What happens to those stories we just move on from because no one around us can truly understand them? That was the question I kept asking myself as I tore through Mimi Nichter’s Hostage: A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience.

In September 1970, Mimi Nichter was headed for New York and her senior year of college after a summer in Israel when her flight was hijacked. Landing in a remote stretch of the Jordanian desert, TWA Flight 741’s passengers abruptly became hostages. In Hostage (Potomac Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press), Nichter walks us through the long days when she did not know if she’d ever return home. And while Hostage is a dramatic story about the extraordinary experience of being a political hostage, it is also a quiet look at how those memories we’ve cordoned off sometimes return later to ask us to make sense of them.

Below Mimi talks about the experience of writing this riveting memoir. Lots of fantastic advice and inspiration here particularly for those trying to write memoir after writing as an academic or journalist or anyone hoping to write a story from decades past.

BTW, copies of Hostage have just started to ship. I highly recommend you get a copy right away, and then you start it when you can stay up late as it’s a very hard book to put down.

Theo Nestor: What was the biggest challenge in writing Hostage and how did you overcome it?

Mimi Nichter:  One of the biggest challenges I faced was in dredging up buried memories. My memoir is largely based on events that occurred over fifty years ago, so to write the book I needed to remember details! For most of my life, I rarely talked about my hostage experience except to my closest friends. Even then, I would recount a shortened version, merely sharing that when I was twenty years old, I was on a hijacked plane and held hostage. I left out the scary parts and how close I’d come to death. When I did mention it, I got a headache and felt drained and saddened for days. Not telling the story seemed safer. Even in therapy, I never mentioned it. So, when I began to write the memoir, I literally had to pry open this box of memories that I had locked away inside long ago. It was frightening to revisit and have to relive each of the days I was held. I cried a lot as I remembered—a Kleenex was always in hand. 

I overcame the challenge of facing buried memories through my writing. As the story emerged as words on the page, my fear of telling the story diminished. Day by day, little by little, word by word, I moved forward, unpacking the frightening story. I could feel that I was moving forward, letting go of the painful memories by finally giving voice to them. 

Theo Nestor: What was something that surprised or delighted you in the process of writing Hostage? 

Mimi Nichter: I was surprised by how much I needed to learn about craft to write this memoir. As an academic, I knew how to write about my own research—I had written four books and over seventy-five journal articles. But those all drew on other people’s experiences, not my own. As I began to write the memoir, I had the knowledge of how to write a book, but not how to write from my own voice with feeling. Fellow writers and writing teachers who read my early drafts said the memoir seemed a bit clinical—I was telling the facts and needed to go deeper. But how to do that??  Through writing, I began to process the experience and access my feelings. It took a long time. Through multiple layers of revision and the many workshops I attended, I learned how to go deeper. 

Another big surprise was how changing the tense of my book from past to present tense—after it was all written—placed the reader into the hostage experience with me. It provided an immediacy that the past tense did not.

Finally, I’ve been delighted by the generosity of fellow writers as we all struggle, stumble, and hold each other up in the sometimes perilous journey of writing memoir. 

Theo Nestor: What advice would you give to writers working on a memoir with the hope of publishing?

Mimi Nichter: When I was writing my book, I was driven to get it done, find an agent, and have it published. Looking back, I realize that if you try to bring your book into the world too early, you probably won’t have much success. I didn’t. My advice is don’t be in a rush to finish. Try to savor each stage—the remembering, the writing, the endless revisions, the challenges of how to stitch it together into a cohesive narrative. The process takes time. Let it marinate. Believe in your ability to finish and see the project to the end. Keep going! We need to hear your story!

Theo Nestor: Where can readers connect with you online?

Mimi Nichter: You can find me at:

 https//www.miminichter.com

Facebook: https://facebook.com/mimi.nichter

Instagram: @miminichter

Mimi Nichter is an award-winning cultural and medical anthropologist, public speaker, and a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Arizona. She is the author/coauthor of four anthropology-related books focused on key cultural issues in the U.S. including body image and dieting, smoking and drinking, and social media use. Her forthcoming book, Hostage: A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience, was a finalist for the 2026 Literary Award in Non-Fiction at the Tucson Festival of Books. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek and HuffPost Personal.

Remember during the pandemic when–after scrolling madly for hours through Zillow or Tinder or both—you’d jump on Instagram only to be slapped with a Shakespeare-wrote-King-Lear-during-plague meme? Well, some writers really were coming into their own during the pandemic, and one of them was Ren Cedar Fuller whose just-published essay collection, Bigger, won the 2024 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize. And for good reason; with crystal clear prose, the essays in Bigger explore relationships and modern life with an expansive and compassionate perspective often absent from contemporary discourse. Ren is here today with us to talk about her process in writing this beautifully realized new collection.

Theo Nestor: Welcome, Ren! Happy Pub Day! Tell readers a little bit about Bigger.

        Ren Cedar Fuller: Bigger: Essays explores how loving people who are different from us can expand our world. I write about growing up with a father who was neurodivergent and a mother who was an immigrant. I write about my child coming out as transgender when they were in middle school and how our community responded. I write about having a hidden disability—my eyes do not make tears—and how that affects my emotions. And I write about watching my mother’s Alzheimer’s seem to carry her back to her childhood in Ecuador.

        Theo Nestor: What was the biggest challenge in writing these essays and forming this collection, and how did you overcome it?

          Ren Cedar Fuller: Each essay started with a memory: the strange rules my father had for my sisters and me; or how, when Indigo came out as trans to my husband Jason and me, it felt like a golden afternoon. With each essay, I drafted and workshopped through many revisions and felt frustrated because the story wasn’t becoming what it was supposed to be. 

Each essay in Bigger has a different structure, but I didn’t plan it that way. And I didn’t start with structure. I had to know the story first. I experimented with multiple narrative or lyric structures for each essay, with complete rewrites, and finally a structure would click, and it felt like the story couldn’t possibly have any other form. 

           The biggest challenge in forming the collection was that most of my essays have lengthy, time-jumping chronologies and I had no clear way to order the collection. (I ended up trying to put the essays I thought were strongest first and last, and hiding the ones I thought were weaker in the middle.) My editor at Autumn House, Hattie Fletcher, helped me revise the order to create narrative flow to make the collection approach a memoir-in-essays.

       Theo Nestor:What was something that surprised or delighted you in the process of writing these essays? 

         Ren Cedar Fuller: When I wrote my first essay, I thought, that’s it. That’s all I can do. And then I had an idea for another essay, and when that one grew into itself, I had another idea. It’s lovely to know I’ll never run out of ideas, that I’ll be in my nineties, typing at my laptop, and telling Jason, “Just a minute,” when he says dinner is ready.

