey and tenacity to build an useful life as a reporter and immigration advocate -- despite the fact that he is too old for DACA eligibility, came too late for amnesty, and cannot apply for for citizenship under any current laws in our broken immigration system.
From a writer's perspective, I ended up reading this book twice because the story was so beautifully told from a psychological and emotional viewpoint. The betrayals, the kindness of Americans who mentored and helped him, and those who dismissed his history as being "the wrong kind of immigrant" really made me think about the difference between the myths we tell ourselves of being a nation of immigrants, and the ever-shifting history of America's favored treatment of some groups of immigrants while denying the humanity of the less favored.
The story also unfolds like a thriller. There is so much the author didn't know at the time he came here by himself. He was young. He didn't speak English. He didn't really know his grandparents. Step by step, he takes us along with him on his own journey of thinking he is an "American" to realizing that he was brought in a tangle of lies. Each new revelation takes us further inside the tangled web of trying to figure out how to become a legitimate citizen, while
Writers Who inspire Me
Every morning as soon as you wake and each night before you go to sleep, say to yourself, simply and clearly,
"I am a writer. "
It doesn't matter if you believe it. Just plant that seed."
-- Natalie Goldberg
Wild Mind
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"At the bottom of all memoir writing is the question, Who Am I? "
-- Sue Monk Kidd
The Secret Life of Bees
(from an interview in
Why We Write About Ourselves)
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Researching the Story
Researching the Story
June 10, 2021
For me, research is one part treasure hunt, one part intuition, and one part history pageant.
In researching my husband Jim DeFelice's recent book, Every Man a Hero, a memoir about a World War II medic, I was amazed again at how much more there is to learn about a period that I have researched for nearly two decades.
My husband has written several WWII military histories, the first autobiography of Five Star General Omar Bradley, and half a dozen young adult biographies of WWII era figures.
This was the first time I researched the history and training of military medical personnel. What fascinated me was the amazing medical breakthroughs and technology that happened between the two World Wars, and the psychiatric knowledge that was gleaned from studying World War I veterans who suffered many diseases -- namely tuberculosis -- as well as those who suffered from what was known then as "shell-shock" -- more commonly known today as PTSD. Between the wars, the partnership between the government and private medical companies and schools brought about immense breakthroughs that led to many more Allied troops surviving the battlefield than before.
The forerunners of X-ray machines allowed more rigorous scanning to weed out infected recruits and cure them before they could infect their fellow troops.
Advances in creating plasma, rather than having to rely on storing donated blood, allowed medics to do field surgery much closer to the battlefield.
And psychiatrists studying the effects of men who had survived horrific bombings and mass killings on the battlefield led to new understandings about the value of returning lightly wounded to their same unit of soldiers, where they had already formed bonds of friendship and support -- rather than ship them into units, as they did in WWI, where they knew no one.
The book is remarkable for Ray Lambert's story alone -- he and his brother, both medics in every European invasion from Tunis, to Sicily, to the Normandy Beaches of D-Day.
But for me, it will be the book that introduced me to the amazing medical advances that allowed so many of the Greatest Generation to survive and make it home to their families.
Stories I can't stop thinking about
I was lucky enough to take a writer's workshop with Alice Hoffman at the Rutgers University summer writing conference a few years ago.
I've loved her books for many years, starting with Seventh Heaven -- set in Levittown, Long Island, where I attended elementary school -- through Practical Magic, and Turtle Moon. She's a strong storyteller, and her books immerse you in other worlds.
But the book that really knocked me out was The Marriage of Opposites. It's about the mother of French impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. Or should I say, the book is in two parts. The first is the mother's tale -- a headstrong Rachel, daughter of a Jewish family, growing up wild on the idyllic island of St. Thomas in early 1800. Hoffman conjures up the colors and tropical vibe of the island, suffusing the natural beauty with symbolism and art. The language is gorgeous, and the storytelling is intimate and alluring, pulling you into the lives of the islanders, from the bottom of the social heap to the top.
The second part of the book is from the viewpoint of the young artist Camille, who gets to live out his mother's dream of living in Paris.
Hoffman said that when she first started writing books, she would paint her studio a new color, and fill it with pictures and items that would help her connect to each new book's setting and tone. Perhaps that's why I always feel immersed in her books, carried along by the vibrant threads of her stories about how people yearn for love and adventure, and find them, strangely enough, in very ordinary ways.
Writers That inspire Me
"After a while, the characters I’m writing begin to feel real to me. That’s when I know I’m heading in the right direction."
-- Alice Hoffman, author of 30 novels including "Practical Magic" and "Marriage of Opposites."
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"If you don't know your history -- then history itself is news."
-- Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns.
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Researching the Story
Researching the Story
For me, research is one part treasure hunt, one part intuition, and one part history pageant.
As a reporter, as a historic researcher for the military history books that my husband writes, and as a writer of fiction, I know the power of good research.
But reading how former New York Times reporter Isabel Wilkerson had conducted interviews with more than 1,200 people, I was at first in disbelief. She worked on the book for eight years. When I read the book, I was in awe.
Not only was her Pulitzer Prize winning book about the long migration chain of American Blacks fleeing from the repressive Jim Crow South of first half of the 20th century one of the most compelling history books I have read. It was an example of masterful storytelling by virtue of its deeply researched detail.
But unlike some history books, it wasn't ponderous, or hard to follow. That's because Wilkerson focused on three distinct individuals, each of whom represented the three major strands of migration that Black Americans had followed (from Florida to New York, from the deep South to Chicago, and from Texas to California).
Wilkerson spent a long time with each of the three main people, putting them in a sense under a microscope, going back for interviews over and over during the eight year period of research and writing. She dived deep into their backgrounds, the fearful events that forced them to leave, the people who helped and hindered them, and their philosophy of what got them through, and what were the personal costs.
Wilkerson also opens a wider lens, using all of her interviews with others who made similar journeys, or those who stayed behind, to paint a fuller picture of the forces of history that played out across America as Black Southerners looked to the North for freedom, yet didn't always find what they were looking for.