Before the Book That Changed My Life, and After
In deep winter of 2020, when La Niña storms whipped wild across the Puget Sound and northerly winds harassed the high branches of the Douglas fir trees that lined my street, I was wrestling with a story that kept maneuvering out of my grasp. I’d try to write in one direction, and the story would jinx the other way and I’d lose the thread. It was awful.
I didn’t know then that some stories go their own way, whether you want them to or not. Your job as the writer is to keep going. But no one ever tells or teaches you how, especially when the story is surly and slips from your grip. And then, when you’re bruised by it, when you know you’re losing the battle to corral the beast onto the page, the easy thing—the sane thing—to do is to just tap out.
But by then, I was two years deep into the process, with a book deal and a deadline for my first memoir. It was a book I didn’t necessarily want to write, but the one I felt I had to write; one that would meet the moment as the US had entered a period of extreme political and social tumult, and attacks on people like me—Asian and gay—were increasing in scope and scale. I had an editor and advance money I’d already spent on a new Subaru Forester. My wife picked the color and trim. We paid in cash and drove home with the sunroof open and the radio cranked to the loudest level. Everything felt possible then.
That winter swung hard with hurt. There was Covid. There was the diagnosis, decline, and then death of my father-in-law. There was my own accelerated descent into a darkness so immaculate it rattled me as I sorted through that part of my story where I went to work as a journalist in a war zone because I was so ashamed of being gay.
All three combined gave me the sense that I was drowning. I wanted to quit. I worked out quick math to see how many months—or years—it would take to pay back my advance after killing the project.
The last time I felt like I was submerging beneath the weight of something that felt impossibly difficult to accomplish was when I was a kid, and I was literally drowning. In sixth grade, my classmates and I walked with our shoulder bags from our school across the parking lot to the Aquatic Center, where we changed into swimsuits and leapt, one by one, into the deep end. We were not so much taught as we were told to swim. I didn’t know how. I remember limited instruction on how to complete a breaststroke before the swim teacher lined us up into lanes and ordered us to do laps. I was lucky enough to get a spot near the edge, where I thought it would be easier to get help, and when I started in, I knew I wouldn’t make a single lap. Halfway down the lane, bobbing my way to nowhere, I started to flail, my head slipping under the surface and my arms and legs frantically scissoring to stay afloat. Each time I kicked myself up into open air, I caught a glimpse of the teacher casually walking over with a kickboard. She eventually reached me and leaned down and passed the board to me. I grabbed it and held on for dear life and kicked my way to the end.
That’s the feeling that came to me at once that winter of 2020 when I came across Natasha Trethewey’s memoir, Memorial Drive. First drowning, and then grabbing a kickboard.
I saw it at the main branch of the Seattle Public Library. When I snagged it off its display and took it to the top floor where the ceiling was all glass, scuffs of sunlight scattered into the room and pigeons canted across my view. By the time I stopped reading, nearly two-thirds of the way in, the sky was inky black, and I heard a librarian’s muffled voice announce over the intercom that the library was closing soon. Holding that book, and all the words I had just read, I felt something shift in my heart—a plate tectonic of emotions surging and colliding and remaking my inside structure. I was never the same again.
I finished the book on the bus and when I got home, I flipped back to the first page and began all over. What was it, then, that so transfixed me?
Up until I found Memorial Drive, I had read dozens of memoirs to learn about voice (James McBride’s The Color of Water), and structure (Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking) and vulnerability (Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries). Hisham Matar’s The Return taught me how to delicately thread a theme across a narrative arc that spans decades and separate continents.
I had plenty of takeaways from so many different memoirs. But none of these books taught me what I didn’t know I needed most: to keep going. And none of them gave me the key to do so: a specific framework for viewing, considering, and making meaning from events and experiences in our lives that make us who we are.
So many books came before Memorial Drive and so many have come after, but none slipped into the unguarded sliver of my heart the way Memorial Drive did. Which surprises me to this day. It seems implausible to find a point of connection between who I am and who the author of Memorial Drive is, though parts of her story mirror mine. Trethewey grew up as a straight, Black woman in the Deep South. I grew up a queer Cambodian refugee in rural Oregon. I didn’t expect to locate myself within the pages of her memoir, but that’s exactly, and thrillingly, what happened. And that’s what I kept wanting and trying to do with my own memoir, if not for constantly hitting mental snags along the writing path.