Theo Nestor: What advice would you give to those working on an essay collection with the hope of publishing?

 Ren Cedar Fuller:  Look for the big question or theme that runs through your essays. In the first class I took with you, Theo, a student suggested we explore the same big question over and over with our writing. When I’d written a handful of essays, I read them to see if I have an overarching theme, and I do. I write about how people are different; different is hard; and different is good. (This is also something I talk about as a parent educator, so I suppose it’s the theme of my life.)

Submit some of your essays to literary journals. Many publishers use journal publication as a screening tool: Do others in the literary community recognize the value of your work? 

Write more essays than will fit in your collection, then curate them based on theme, variety, and how they play with each other. I made a spreadsheet and listed questions, plot, characters, main scenes, favorite lines, etc. for each essay. It helped me see what was missing.

Don’t listen to the naysayers who say no one publishes essay collections by debut authors. That might be true for commercial publishers, but many university and small independent presses value discovering new writers. Research their reputations, then look for open submission periods and writing contests that don’t require you to have an agent.

Most importantly, write the book you believe in!

Theo Nestor: Where can readers connect with you online?

 Ren Cedar Fuller: You can follow me on Instagram @ren.cedar.fuller and read more about my writing journey on my website: www.RenCedarFuller.com.

Ren Cedar Fuller’s debut book Bigger: Essays won the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize and was a finalist for the Iron Horse Prize and the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Program. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus, New England Review, North American Review, and Under the Sun, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. Ren is a parent facilitator at TransFamilies, an online hub for families with gender diverse children. After teaching public school, she founded a nonprofit preschool, where she continues teaching parent education. Ren lives in Seattle and loves to kayak slowly on the Salish Sea.

Theo Nestor: Welcome, Shigeko! Please tell readers a bit about your memoir, The Pond Beyond the Forest.

Theo Nestor: What was the biggest challenge in writing these essays and forming this collection and how did you overcome it?

Shigeko Ito: I faced several challenges, and it’s hard to single out just one as the biggest. The entire process spanned nearly a decade, and sustaining my motivation was often a real struggle. I also wrestled with defining the central theme and identifying the structure that best suited my story. Gaining clarity on the structure was a huge relief, though articulating the theme took much longer.

I’ve always been more of a pantser than a plotter. Early on, while taking your Yearlong Memoir Manuscript class at Hugo House, you encouraged us students to create an outline, but I couldn’t because my process was largely exploratory, organic, and sometimes chaotic. In hindsight, an outline might have helped me finish more quickly, but working without one gave me the time and freedom to continue honing my craft through classes, retreats, and residency programs. Similarly, not having a hard deadline was both a blessing and a risk—it allowed me to mature as a writer and as a person at my own pace, but it also carried the very real danger of never actually finishing.

What carried me through was trusting the process and holding fast to the belief that I had an important message to share. That sense of calling, combined with persistence and perseverance, ultimately brought the project to the finish line. I see this work as my legacy project with a long tail, as well as a launch pad I can leverage to raise awareness about the lasting and often overlooked effects of invisible childhood trauma.

Theo Nestor: What was something that surprised or delighted you in the process of writing these essays?

Shigeko Ito: I discovered that the true power of writing a memoir lies in the process, not just the end product. Revisiting and engaging with painful memories gave me a second chance to process them with greater objectivity, clarity, and maturity. I developed the perspective of an observer with curiosity, which helped to establish a more constructive relationship with my past. By piecing together fragmented memories, I uncovered the root causes of my lifelong struggles. This awareness led me to cultivate greater self-kindness, compassion, and acceptance, which in turn helped tame my once-vicious inner critic. This journey felt deeply healing and empowering, much like self-generated psychotherapy.

Theo Nestor: What advice would you give to those working on a memoirwith the hope of publishing?

Shigeko Ito:  If you’re under a tight deadline and need to finish a manuscript quickly, I may not be the best person to offer practical advice. But if you’re not pressed for time, I encourage you to embrace memoir writing as a profound journey of self-exploration. It’s a unique way to discover parts of yourself you didn’t even know existed. The writing can become an invaluable ally on this journey, guiding you toward deeper self-understanding and growth. If you feel a calling to share an important message, trust that instinct and don’t give up. The real magic happens during revision, so don’t be discouraged if your early drafts feel rough—they’re simply the foundation to build on, improving steadily until your manuscript truly feels ready.  

Theo Nestor: Thanks so much, Shigeko! Where can readers connect with you online?

Shigeko Ito: Readers can find me here:

Website: shigekoito.com

Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/shigekoito.bsky.social

Facebook: facebook.com/shigekoitomemoir

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shigekoito-memoir

Instagram: instagram.com/shigekochakoito


X (formerly Twitter): x.com/ShigekoChakoIto

Shigeko Ito grew up in Japan and immigrated to the United States to pursue higher education. She studied early childhood education, earning a PhD in Education from Stanford University. Drawing on cross-cultural experiences and academic expertise, she explores themes of trauma, resilience, and healing, with a particular focus on childhood emotional neglect. Her work has appeared on the CPTSD Foundation blog and the Anxiety and Depression Association of America website. In 2025, she was named a semifinalist in the nonfiction category of the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. She worked in Montessori preschools for many years and lives in Seattle with her husband of thirty years and beloved animals. Author Website: shigekoito.com

My favorite literary genre is the essay. And, my favorite essays are often those that begin in single moment and then whisk us up for a ride through time and space. Samina Najmi’s Sing Me a Circle is chock full of magic rides through the space-time continuum so artfully crafted that you might not even realize that you’ve been transported between a contemporary online thread about fan belts, 1970s Karachi, a London hospital twelve years earlier, and then to a Karachi classroom where a sparrow makes its final flight.

“All points on a circle are always the same distance from the center,” Najmi observes. The center in the essays in Sing Me a Circle is love and connection. Wherever she takes us–Boston, Fresno, Palestine, Karachi–she shows us how love and connection remain the constant, how this center can indeed hold.

Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss and a Home in Time (Trio House Press)–winner of the 2024 Aurora Polaris Prize in Creative Nonfiction–will be in bookstores everywhere on October 1st. I’m so thrilled to have Samina Najmi here today with us to talk about the process of making of this beautiful essay collection.

Theo Nestor: Welcome, Samina! Please tell us a little bit about Sing Me a Circle.

Samina Najmi: I wrote the essays in this book over the course of ten years. The first of these marked the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and I didn’t even know what genre of nonfiction to call it. But then I began taking workshops in creative writing and found myself steeped in recollections of growing up in Karachi, Pakistan. Those memoir essays eventually merged with others I had been writing about my present life as a mother and professor in Fresno, California. So while the book’s focus is on life lived day to day, it’s set in a broad sweep of space and time. 

