Everything Old is New

You tell your story with novel-like quality; what inspired you to share your story and tell it in this fashion?  I have, as near as possible, a photographic memory.  I remember not just incidents from the past but whole conversations and details of where and when.  I suppose it is a strange phenomenon for most people.  I draw upon it for my writing, whether non-fiction or fiction.  When I started writing Terror, it came back.  I heard Jimmy's and my voices.  I felt the fear.  Saw the beauty.  I had known great love during that time.  I wrote as if I were there once again.  I was in my mind and heart.

What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?  I started writing this book when I was a law major in college.  My father and I had many discussions about the illegal supper club and gambling casino that he and his business partner ran in our huge Victorian home when I was growing up.  Dad had become obsessed with how national and local politicians, and those with money and power, often decided the outcomes of our country's legal issues.  When the club operated, gambling casinos were illegal, and bars had to close at midnight.  The city had a vice department that raided places like ours, but if you ran a clean operation like my parents' and Jimmy's, you paid under-the-table money and graft, and you got a free pass.  Our parents were notified in advance of any raids.  They emptied most of the cash from the cash registers and stuffed it into the cushions of our rocking chairs.  Then came the fake raid.  It affected our lives immensely.  I wanted the injustice brought out in the book.  I knew what happened then so long ago was as relevant as what is happening today.  If not, more so.  Everything old is new.

How did you balance the need to be honest and authentic with the need to protect your privacy and that of others in your memoir?  I waited until our parents passed away, and all those of us left would not be hurt.  We knew.  We understood.  Years before, I had tried to make it into fiction by adding a phony character at the beginning and end.  My agent at Curtis Brown LTD, Clyde Taylor, loved it as the true story it was, without the made-up character.  Clyde was also my mentor, and he was working on marketing a novel I had written when he died unexpectedly.  At the time, I was getting very ill with a malady called Trigeminal neuralgia, and the devastating loss of Clyde's demise and my illness proved too much to start seeking a new agent.  I put away all my work but never stopped writing.

How has writing your memoir impacted or changed your life?  My writing brought to life my desire to give credence to the impact our early lives have on us.  I believed my experiences had elements that everyone faces, and I could help others.  Our feelings and emotions from those early experiences imprint on us images of all we experienced when we were small, as though we were little sponges.  It is said you can't go home again.  I say, you never leave.