Memorial Drive is Trethewey’s account of her mother’s cold-blooded murder at the hands of her stepfather, and how Trethewey reckons with the guilt of not being able to save her mother. It has less to do with domestic violence than it does healing. The memoir tracks back to a time of innocence and unfiltered joy when a young Natasha grows up between her white father and her Black mother. But it’s the 1960s in the Jim Crow South, and Trethewey doesn’t explicitly say that her parents’ marriage ends within the strained context of time and place, but it’s hard to miss the clues. This paves the way for Trethewey’s mother to meet and eventually marry Big Joe, who emotionally terrorizes Natasha. She doesn’t tell her mom. And it’s that secret she keeps that scaffolds around an impossibly profound guilt when Big Joe later shoots and kills Trethewey’s mother in the family’s apartment. If only she had told how Big Joe scared her.
It’s gutting and harrowing, and I remember thinking, “But she kept going.” As in, she kept writing the book, and she kept living. When I watched a recorded interview with Trethewey later on, I was struck by her poise and clarity in why she wrote this particular story, and how this book was something she had to write, whether she wanted to or not. I had not stopped to consider the out-sized emotional cost of writing memoir until I finished reading Memorial Drive. I had not stopped to consider that the abyss I fell into when I started writing about my own discomfort over the fact of who I am was both inevitable and necessary, and that perhaps the point of writing memoir, at least partly, was itself a passage toward healing.
In an opening scene of the book, Trethewey has a dream in which her mother has a hole in her head, and her mother—at that point long ago deceased—tells her: “Do you know what it’s like to have a wound that never heals?” When I read that line, I gasped and quietly uttered, “Yes, yes, I do know.”
And suddenly, just like that, my own story—the one that kept getting away from me—was staring at me from the page. We all have an existential wound, the one that doesn’t heal. Trethewey’s was tied up in her mother’s horrible death. Mine was rooted in my beginnings. In a story about being saved by my mother when our family escaped the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge Communist regime in 1970s Cambodia. And how I had to untangle that origin story from the tightly woven threads that make up who I am in order to come out as gay. We can go on forever without ever getting close to those wounds, or we can move toward it, turn it over like an agate to view its multiple dimensions and try to make meaning from human complexity.
Memorial Drive as an allegory metabolized in me. I went back to my own book project and wrote with the kind of vigor I didn’t know I was capable of. I wrote the next day and the one after that. I don’t remember stopping until weeks later when I had a solid draft. Memorial Drive taught me how to write into the wound because the author did. If Trethewey could go on to tell a story so wholly devastating, I told myself I could, too.
Memorial Drive gave me more than merely gumption to go on. This book gave me the key that unlocked the problem I was having with my memoir when I felt like I was drowning. All great narratives have a defining principle—a way in which the narrator understands the world. The guiding principle in Memorial Drive is simple: In trauma, there is a before and an after. Once you cross the threshold, you become irreversibly changed.
It was uncanny how simple yet so remarkably transformative this notion was, to view one’s life as a series of befores and afters. To be handed a framework for how to situate my own story within the broader human experience felt like the greatest gift I could stumble into as a writer. I began to think of everything in my life in terms of befores and afters, and soon, patterns in the arc of my life emerged, things began to make sense. As in, before my family fled Cambodia and after. Before I came out as gay and after. Before I read Memorial Drive and after. I was one way, and then I became another. It’s as if our lives are constantly taking quarter turns—sometimes complete revolutions—as we rotate out of old ways of being and seeing and into new versions of ourselves. And this is the beauty and brutality of the human condition.
Spring came, and then summer, and I re-read and dog-eared my own copy of Memorial Drive six more times. Another set of seasons passed and my memoir, Ma and Me was finally published.
Memorial Drive was the kickboard that got me to the end. I held onto it tightly through the course of finishing my memoir as if my life depended on it, because, looking back, it did.