Theo Nestor: What was the biggest challenge in writing these essays and forming this collection and how did you overcome it?

Samina Najmi: In the beginning, I had to move away from seeing myself merely as an observer or documenter of events. I had to get comfortable with allowing my consciousness a more conspicuous role in the essays, shaping the reader’s interpretation of events. That often meant allowing an image to tell the story. Once I grasped that aspect of the craft, the individual essays sprouted pretty easily, and most also got published. Still, it took the collection three years to find a home. Looking back, I could have been more meticulous about submitting the manuscript to multiple presses at a time. But I liked doing my research on the publisher before sending the manuscript out, and that always took time. 

Theo Nestor: What was something that surprised or delighted you in the process of writing these essays?

Samina Najmi: Many things. First, I was surprised how exhausting this work was—the excavation of one’s own thoughts and relationships and lived experiences. An early essay, “Abdul,” wiped me out. (It won Map Literary’s nonfiction prize that year, and that was an early indication to me of the demands and rewards of writing personal essays.) Then, I was surprised how satisfying it was just to articulate my thoughts on the page. There’s so much power in naming our experiences and making them coherent to ourselves. Beyond that, I was delighted to discover motifs and patterns, as though my life were a novel I was reading! That’s when I realized that life is generous in handing us metaphors; we just have to be able to read them. A most unexpected joy has been the feeling, especially when writing about grief or loss, that my burden is lightened when it’s shared with the reader.

Theo Nestor: What advice would you give to those working on an essay collection with the hope of publishing?

Samina Najmi: My own experience suggests that an essay collection will complete itself in its own time. It’s so dependent on one’s evolving consciousness that I don’t think it can be rushed. I wouldn’t be worrying too much about the shape of the collection until you have enough essays that you’re happy with, individually. Send those out. Eventually, you’ll take a step back and read your essays as a reader rather than as a writer: What do you see? What themes and patterns and images emerge? The essays don’t have to be interlinked, of course, and you might not be aiming for a memoir-in-essays. But you’ll see what they’re saying holistically. You’ll know when it’s time to declare the collection complete. Then send the manuscript out in small batches to presses you’ve researched. And do a better job than I did of compressing the intervals when you have no active submissions!

Theo Nestor: Where can readers connect with you online?

Samina Najmi: I’m easy to find on Instagram. 

Theo Nestor: Thank you, Samina! I’m so looking forward to your book’s publication day.

Samina Najmi is Professor of English at California State University, Fresno. A scholar of race, gender, and war, she began writing memoir and personal essays in 2011. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in over thirty literary journals, including World Literature Today. Samina’s memoir- in-essays, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, won the 2024 Aurora Polaris Award in creative nonfiction and will be published by Trio House Press on Oct 1, 2025. Publishers Weekly gives the book a starred review, and Poets & Writers features it among its top five creative nonfiction debuts of the year. Daughter of multigenerational displacements, Samina has lived in California’s Central Valley since 2006 and watched with wonder her children, her students, and her citrus grow. Come visit her at saminanajmi.com.

Coming of age means coming into danger in Melissa Fraterrigo’s The Perils of Girlhood, a haunting and thrilling memoir-in-essays released today from the University of Nebraska Press’ venerable American Lives Series. I’m excited to share with you my interview below with Melissa about the writing of The Perils of Girlhood.

After my friend and I go our separate ways, the conversation lingers, and as I drive home in the dark with the windows down, the air balmy, clouds ruffled like waves, I replay my words. It didn’t matter, which is almost I didn’t matter, a whole other peril.

–The Perils of Girlhood: A Memoir in Essays

Throughout The Perils of Girlhood, a dual consciousness exists–that of the girl becoming a woman and that of a mother to girls on the brink of being women. And Fraterrigo delivers so much about both those experiences that rarely gets articulated. The teenage girl’s sense of being caught in a searchlight and not knowing why; the awkward feeling of being a girl walking into a new room of people, of being a girl climbing out of swimming pool, of being a girl just being herself–or trying to be. Melissa Fraterrigio writes with an acute intuition about where danger resides–the unarticulated desires, the chaos of shifting situations and impossible standards, that queasy feeling of being somehow wrong even when you’re trying to do everything right–even perfectly. Later in the book, the adult narrator watches her daughters across an invisible and yet undeniable divide, knowing she can’t truly help them through perils they now must navigate themselves. The perils of being a girl–she nails them.

Theo Nestor: Hi Melissa! Will you please tell readers a bit about The Perils of Girlhood?

Theo Nestor: What was the biggest challenge in writing these essays and forming this collection and how did you overcome it?

Melissa Fraterrigo: The greatest challenge in writing this book–and this probably stands for all writing projects–was getting out of my own way. I began writing the book during the pandemic. My daughters were in school and all my classes were online. I am a fiction writer by trade, but found that fiction could not hold my attention. I would literally read the same paragraph over and over again, unable to create a relationship with the words on the page. At the same time, I was thinking a lot about my childhood and adolescence. My girls were on the cusp of becoming teenagers, and I couldn’t help but think about all that was on the horizon. So much of what I’d experienced at my daughters’ ages had influenced my mothering from my dad’s sharp temper to the unwanted sexual advances I’d experienced at the hands of dates. As my daughters crept toward the age when so many crucial events happened to me, I wondered how to keep them safe and how to mother lovingly despite my anxieties. With fiction, you stand behind your characters. In memoir, it’s all right there, and I had to be brave. I had to believe my story was not only worthwhile, but that others might deem it beneficial.

Theo Nestor: What was something that surprised or delighted you in the process of writing these essays?

Melissa Fraterrigo:I simply had a blast putting the book together. I think any time you can find joy in the process of creation, that is conveyed to the reader as well. The book is mainly chronological, but it was not written in linear fashion. To highlight universality, I created a series of ten or so “pop cultural vignettes” that were anywhere from 100–250-word asides that were deep dives into everything from “Little House on the Prairie” to Judy Blume and “The Facts of Life” TV show. These were highly researched pieces that I used as an opening to a longer essay or two and then the essay also concluded with one of these vignettes. Yet such shorter pieces interrupted the narrative, and I ended up folding them into the longer essays. As I dug deeper into each essay and listened to what I was trying to say, I could focus on how best to get such ideas across, and it was such a joy to use such excavation to fine the best structure for this book. Endings were transported. Middles became beginnings. It was terribly exciting.

Theo Nestor: What advice would you give to those working on an essay collection with the hope of publishing?

