Why Write a Book Such As My Eye Fell Into the Soup by Denis Ledoux
Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@kathypooler with Denis Ledoux/@DenisLedoux
“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD
“I regret to inform you that your pain is due to cancer,” said the doctor.
“Can there be an announcement more chilling than being told you have stage four intraductal breast cancer? Hard to imagine. ” (from Denis Ledoux’s Amazon page)
It is my pleasure to welcome Denis Ledoux back for this post on his latest book, My Eye Fell Into the Soup, a poignant and raw story of one couple’s journey through the wife’s breast cancer told through the wife’s journal entries and the author’s responses. My reviews can be found on Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThing and Riffle.
Memoir writers often feel a burden to share the stories of their hearts, the ones that provoke deep pain and sadness. Denis explains why he felt the need to share such a difficult story.
Welcome back, Denis!
Memoir Author Denis Ledoux
Why Write a Book Such as My Eye Fell Into the Soup?
My Eye Fell Into the Soup remains a problematic memoir.
Why write a book such as My Eye Fell Into the Soup which is a highly private account of one woman’s cancer journey and one man’s accompaniment of her?
Frankly, it is a sad book that was not easy to write and it has proven to be a sad book for advanced reviewers. Some reviewers have told me how difficult it was for them to read the story because they were so touched by its tragic side.
So…why write this book?
I wrote this book because I wanted to give witness to an experience that has proven to be one that too many people have lived and one also that many people could not articulate as well as I knew I could. I am a memoirist after all—a person who has written his own books and who has co-authored dozens for clients.
Like Anaïs Nin who wrote in her famous journals, “I needed to live but I also needed to record what I had lived,” I too felt that impulse to record my experience—to corroborate for myself that I had lived this difficult time and to witness for others who will experience a cancer journey. The years I wrote about were frankly searing, but I had the urge to bear witness to them—perhaps in ways that people who were in Nazi concentration camps needed to leave a testimony.
What I didn’t write about!
There were many details that were too private for me to include. In every couple, there are confidences shared in intimacy, and these have to remain between the people involved. While she has been gone many years now, I still feel we are in relationship and I am committed to respecting that relationship.
In every couple also, stresses and strains make their appearances on a regular basis. Whether there is cancer or not, the little devils come. While an easy case can be made for including these details as a real part of the experience, I felt divulging some of them would constitute an invasion of Martha’s privacy. I was unwilling to do so.
Many details were ultimately irrelevant
In this category of irrelevant details, I would highlight the financing of cancer care. The hours spent on the phone assuring that the proper procedures were in force and that we would not be met with surprises. Again, an easy case can be made for including these details as being clearly stressors in an already stressful time. But, there was so much else to include that these mundane details seemed to be space hogs. I was already into a 250-page book. How much longer did I want this book to be? How much longer would the reader tolerate?
I face writing the next book
The next book in the series is about Martha’s last year and eventual death. I both know that it will teach me a lot about her, us, me and it will be a difficult write.
I am not looking forward to the composition of this sequel—although I have about a quarter of it already written. Meanwhile…
I am launching My Eye Fell Into the Soup into the world.
A note about the unusual title
It is drawn from the title of an encaustic painting Martha executed from a dream. In the dream her eye fell into a cauldron of soup. She came to realize that the eye was her intuition that should have informed her about her cancer, but it had fallen into the soup cauldron of her life
Author Bio:
Denis Ledoux’s flagship book, Turning Memories Into Memoirs / A Handbook for Writing Lifestories [available both in e- and hard copy;], has been joined on Amazon by a number of other books. In the summer of 2017, he published the e- and the hard copy of My Eye Fell Into The Soup / A Journal Memoir of Living with Stage 4 Cancer. It is drawn both from his wife’s journals and his own. My Eye Fell Into The Soup is the third in a series of five memoirs focused on his wife. The first in the series, The Nice-Nice Club Holds Its Last Meeting, is available free on Amazon. The story of her youth is called A Sugary Frosting .
To access the most current catalog of his writing books, his memoirs, and other titles, visit his memoir network store. To read over 500 free articles on memoir writing, go to The Memoir Network Blog. Among them are Don’t Let Writer’s Block Stop You, Start Your Memoir Right and the free Memoir Writing 101.
Book Synopsis:
My Eye Fell Into The Soup, a poignant book about living with stage four intraductal breast cancer, offers a glimpse into a time when the disease began to loom larger every day. It was a time in a couple’s life that was difficult to live.
This memoir, via journal entries written as events unfolded, takes us through the process of coming to terms with the diagnosis and the struggle to survive and finally to adapt.
Especially poignant is its glimpse in the life of a happy couple, much in love after three decades, facing the end of their lives together. My Eye Fell Into The Soup, a phrase derived from a dream written in Martha Blowen’s journals, is a story of courage and of the deep plunge into the psyche when “real life” happens unexpectedly.
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Thank you, Denis, for sharing your difficult journey through Martha’s cancer and for shedding a light on how a cancer diagnosis impacts a couple. I admire your courage in getting your story out there through Martha’s journal entries and your responses so that others can be guided through the process and know they are not alone.
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How about you? How do you feel about sharing a painful journey?
We’d love to hear from you. Please join in the conversation below~
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Next Week:
Monday, 8/21/17:
“Interview with William Kenower,Part 1 : What is Fearless Writing?”
Thursday, 8/24/17:
“Interview with William Kenower, Part 2: Fearless Writing for Memoir Writers”
William (Bill) Kenower is the author of Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence. He is Editor-in-Chief at Author Magazine and interviews writers and authors on his online radio program, Author2Author.
