My Poetry Background Helped Save My Memoir—But Not Before It Nearly Did It In

By Ona Gritz

“Things take the time they take,” Mary Oliver says in a poem kindly titled, “Don’t Worry.” My memoir took ten years to complete. No one who knows my painful, complicated story is surprised by this. The book centers on my sister Angie who, twenty-five and pregnant, was brutally murdered with her husband and infant son.

As the youngest in an insular, secretive family, there was a lot I didn’t know about my beloved sister’s life. When I finally began to write about her thirty ...