Melissa Fraterrigo:Figure out your process. There are lots of ways to write a memoir, but you’ve got to find your own approach. I encourage my students to keep process journals where they contemplate the writing process both before, during and after drafting so that they can be in better touch with their own creative process. And please, please, please, give yourself grace. You don’t have to write every day. You don’t! But you can work on your project when you are walking the dog or making your morning coffee. Think about your work as you do these tasks. When your writing sees that you take the creative process seriously, it is more likely to continue to flood your mind with ideas and inspiration and ways to keep moving forward. 

Theo Nestor: Where can readers connect with you online?

Melissa Fraterrigo:I have a Substack–Between the Lines–where I share stories of the everyday to explore new ways of thinking, seeing, and writing in our world. I usually share a brief essay and offer a prompt for writers to pen their own essays. 

If writers purchase my book before 9/3 and share a copy of their receipt with me, they can join me for a FREE Memoir-Writing Workshop that meets at 6:30 p.m. EST on 9/3. I’ll include the link here for more information. I also run a small writing studio, the Lafayette Writers’ Studio, where we offer classes on the art and craft of writing in an intimate and supportive environment. Learn more about all of this at melissafraterrigo.com

Melissa Fraterrigo’s memoir, The Perils of Girlhood (University of Nebraska Press), is now available at booksellers everywhere. Fraterrigo is also the author of the novel Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press), and the story collection The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press). She teaches creative writing at Purdue University, in the Butler University MFA in Creative Writing program, and is the founder of the Lafayette Writers’ Studio in Lafayette, Indiana. Please visit melissafraterrigo.com

And part of what thrills me about Carly Pedersen’s new chapbook Desmadre: An Origin Story is that its zine-like form feels like such an exact match for the fragmented memories of trauma, for carrying a world within you that doesn’t match the world that now surrounds you. Desmadre is searing and electric and–as Carly says herself below–does leap from image to image in a way that allows her to quickly snap into focus a life, a family, a neighborhood.

You can read an excerpt from Desmadre: An Origin Story below my interview with Carly in which she describes so well why this book took this particular form. And also: You can buy the book here and read my blurb for it below.

Theo Nestor: Carly, tell us a bit about Desmadre and how this chapbook came to be? 

Carly Pedersen: In my mid-30s, I began to understand how profoundly attachment injury was impacting my relationships. There was a fear of true closeness there, a desire to retreat from being seen, along with a gnawing sense of need that I refused to acknowledge. This is adaptive behavior from a tough childhood, and what works in a dysfunctional setting is no longer useful in a healthy one. 

I embarked on a course of EMDR- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming, an extremely effective (and extremely trippy) therapeutic modality for treating trauma. I would often visualize myself as a giant during these sessions, tearing the roof off my childhood home and lifting Little Me out of the chaos, out of the desmadre.

Theo Nestor: What was a challenge you faced writing this book and how did you overcome it?

Carly Pedersen: Applying narrative structure to memories of traumatic events was my biggest challenge, because what we take from trauma is often implicit memory, not explicit memory. I took a note from EMDR when deciding how to structure this book. Find the feeling, find the cognitive distortion, and then find the earliest image connected to that. Writing this book often felt like leaping from one vivid image to another in my mind, each innocuous thing somehow laden with meaning. There’s a bowl of buttered noodles in this book that itself becomes a metaphor for shared pain. That’s what my brain held onto from those difficult years–a bowl of cheap noodles with six forks in it. 

Theo Nestor: How does the structure of this chapbook connect to its content?
Carly Pedersen: Another part of the recovery process was learning about who I am fundamentally. I am deeply pragmatic and can articulate difficult things with precision. I don’t like filler, in my writing or in my life. I didn’t want to wait for a big publisher’s permission to say what I needed to say, and I did not want to be constrained by form, attempting to stretch fragmented memories into traditional narrative. What emerged was a simple chapbook, modeled in many ways after my childhood mentor David Brown’s Assuming Blue, about serving as a medic in Vietnam.

The chapbook/zine format is also a nod to my younger self, printing and stapling punk zines together with my best friend, artist Hannah Litvin. We were two lost kids together, struggling to survive homelessness. There is something so right about mailing her this book, going back to that art form we shared and using it to tell this story. 

Theo Nestor: How does it feel to have Desmadre out in the world and where can readers buy a copy of your book?

Carly Pedersen: I was shocked to see so many people buying the book on its first day out in the world. I just sat on the edge of my bed watching orders come in and feeling dumbstruck. What I’ve really taken away from the whole thing is how not alone I am in my experiences, and how much readers can truly engage with the nuances and non-traditional structure of this book. I’m happy that I trusted my audience to digest this work, to pick up what I was putting down, so to speak. 

Desmadre: An Origin Story is available as an e-book or as a physical chapbook on carlypedersen.com. I’ve been enclosing a sticker with each physical chapbook: Raised in chaos. Thriving in spite.

Readers can also find me on Instagram at @carlotta_o.

Theo Nestor: Thank you, Carly! I loved reading Desmadre as an ebook and look forward to my hard copy of the chapbook arriving in the mail.

Excerpt from Demadre: An Origin Story

The first thing that happens when your mom overdoses and dies in her bedroom is that someone has to find her. And if you’re like me, when your mom overdoses and dies in her bedroom, you are across town, hanging out with a boy who is your friend but who also hopes you will take your clothes off in front of him one day.

It will be your little sister who finds her, blue. It will be your oldest sister who calls 911, who pulls your mother’s cold body to the floor and does CPR. You will come home on the bus, the last bus, because you’ve been avoiding home, and you will see a phalanx of ambulances. You will see your little brother weeping, screaming “Mom’s dead,” and you will scoff, “No she’s not,” and then some paramedics will keep you from going into your house and you will understand, in one sudden rush, that your mom is dead. You will reach out to hug your oldest sister, and find that she does not reach back.

-From A Teenager’s Guide to Sudden Death, 2005

Author Bio
Carly Pedersen is a Mexican-American memoirist from Southwest Houston, Texas. Her work has appeared in Wordgathering and The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism. She lives in a small farming town in Washington. 

Theo’s Blurb for Desmadre: An Origin Story

Maybe once a decade you come across a writer and think: I want to read everything they write. I don’t want to miss out on any of it. And Carly Pedersen is one of those writers. With a handful of words, she drops me into a world I’ve never seen that feels utterly familiar. I absolutely know this street she’s taking me down, I’m sure, but I don’t. It’s just that she brings to life so vividly our unnamed territories—the hollow echoing of our alienation, our rage over terrible losses rendered invisible, the love that remains in spite of it all. Carly Pedersen’s Desmadre: An Origin Story is searing and electric, and you don’t want to miss it. –Theo Pauline Nestor, author of Writing Is My Drink

Write a Powerhouse Memoir Book Proposal Starts May 1st

Tamiko Nimura writes beautifully about hard things. During the pandemic she worked on her forthcoming memoir, A Place for What We Lose, in my Yearlong in Memoir class at Hugo House, and I had the good fortune to not only read parts of the work-in-progress but also to witness a writer with clear intentionality build a book on a strong foundation of craft and community. Tamiko was as thoughtful about giving her peers feedback as she was about patiently working on confounding structure questions and revising drafts. When I see a writer coming up with this type of care, I think about how it’s not just about getting your book published. It matters how you get there.

