My memoir is a story of communal living and personal
transformation. I joined the commune to live with my best friends, I was a
single mom and wanted help to raise my child, and I was very idealistic. We
took in the homeless and visited incarcerated adults and juveniles; we lived
all over the Southwest and Northwest and in Mexico, Spain and Israel. Over time
one person dominated the group with his interpretation of how we should live. The
break up was a bitter mix of betrayal and disappointment and grief, but my
journey continued to self-awareness, healing and empowerment.
After the group broke up, I dreamed of sorting, packing
and running away for years, and sometimes still do. This describes what it has
been like to write and edit my memoirs. For the ten years I lived in the
commune, I did almost no writing at all, held to a standard of perfection
impossible to achieve and a lack of privacy that prevented true
self-expression. When I returned to the states, one of the first things I did
was to enroll in a continuing ed writing class. Memories poured out of me onto
paper, insistent and unstoppable. I wanted to capture everything while it was
fresh in my mind. I made phone calls to friends to confirm details, I returned
to Mexico and re-visited places I lived, I wrote furiously every chance I could
but it still took me years to finish. In the meantime, I had to earn a living
and raise my kids. I found true love and lost both the lover and a son to suicide
and had to survive yet another painful turn on the wheel of life.
The memoir, started twenty-five years ago, grew into 650
pages. Five years ago I revised it down to 350 pages but it wasn’t until this
past year that I was able to work with an editor and revise it to a publishable
manuscript.
While writing down everything I could remember,
realizations about myself, the person I was at the time, startled me. In high
school, I was a rebel hippie; in love I was a free spirit; in heart and soul I
was a poet. In the group, under the “guidance” of our leader, I was scolded and
my personality flaws raked over the coals. At one point, I defiantly removed
myself and my children from the group; longing to belong brought us back. But as
I remembered the past, I saw how naïve and inexperienced I was, emotionally
high-strung and desperate for approval. In this mirror of myself as a
character, I was revealed in a not very flattering light: my introverted yet overly-dramatic
personality, my need for acknowledgement and acceptance, my awareness of how
attractive I was to the opposite sex, my opinionated ideas and resistance to
advice, overlaid with undiagnosed PDST from a previous trauma. These personality
traits made me seem out-of-touch, arrogant, vain, insecure, stand-offish, and “too
sweet, not enough salt” as I was chided. Seen from this angle, I could
understand how someone might be impatient with me and want to toughen me up. I
could understand someone wanting to mentor me so I could be of service to
others: to become strong, compassionate, visionary.
I also had to be vigilant
about blaming others or dramatizing the role of being the victim. In this way,
my skills with writing fiction were helpful. Through the lens of trying to
objectively describe interactions between myself and others, I didn’t pity the
person I had been. And from there, I couldn’t excuse the way I surrendered my
power to another. A lifetime of experiences would eventually teach me how to
survive loss and disillusionment and bereavement, how to connect with
understanding and openness, and how to be of service with deep empathy. But
these were not mine when I first joined the commune and I cringed to see my
faults laid bare under the scrutiny of my pen.
After I started the memoir, I shared the beginning
chapters with members of a women’s writing class. They were curious and encouraging
but when I started to publish poetry, my focus shifted. I might mention that I had
written a memoir but I only showed it to a couple of friends. Lately I feel an urgency
to get it out to the world. Perhaps it is because a dozen of the former commune
members have died and I am painfully aware that time is running out.
I pitched my memoir to a well-established agent at the 2014
writer’s conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He scanned a few pages and
said he was interested. He advised me to hire a professional editor to go
through it before submitting a proposal to him. Filled with new ideas from a
workshop on how to write a dynamic first page, I revised the beginning until I ended
up strangling myself. Even with the help of an editor, the agent rejected the proposal
I sent. When it came back, I realized that I had been trying to fit into someone
else’s notion of “a hook” instead of trusting my own voice. But I persisted in rewriting the introductory
pages over and over. And over.
One of the weaknesses of my memoir was that I was more
comfortable as a fiction writer. I wrote it like a novel, without reflection
from my present, wiser self giving insights on my past self, hoping the reader would connect to me
as a character and want to know what happened next. Now I can see that
reflecting deeply on the meaning of my experiences was so painful and fraught
with emotional landmines that I was unable to tackle it head-on. Writing about those
times when I was abused, not only by the leader of our group but others who were
still my friends, and those times when I allowed choices to be made for me and
my children that were unhealthy or dangerous, brought up unresolved anger and
guilt. How hard it was to write from the perspective of hard-earned wisdom and
even harder, to justify why I had stayed! I felt, for the first time, ashamed
of my endurance, my duplicity, my willingness to go along with the abuse. I
felt ashamed that I had been so stupid and naïve. My doubts began to crescendo
as my editor asked questions about things that seemed obvious to me. I grappled
with explaining the spiritual basis of our lifestyle, founded on interpreting
the New Testament literally. I didn’t want to explain every scriptural reference
because I thought it would bog down the story. It was a challenge to explain
that as remnants of the ’60s with Flower-Power attitudes about parenting and
property, we didn’t believe in nuclear families or owning possessions. For
example, my editor would always bring up my children: where were they, was I
worried about them? She would suggest that I add sentences such as, “As soon as
I came home, I went to check on my son,” but that sentiment was simply not true.
