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It was 2010, and we had just moved into a new house. The kids were little, and the house was a mess: boxes everywhere, nothing in the right place. All day long, guys traipsed in and out, fixing things, installing other things. I sat on the floor in an empty room feeling useless, out of place in what was suddenly my house, a house that was bigger and more grown up than any house I’d ever lived in, any house I’d ever thought I’d live in. I was 37 years old.
I opened up one of boxes and discovered a collection of homemade books I had made in a graduate school workshop. I had, several years earlier, obtained a master’s degree in early childhood and elementary education and this was a workshop to demonstrate the sorts of projects you might make with children, a way to extend a writing assignment, for example. The books were beautiful, some simple (folded papers nestled together), some more complicated (painted cardboard covers, hand sewn bindings). I had completely forgotten about them—no, not forgotten: I barely remembered them at all.
The story I told about myself at the time was that I was a harried, disorganized mother, always running, always late, always forgetting something, but in a charming way. I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning or buy cat food. There was always a form I hadn’t signed, a birthday party I hadn’t RSVPd for. I felt inadequate, not up for the task. (What I didn’t understand was that the things that were valued in this new life were things I wasn’t good at, hadn’t been trained for and wasn’t interested in. But instead of seeing this as a problem with the system I was operating in, I had taken it to mean that there was something wrong with me.)
But opening that box and seeing the books I had made, the care I had taken with them, I suddenly remembered a different version of myself, the one before children, the one who got two master’s degrees at the same time, the one who had the time to spend an entire Saturday afternoon making homemade books she might use in a classroom one day. There was nothing wrong with her, and she was still me. I left the books on the floor, turned on my computer and started writing, a sort of letter to that girl, the girl I once was, the girl I’d forgotten about.
I mark that moment as the beginning of my writing journey, or at least one of them.
I’ve written about finding the books before—it was, in fact, the very first post on the blog I started that day—but only now do I see the connection between the specifics of what was in that box—books I had made—and what I am doing now: making books. It took a while (13 years) but the book that rose out of that box of homemade books is on its way to publication. I didn’t end up making books with children, I made one of my own. My Last Innocent Year will be out in four months. You can preorder it here.
Here’s a link to an early review of the book by Lucy Pearson at www.thelitedit.com, a gorgeous website devoted to books, travel and lifestyle.
Lucy also asked me to compile a list of books I’d take to a desert island; you can read that list here.
My Last Innocent Year is available for preorder.