Tamiko’s memoir, A Place for What We Lose, tells the story of a daughter embarking on a pilgrimage to the internment camp where her father was held during WWII as she finds–with brilliance–a way to navigate her own set of complex challenges. You can get a bit of the story here in this gorgeous essay, and soon A Place for What We Lose will be out in the world.

Nestor: Tell us about your book’s big news, Tamiko!

Tamiko Nimura: A Place For What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake is being published by the University of Washington Press, which is home to so many amazing Asian American and Japanese American titles that I’m thrilled to be joining their list. I don’t have a publication date yet, but I think I can say that we are hoping for 2026.

Theo Nestor: What was the biggest challenge in writing A Place For What We Lose and how did you overcome it?

Tamiko Nimura: Structure, structure, structure. The book is a braided memoir with two main strands and different timelines, a memoir that also contains part of my dad’s unpublished memoir. I kept thinking I had the problem solved and then something else would emerge. I kept printing it off and on for years and announcing the structure problem solved. I tried on “hero’s journey,” “heroine’s journey,” and other forms that didn’t seem to fit. As I write this, I am diving into yet another restructuring of a third of the book with the help of my editors at the press, and (knocking wood) I’m hopeful this is it. 

Theo Nestor: What was something that surprised or delighted you in the process of writing this book?

Tamiko Nimura: Oh, so many things! I have been working on this book off and on since 2010. I could practically write a book about the writing of this book, and the process journal I kept for the first seven years of the book is almost as long as the book itself. (No one would want to read this, I know.)

But how about this, the main surprise and delight: I learned that I could talk to my dad again, even after close to 40 years of him being gone, after I avoided that conversation for decades. I learned about ways to open the channel of communication between us and keep it open. I learned how to bring him along with me into my present, into an alternate world where he could watch his beloved San Francisco Giants win the World Series, where he could play online chess with my oldest kid and go to the planetarium with my youngest kid, where we could cook sukiyaki together and talk about the latest library books we’re reading. And that is a huge gift.

Theo Nestor: What advice would you give readers wanting to publish their memoir? 

Tamiko Nimura: Read widely and often, in and out of your genre, to be clear about the conversations your book is entering. By extension, this means you should have a good sense of the core readers you want to reach. (I think about my audience as an onion, with a core and surrounding layers.)

(For a resource: I listened to many episodes of “The Shit No One Tells You About Writing” for query letters and had mine critiqued by editors and agents several times even before I sent it out.) 

Agents and editors often tell aspiring memoir writers that memoir is a hard sell, which is….true, if you’re not a celebrity. And mine did take nearly a year to sell. But there are many wonderful independent (including nonprofit and university) presses who are excited to take on books that play outside of commercial norms and celebrity lives. 

And I believe that there is a deep hunger in our culture for memoir, for stories of how and why ordinary people get to the other side of something life-altering. I have also felt a deep hunger and love for BIPOC, genre-bending memoirs about those kinds of journeys, which is partly why I wrote this book as I did. I hope my book finds its readers. At the risk of sounding too earnest, I hope that it can be one voice in the choir of resistance: a small measure of much-needed light and even joy. 

Theo Nestor: Thank you, Tamiko! I can hardly wait to hold your book in my hands.

Tamiko Nimura is an Asian American creative nonfiction writer and public historian living in Tacoma, Washington.

 Write a Modern Love in February includes 3 live one-hour classes with Theo Nestor on February 8th, 15th and 22nd 2025 as well as indefinite access to the recordings of these classes. Each class includes a Q&A session during which you can ask specific questions about your essay. Can’t make the meeting or need to come late or leave early? No problem: All the classes are recorded and will be posted within 24 hours of class. Optional add-on: Two-round review of your Modern Love essay. Learn more here.

Hello Readers!

I’ve been waiting for this day–the publication day for Reagan Jackson’s Still True: The Evolution of an Unexpected Journalist–to share my enthusiasm not for just this book but general Reagan’s ability to dismantle the insanity of the existing world and her quiet insistence that joy and liberation are reasonable goals. Reagan walks through the streets we’ve walked down and those we haven’t and tells us friend-to-friend what we’ve seen and what we’ve missed. It’s a rare gift–and one we all get to enjoy together as Still True is available for purchase at booksellers everywhere today.

I had the chance to ask Reagan some questions about the writing of this essays that built this book. As usual, she went deep. Here’s a quick excerpt and you can read the rest of the interview below:

Theo Nestor: Tell us a bit about Still True!

Reagan Jackson: Still True is a hybrid book. It begins with a short memoir piece about my unexpected journey into journalism and the choices I made around what to cover and why. The rest is a collection of essays and articles spanning a decade. It’s a time capsule, but the topics covered remain relevant from gentrification to globalization to movement building around viral Black death and Black joy. This is a book that forces readers to think deeply about what they hold as true and why. 

Theo Nestor:   If you had to be remembered for just one story from this book, which one would it be and why?

Reagan Jackson: This question is soooo hard and I think I would give a different answer on a different day, but today I would say The Tea on our Juneteenth Black Out and the Necessity of Black Healing Spaces. On Juneteenth 2020, Mary Hall Williams and I staged a protest within a protest. We hosted a 12-hour Blackout on Cal Anderson Field in the center of the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, which was an internationally covered Black Lives Matter Protest. Most journalists don’t often become the story, but we were that day and I was so deeply irritated by the reductive and in some cases just negligent and unintelligent coverage about what we did and why that I felt forced to write a piece just so that people could actually hear some nuance. This event, which was registered as an official protest in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives, was instrumental in popularizing a movement across King County and beyond to center Black grief during a time a viral Black death. It helped to spotlight the need for healing in a way that created space for us to prioritize the fullness of our humanity, not just our rage. I learned so much that day and at a great personal expense. So I hope folks read it and talk about it.

Theo Nestor: Of all the places you’ve travelled, where do you want to go back to and why?

Reagan Jackson: Spain. I want to go back because I never wanted to leave. When I was a junior at UW I spent a year abroad in Cadiz, Spain studying Spanish at la facultad de filofia y letras at the University of Cadiz. I don’t necessarily want to live in Cadiz again. It was a lovely sleepy little beach town that was perfect for that moment in my life, but I think I might love living in Madrid. 

