Count Down to Publication II

It's December 14th, the night before my birthday. I lie in bed, next to my eight-year-old daughter who is falling asleep after a long day of practicing her spelling, reading books and learning her times tables. Between is one of her teddy bears with a heart built inside. Jo has one hand on my arm and the other around her bear. She is tired tonight but not so tired to ask me questions about tomorrow. "What kind of cake do you want?" "What do you want for your birthday dinner?" "Are you excited to open presents?"

For most people, a birthday is fun and a time to celebrate. I am the first person to make a very big deal of birthdays—for other people. But when it comes to my own birthday, a storm of melancholy takes over and I just feel tired.

I used to tell myself that I felt so lost this time of year because my father, Bud Lauck, had a heart attack on December 4th, 1973 (eleven days before my birthday). In fact, I told myself this story for a long time, hoping I could just "snap" out of it but the sadness never went away.

It took years to realize my sadness comes from a much deeper place.

On my birthday, I lost the love of my birth mother and all connection to my ancestry. I was relinquished—against my mother's will—and forced against my own will to enter a new family that was wholly unfamiliar to me. The transition from the mother who carried me to the mother who would adopt me took several horrible days. I lay in a plastic bassinette, crying non-stop. A bastard. Unwanted. Unnamed.

That's a pretty bad birthday, if you ask me.

Found, my fourth memoir, details the depths of how it felt to live apart from my original family—depths that were largely unknown even to me until I was forty years old. In due time, I learned the truth though and of course, went out and found that mother who had given me my life.

We are now at the point in the process of bringing the book to press where we have gone through all the edits. There have been first pass pages, second pass and even third. At the third pass, there is little more that can be done to the book. The pages have been designed and type set. Only the smallest changes are allowed.

I decide it is important to let one of the people, featured in my book, take a look. It's a last minute decision and a complicated one because this person isn't pivotal to the story but I just get a feeling that I must let the person take a look. Just in case. It's a gut sense, I suppose. Within a few days, my intuition is rewarded. The person I have written about, as truthfully as I know how, is furious. Changes are demanded. This person is sure I don't have my own story right and goes ahead to make pages worth of edits including dialogue. My story is now the property of another person's agenda. They feel they have the right, no the duty, to tell my story. For the good of all involved, this person explains.
At the final hour of possible change, a scramble takes place. My agent, my editor and I try to figure out what to do and how to do it. Decisions are made, I arrange childcare and set myself down for hours and hours of precision editing.

Do I incorporate the changes this person demands?

Of course not.

Rather, I remove this person, in total, from the pages of my book.

This is one of the hardest (and most interesting) aspects of writing memoir. The people in our lives, who are inevitably going to end up in the lines, will a different view of the experiences we write about. Depending how evolved people are, they will react strongly or not at all. Some will care. Other's will not. Most often, if a person is positively portrayed in a book, they are delighted. If they are complex on the page, the reaction is usually very strong and quite negative.

Still, no one has the right to rewrite a memoirist's book. Memoir is about the writers experience and her point of view. Her truth is her truth. To allow others to alter your truth for the sake of their continued friendship or even love is no friendship and no love. That is not relationship. That is occupation.

Having been an adopted child, required to adapt to circumstances out of my control since the day I was born, I have no interest in compromises of the soul. To bend my truth to fit the view of another is a compromise of the Self and thus the soul. I won't have it.

Thankfully, Seal Press was in agreement and the changes were made in time.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I read the revised pages and found no evidence of this person in my manuscript. Not one.

Will the story suffer? No. Not at all.

This is the process of writing memoir. Rewriting never seems to end.

Jo is asleep, finally. She has rolled to her side, leaving me the bear with the heart on the inside. I kiss against her cheek and press the bear close to her side--just in case she needs some comfort in the night.

I make my way to my own bed, done with another day. Tomorrow I will wake up to be 47-years-old and one day closer to the publication of this book.