Keepsakes and nostalgia

Sifting through the artifacts of our past

Some people have asked if it was hard for me to access memories from my college years when writing MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR because I graduated from college so long ago. It wasn’t that hard for me, in part because I had written about those years before in personal essays. One of the first pieces I ever published was an essay for my college alumni magazine about a college boyfriend who tried to teach me to drive a stick shift. (TL; DR: I never learned. We broke up.) Reading the essay now, I can see seeds of what would become the novel: the city girl transplanted, the things we do for love, the pain of being misunderstood and, perhaps most achingly, how we subsume parts of ourselves to fit in and what it costs us.

I also relied on keepsakes from those years—journals and letters and even some emails I printed out for some reason. Some are painful to look at, especially the journal I kept freshman fall which reveals how depressed and lonely I was, although I did my darnedest to stay positive. Sweet girl. I am perhaps the rare writer who does not keep a journal so the fact that I kept one at all during that time is testament to how lonely and estranged I was. Over the years, I have thrown out some of this memorabilia, mainly because I don’t want to revisit those feelings or experiences anymore but also because I don’t want my kids to find it after I die. I am not joking!

Here are some snippets, perhaps not the most interesting ones but ones I am comfortable sharing:

• a list of courses I considered taking freshman fall. Introduction to Archaeology? Economics 1? Computer Science 4? I was really all over the place. I did take Math 3, which was a mistake, and one of those Russian courses, which was not

• During my study abroad semester, I missed the driving-instructor-boyfriend so much I wrote out the lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s song “Blue” because of course. Also a snippet of Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al,” which I adapted a bit (“she’s a foreign woman”)

• And of course I kept the letter the driving-instructor-boyfriend sent me during that study abroad in which he broke up with me over twelve pages. This was the cautionary note he left on the outside of the envelope which, despite its clear imperative, did not prepare me at all

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I spoke to Victoria Wood over at The Reader’s Couch Podcast about grief and bad men and the writing process

I loved seeing MLIY on this roundup of novels about college that are not THE SECRET HISTORY. So many here I want to check out!

Over on Instagram, I recommended Claire Dederer’s LOVE AND TROUBLE (her new memoir MONSTERS: A FAN’S DILEMMA comes out next month) about the year she turned 44 and, to paraphrase, lost her mind. The opening chapter “You, Now” is so raw and bloody and real that when I first read it in 2017, the year *I* turned 44, I had to put it down. I finally finished it last week and can’t recommend it enough.

Looking at that first chapter now, I discover this part, strangely connected to what I wrote about here. I did not plan this.

• “As you sit there, you find that all of a sudden you can’t stop thinking about her, the girl you were. The thing is, you don’t really remember her that well, because you’ve spent so long trying to block her out. You suddenly want evidence of her existence. You go down to the basement, as one in a trance, and start rummaging through boxes. You kneel penitent-like on the cold cement floor, looking for her.”

• Here’s the rest of the page because it’s too good not to share:

• I mean, now you’re hooked so you might as well read the whole book. Let me know what you think, and also what keepsakes you’ve kept from your youth and if any are too painful—or maybe too cringeworthy—to revisit.