When I think about the pace of my life now, I feel Spain calling me into a more peaceful way of being. Long walks down cobblestone streets, sit down meals with people I love, and dry humor delivered in that signature Spanish accent. Spain was the perfect fit to my bio rhythms. I loved taking siestas and the pace of life. I also met wonderful people and ate delicious food and sipped sangria by the beach. It was a vibe. 

Theo Nestor:    What’s a challenge you’ve had to overcome in writing and publishing this book?

Reagan Jackson: Imposter syndrome. I was an unexpected journalist not because others didn’t see me as qualified, but because I didn’t see a place for myself or my voice in the field. Even after I was offered a column and given the validation of having some of my work go viral, I still didn’t feel like a “real journalist” so how could I possibly publish a book of articles? Throughout my career I’ve had to decide over and over again that I am worth being heard. What I write and how I write might seem foreign or unrecognizable as journalism, but in choosing to write from a place of authenticity and a deep love of my community I am bringing a much-needed intervention to the myth that objectivity is possible. Through my work I am saying with my chest that you have to be real about who you are in order to even tell the truth. Truth telling is the purest form of journalism and I am real AF in all I do. Choosing to write and publish this book required me to level up my self-worth and self-respect in order to take the leap. 

Theo Nestor: Where can we find out about your book events?

Reagan Jackson: Follow me on Instagram @reaganejjackson and also check out these two websites: www.reaganjackson.com and https://www.hintonpublishing.com/

Palo Alto, 1966

We lived in an apartment complex in Palo Alto with a flat roof and globe swag lights that hung like full moons. The complex was u-shaped, and across the U lived a girl a few years older than me who played with me when she had no other options. Suddenly, her birthday was nigh, and it came to my attention that she was having a party, not because she invited me but because it somehow became known. Maybe I spotted cake sprinkles on the kitchen counter or a stack of invitations featuring unicorns prancing through stardust. 

I did not yet know that one could not petition to be invited to a party, just as you can ask people to care about you. I didn’t know yet that we choose people instinctually. People are either a “yes” or a “no” for us. Rom-coms are about Nos becoming Yeses, and this is one of the reasons they are evil. They breed false hope. 

            So, I schemed and frankly begged to be invited. I asked her mother point blank if I could come. I knew it was wrong but couldn’t let her off the hook. She said it was a party for older girls. I argued that I was old for my age. I asked the girl. I asked my mom. Part of me did know there was something shameful in this cajoling. But my longing to attend this Shangri-La of a party with deeply frosted cake and unicorns and pin-the-tail trumped my shame.  I had to be there.

            And then suddenly word came down: I was in. I was incredulous and thought to pepper the girl’s mom with a repeated “Are you sure?” but I also didn’t want to push my luck.

            And at the appointed hour on the long-awaited day, I ran across the U in my scratchy party dress and suddenly I was there in paradise, surrounded by cake and girls and balloons, and…I, I felt like I’d begged my way in. I felt unwanted.

And truly, that’s what I’d been after all along: To be wanted.

San Francisco, 1989

After an extended boyfriend drought, I finally had a boyfriend.  I was beside myself with excitement because I really liked him. And because the relationship burst out of nowhere after the sort of dry spell in which it becomes impossible to comprehend how two people ever get together. How would it even start? Someone asks someone out? People meet where? Parties? Bars? At work? And they like each other and then one of them acts on it?

            I was all Hot Chocolate’s “I beLIEVE in miracles! Where you from, you sexy thing?” I was saying a lot of stuff like, “My boyfriend and I…” and “I told my boyfriend….” I need to underscore that this was San Francisco in 1989. Really not an easy place to find a boyfriend. It didn’t help matters that I dragged an overstuffed cross-body bag full of books around the city along with my low self-esteem and heavy work schedule. Besides my job waiting tables, I tutored undergraduate students of color at San Francisco State where I was a grad student in English Literature, mostly students from Vietnam who were studying their way into a better life in America, which, of course, meant reading Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and writing five-page essays on the ethical issues explored within. In between jobs I sat in cafes where I ate oversized muffins, drank lattes, and wrote papers on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and French feminist theory—not exactly the fast track for meeting guys.

            So, the boyfriend. We are going to call him Michael. The day Michael and I decided we were boyfriend and girlfriend happened to be the 4^th of July and that night Michael mentioned his birthday was July 16^th. I mentally logged the date and thought to myself, wow, that’s really coming up quick! I better figure this out! I’d waited so long for someone to love that I was completely prepared to lavish. I just needed a plan.

            “I’m not sure if I should go with chocolate or something surprising like carrot,” I pondered out loud a few days later, vaguely addressing my inquiry to Maggie, headwaitress at the San Remo, the Italian restaurant where I waitressed four nights a week. “You know, for the cake?”

            If I searched the earth, I could not be parsing through this cake decision with someone less sympathetic to this particular question than Maggie. I was twenty-seven and Maggie thirty-six.  She resented the hell out of the nine years of youth I had on her, despite my dearth of confidence in my desirability. Maggie saw me as one of the young things who sashayed through the restaurant without a care while she toiled as a doomed spinster destined for an eternity of thankless servitude. In cutlery-napkin-rolling time conversations, she had a glib answer to every life question, although these answers never seemed to get she herself anywhere. Even though she ostensibly had a lot going for her—plans for becoming a therapist, her own condo in the East Bay, brains enough to incisively cut you down to size—her life was relentlessly empty. Telling Maggie plans of love was like telling Ebenezer Scrooge the itinerary for an upcoming shopping junket.

            “Maybe a chocolate cake with a mocha frosting?” I suggested, fascinated by my choices, feeling certain that everyone in the world must be rooting for me to make it the ball in my pumpkin and home again before the clock strikes midnight.

            “Woah!” Maggie said, one hand of red acrylic nails forming a fatigued stop sign and the other resting on an aproned hip. “Hold up there, girl. Getting a bit ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? Aren’t you afraid of scaring him away?”

            “What? No! We’re totally into each other. What do you mean?”

            “It’s too much. It’s like ‘Love me! Love me!’ Don’t you think?”

            “No. I think it’s nice.” I answered, defensiveness thick in every word.

            “When’s your birthday?” She asked, scooping an ice cube out of ice machine and popping it into her mouth. She was the mechanic. All she needed was for me to pop the hood.

            “August third.”

           She cocked her head and raised an eyebrow and said evenly, “Yeah. Too bad. He’s in the power seat.” 

            “There is no power seat!”