We raised our children kibbutz-style; I trusted others to take care of my boys
and even left them to go across state lines. We were living a new paradigm as
brothers and sisters in spirit, sharing everything in common and working for “God
not Mammon.” Why didn’t she get that? Her red marks all over the page made me feel
discouraged. I had to slow down and explain more than I wanted to explain. I
wanted to take the readers on a ride with me, an exhilarating roller coaster of
highs when we were doing God’s work and receiving what we needed and lows when
we were begging on the streets, highs when we got invited to the inner circle
and lows of being chastised, highs of feeding the hungry and lows of living
with sexual predators. I had to remember that she was reading as an outsider
and as a representative of my possible readership. There were moments when I
almost gave up, thinking I could never untangle the complicated mess enough to
keep a reader turning the pages. Revising was exhausting but I started to see
how the manuscript was taking shape. My story made more sense and had more
clarity.
My memoir is a multi-faceted, complicated story. If I
think about everyone on that journey with me, there are more than one hundred
points of view, not including some who left and never came back. Others had
similar but vastly different experiences, including my children. I wondered if
I should refer to some of these. As my editor pointed out, episodes piled up
one after the other and she thought the reader might get tired of waiting for
the other shoe to drop. The reader wanted the crescendo towards revelation and
group break up, followed by my awakening or rebirth, she advised me. But I felt
it was important to keep the integrity of the story as it unfolded, the reality
that I lived this lifestyle for ten years and that group-think, disempowerment
and blind obedience occurred gradually. It was later, after the editing process
was finished, that I was able to go back and cut out parts that felt
unnecessary or dragged the momentum. (I am glad that I have kept a hard copy of
the original manuscript for myself, though.)
Because the leader was alive until recently, I chose to
rename everyone, including myself. It wasn’t so much fear of lawsuits as fear of
being harassed by him. I imagined him showing up at a public reading or
contacting me through social media. Any possibility of attention from him made
me anxious. I knew I just couldn’t handle it; rage and resentment surfaced
during the writing and editing as well as a more compassionate understanding of
my own journey.
I knew that the people I was writing about would be
upset. I knew friends would be taken aback by some of my perceptions. I
deliberately left out the more scandalous sexual behavior because I didn’t want
that to be the flavor of the memoir or the reason people read it. At the same
time there is more about my relationship with the leader than people who know
me now might be aware of. I have to be willing to be vulnerable and take a risk
that they won’t judge me. I wanted to show how miracles were possible when we
lived by faith and served the outcasts and the disenfranchised of society, how
easy it was. But as I meditated carefully on the past, my perspective shifted.
Perhaps the hardest thing to do in revising my memoir was
to keep a consistency of vision and purpose. I wrote my story chronologically
as that is how the memories were stored but in revising, I also recognized that
my writing skills have improved since I started twenty-five years ago. I
originally wanted the story to be told in the innocent young woman’s voice,
then have that voice mature over time. My story is about giving up
self-volition and reclaiming self-empowerment, naiveté and sagacity, losing a
sense of individual identity and re-identifying myself, a transformative
healing story. But while trying to summarize it for a proposal, I realized that
what my story is really about was never
feeling that I was good enough and the ways in which that belief allowed me to
be victimized. This belief did not begin when I joined the group. My sense of
self-worth had already destabilized during encounters with others who disregarded
me or rejected me because I was different. This is something many of us deal
with in our contemporary culture, especially women and especially artists. Because
I believe in the power of story to teach and to reach out to others, it
overrides the fear that others who lived with me might feel discomfort at
reading my version of what they also lived through. I changed my name back to
my real name in order to connect it to my previous work but kept the pseudonyms
I gave everyone else. It provides some disguise for those who don’t want to be
associated with this story. I also have my son to consider: he doesn’t want the
story of his upbringing to be blatantly in the public eye if at all possible. In
my preface I apologized to all that I was limited to the events and experiences of my own
life told through the subjective lens of my own interpretation. I wrote that I regret that there isn’t a way to
archive our shared experiences.
Now that the manuscript is edited and revised, it is
possible to self-publish if I don’t find a home with a publisher, so I foresee
it being in print some day. I want the take-away to be the story of survival
and healing and being silenced no longer because, after all, that is the reason
I felt inspired to share it. I rescued my own voice, both in telling the story
and in living my life. I access my inner guidance daily. I claim my authentic
way of being in the world and I am still learning how to live up to the person
I want to become. I am powerful and I am still evolving.
I wrote the memoir to heal myself. Some of this healing
happened naturally as I wrote down my memories and continues as I share this story
through open mics or excerpts posted on my fb page. I revised it in order to
offer it as a healing story to others, to remind ourselves that we are all more
than enough.
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