            “Right. Let’s see what you say about that on August 4^th,” she said cooly. “Look, can’t you see it’s a set up? You have to go first. Whatever you do sets up the game. You move any piece and he’ll have your queen,” and with that she spun on a heel toward the table of blue-haired regulars who’d just been seated in her section, her sour expression dissolving into her game face. On an average night, she made twice as much as me in tips.

            “I believe in miracles!” evaporated. I wanted Maggie to be wrong, wrong, wrong. We weren’t game players! I argued to myself, but insecurity crept into my thoughts. Was I begging him to love me?  Could I scare him away simply by doing what instinct told me to do—to make his birthday nice? I wanted to take all my energy and funnel it into creating something beautiful. I wanted to sacrifice an afternoon to baking and have it feel like no sacrifice at all. I wanted, in sum, to love and be loved. Yet, it was hard not to be convinced by Maggie. Doubt eroded my confidence. I halved my celebration plans, but still made a poppyseed cake frosted with vanilla buttercream.

            Not long after his birthday, Michael began to worry aloud to me that he would end the relationship abruptly, as he had with his past relationships. Despite the heart-pounding queasiness I felt during these bouts of speculation, I refused to see them as a bad sign. I also refused to see it as a bad sign that during these conversations, I did not ask for reassurance but instead helped parse through his fear that he might bolt and reassured him that his awareness of a pattern was a sign that he was ready to change. Thanks, therapy! Yet, worry began to settle in on a molecular level, and whatever power I had in the relationship was subtly and incrementally shifting to him. Scales tipped.

On my birthday, he gave me a beautiful blouse and a small photo album of photos of him alone in various stages of life. I both wanted the album and was repelled by it. I laughed a little too loud when he joked, “I guess it seems a tad narcissistic to give someone pictures of yourself!” Oh, not at all. Don’t be silly!

By September I was watching for signs of his pleasure and displeasure and rushing to my answering machine as soon as I got home to see if he’d called. As I fell deeper into the relationship, I imagined that he with his underground zine and college radio station aesthetic was cooler than me. In conversation, I was too eager to impress, dropping references to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Somehow, he’d gotten the power. It was no mystery really; by questioning the fate of the relationship, he’d sealed the deal. He’d gotten the power seat. Yes, there was a power seat. 

One day in the middle of October, I was sitting at my desk finishing a paper on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own when a rumble rippled through the floor. For a second or two, I thought it was the N Judah rounding the corner onto Ninth. But then a cobalt vase of Markos’ rolled onto its side and a fissure snaked its way through the white plaster of my wall. Dishes leapt from the drying rack and shattered onto the black and white tile. I heard the two boys run out of their apartment down the hall and yelling in Spanish near my door. By the time I made it out there the youngest one crying. “Come with me,” I said in English and grabbed his hand and we ran together with his brother down the five flights of stairs and out of the building into the street. The shaking had ended, but the fear that it could start again remained.

In front of my building a crowd gathered, exchanging stories. I stood with the boys there until their dad rushed up, thanked me, and led the boys away. A man with a Watchman TV joined our sidewalk cluster. I glimpsed over his shoulder and saw footage of a fire in the Marina district. I wondered if Michael was okay. He worked down the Peninsula, and the earthquake happened at 5:17pm, twenty minutes after quitting time. We had a plan to get together later. Was he driving home? Had the freeways been impacted? Was he alive?

My neighbor friend, Rachel, walked up just then, and we started wandering the streets together looking for a working pay phone. It was a strangely sunny and glorious day. The sun beat down on the sidewalk where acquaintances rushed to comfort each other. As we walked, Rachel talked about how worried her parents must be. But my one real thought was of Michael.  In that moment, I didn’t really care what my mom and my stepfather were thinking (Did they even know?). I wanted to call Michael, and this was pretty much my only thought as firetrucks blared by us and we walked past a brick apartment building reduced to rubble. Finally, we found a payphone. I called home at Rachel’s insistence. My parents had, in fact, seen the earthquake on the news and were very worried. Over fifty people were dead, and my mom said the Golden Gate had collapsed. I rolled my eyes.

“The Golden Gate has not collapsed,” I said, irritated.

 “Okay,” my mom said, “another bridge then.”                                                  

The Bay Bridge? Okay, fine, but where’s Michael? I called his place and just let it ring and ring. Most of the residential lines were down, we’d heard from people on the street. With nothing left to do, Rachel and I returned to our building.  An hour later we sat talking in my apartment with the door open (because somehow that felt safer) when Michael’s face rounded the corner. Relief rushed through me, followed by a warm sense of security. He’d come for me! We were really together now.

Michael and I quickly decided to stay at his place because he lived in a one-story house, which seemed a far safer choice than my five-story building. We wondered if night would bring more shaking. As I turned to say goodbye to Rachel, I realized that she had no one coming to stay with her or take her away, something I hadn’t even considered. I saw in her face that I wasn’t quite the friend she’d hoped I’d be.

“Do you want me to stay here? I could?” I asked, knowing that the damage was already done.

“No, I’ll be okay,” she said.

“Okay, I’ll try calling you in the morning. Maybe the phones will be working again by then,” I said and gave her a hug, knowing that a better friend would stay put. Michael had his roommates after all.

Despite the disaster all around us, I felt a coziness as we drove back to his house. People had died. The Marina was burning. The Bay Bridge had (partially) collapsed. I’d left my friend to fend for herself. But my boyfriend had come to get me! Now we can huddle together and exchange words of love and perhaps even make out relentlessly the way Hawkeye and Hot Lips Houlihan did in that one episode of M.A.S.H. when gunfire exploded into the night all around them as they huddled together in a deserted hut.

My secret plans for foxhole rapture screeched to a halt when we arrived at his place in Noe Valley. Conducting an inventory of the damage to the house with jangled roommates was not romantic at all. One of his roommates was worried about a coworker who possibly might be stuck in their office building downtown. When he’d left there two hours ago, he hadn’t noticed whether she’d left their building safely or not. He’d tried calling her house, but there was no answer. All the phones are down, I offered. Yes, he said, but he was still concerned.

After much discussion, Michael and this roommate decided they would walk downtown searching for the coworker. Did I want to come with them or wait there alone?  I opted to wait there, not anticipating the bleakness of the hours that lay ahead of me, lying in Michael’s bedroom with no electricity waiting for him to return. Who was this person he was “rescuing” and why were they so sure she needed their help? These were questions I couldn’t answer, although I spent hours trying.

Finally, he returned at 4am. The room was dark when he climbed into bed beside me. I thought I hadn’t slept at all, but I must’ve because now I was groggy. We lay on our sides facing each other. Light from a streetlamp illuminated the top of his head and a corner of his pillow, but his face was shadowed. He told a long story about walking downtown through streets of shattered glass, about arriving at this office and finally getting her on the phone and finding out she’d left the building hours earlier and walked safely home.

 I made reassuring noises as I listened but thought to myself: You wanted to be a savior to some woman you’d never met who didn’t even need saving. You’d rather rush off to save a stranger than stay with a real girlfriend who needed reassurance. I thought about the hour after he’d left, how I’d worried that I might die or he might, but mostly I worried that my boyfriend would never love me. I wondered what makes love start. I shared none of this with him though. I didn’t want to be needy, to be the one who needed more love than would be given, the one who rushed in to bake a cake too soon.

A month later I headed my usual route to work, but then realized my shift didn’t start for another hour so jumped off the Powell Street cable car a stop early to wander around Washington Square. I spotted an antique shop and decided to go in. 

“What are you looking for?” said the woman with long tousled hair perched on a stool behind the glass case stuffed with imported silver jewelry. Silver bracelets laced up both her arms, a loose weave black sweater bunched up above her elbows. Her eyes were lined with navy blue. I was used to living in a city of people cooler than myself by then.

“Just browsing. A Christmas present for my boyfriend maybe.”

“That’s nice,” she said, flatly. “Wish I could say the same. I’m mid-breakup myself. Not even mid. Just the shitty part after, you know?”

“Oh, yeah, know it well,” I said. I looked at her. We were both heading into our late twenties: Too young to be married—at least in San Francisco—and yet tiring quickly of the short-lived relationships of the twentysomethings. I got the feeling looking at her, I was looking at my future. “I’m sorry,” I said because I was.

“It was one of those things where you see that the person is really not there for you,” she said. “After the earthquake, I saw who he was and I was like no, I can’t. I can’t do another round of this.”

My heart dropped a bit with her words “I can’t.” I wondered what it was that I couldn’t do. Where was my limit? What would I not do another round of? It seemed like I was a long way from finding out.

 Thanksgiving weekend I blurted out that I loved him. He didn’t reply until New Year’s. He told me then that he loved me too but then never mentioned that love again. We stumbled along until May—seeing each other slightly less often with each passing week—when I finally said, “I think you want to break up with me.” Not even “I want to break up with you.” Even in this moment of misery, I was thinking more about his feelings than my own.

The relationship broke right along the very fault line Peggy had zeroed in on the summer before, my desire for more pushing him away. Peggy—and pretty much all the jaded people in the world—are, in fact, right most of the time. But it’s not exactly a hard call.  Every relationship you’re in is going to be wrong and will end in a breakup except for the one that lasts. The jaded can spot—because they want to see it—your fatal flaw, your neediness, your coldness, your fear of intimacy, your what have you. But whatever preventative measure they suggest you take to curb your flaw, it’s only going to slow down the eventual breakdown. Because no matter how you act, you still are that person. Just because you act like you’re not controlling or compulsive or desperate for love for a few months, doesn’t mean you’re not controlling or compulsive or desperate. The truth—the very you of you—comes out. No matter how much I might dial it back, I was still the person who wanted to be deeply ensconced in a relationship I could give my whole heart to and Michael would still be the person who needed to pull away from such eagerness.

In the weeks after we broke up, I turned my attention to my master’s thesis, which in the last anxious days of the relationship, I’d pretty much set aside after turning in the first eight pages to my thesis advisor. The thesis was supposed to be 100 pages, so 92 pages stood between me and graduating and looking for work other than tutoring and waitressing. But I’d finished all my classes and I had no boyfriend so other than my 27 hours a week at the San Remo, I had nothing but time. 

The thesis topic seemed laughably arcane at an urban American university, but I’d already chosen it, had it approved, and done much of the research. And picking up the thesis again, I saw that with it I’d chosen myself: The focus was something I’d titled, “The Canadian Cottage Novel,” a study of three novels by Canadian women whose protagonist left the world behind for a life of agency in isolation. Over the next few months, I sat alone in the world of Margaret Atwood, Audrey Thomas, and Margaret Laurence. Surfacing was the title of the Atwood novel, and with it I did surface. I underlined, stacked notecards in meaningful piles across my apartment floor, and typed. These writers were subversive, I said. They refused to play, I argued. They took back their power, I wrote.     

Vancouver, 1972

I once cracked open a fortune cookie and found this: “Always give the stepchild the extra piece of cake,” which reminded me of my stepfather, who took me on as one of his own, who I began calling “my dad” days after he and my mother married—even with him I had rushed in.

They married the August I turned ten, a union that changed my life forever, one that moved me from California to Canada, that ensconced me in fairly large and close-knit Irish family that had a sense of ritual and order that was lacking in my fractured family. One of those rituals was Grandma Mehaffey’s stunningly perfect layer cake as the centerpiece of birthday celebrations. When my new cousin’s cake emerged from the kitchen one late July afternoon in 1972, my being lit up with desire for this pale pink cake to be my own. After she blew out the candles, the first incision revealed two pale pink layers of cake sandwiching a white one, the three perfect layers separated by a thick layer of the butter cream frosting the pale pink of cherry blossoms.

It wasn’t enough to eat this cake. I wanted one exactly like it baked for my birthday the very next week. But I couldn’t be certain that it would happen. My cousin, after all, was a biological granddaughter. I was a new-to-the-scene step-granddaughter, if there even is such a thing.

I knew that I would need to ask for the cake. Without the ask there would be no cake. The request could be denied. I knew that Grandma Mehaffey disapproved of my stepfather’s third marriage, of my mother—a bleached blonde who was also on her third marriage—and by extension her disapproval of the marriage and my mother and her “bottle blonde” hair was also a disapproval of me. But I asked. I mustered courage I didn’t possess to make the request. That’s how much I wanted the cake.

 “I don’t see why not,” she said, almost breezily. She, an old woman from Belfast who said nothing breezily, who could rule the world with the lift of a single eyebrow, who could pronounce a too weak cup of tea “undrinkable” and the kettle would be promptly reheated.

I took in the breeze of her response. I understood instantly and with my entire body that the request had shifted her opinion of me. Inexplicably, she wanted to make the cake. Years later when I reread The Little Prince, the words of the fox struck me to my core, “But if you tame me, then we shall need each other.”  We grow to love the people we take care of. I’d given her the chance to take care of me, to love me.

A week later my pale pink cake burst from her kitchen ablaze with eleven candles. It was a cake made from scratch just for me. There had been sifting of dry ingredients and creaming of butter and sugar. There had been oven preheating and the cooling of steamy cakes on wire racks. There had been an afternoon of baking. There had been sacrifice.

Click on thumbnails below to read more essays from My American ’80s: