Alisyn Camerota: How Writing a Memoir Healed My Mother and Me
21.03.2024 - 20:57
/ glamour.com
, who have turned living-out-loud, confessional social-media posts into an art form.“Once I’m dead, you can say whatever you want,” she said.“You know, Mom, I’m entitled to tell my story,” I countered.“Of course,” she said.
“The problem is it’s my story too.”She wasn’t wrong.
No one’s story exists in a vacuum.
Even as adult children, our lives are inextricably linked to our parents, and as the stacked shelves at any bookstore prove, parent-child dynamics are great grist for the memoir mill.
But there was something besides quiet stoicism in , something more complex and pernicious, that I realize I was trying to unearth in writing my memoir.
Family secrets.
As a child, I didn’t know that my mom grew up in a house full of them.
I only knew I still felt them lurking.Those secrets were part of the reason I was mystified when at fifteen, in the middle of my sophomore year, my mom decided to move us three thousand miles away from our hometown to a place where we knew no one.“I don’t want to leave my friends,” I wailed, begging her to reconsider.Like many teenagers, my friends were my world.
I was the only child of a divorced mother who, I didn’t understand, was searching for a new life.
This was decades before social media, FaceTime, and cell phones connect us to loved ones across a continent, so when we moved, I felt lost and abandoned.
One month later, we moved again, to a different city.
Ten months later, my mom was ready to move again, to yet another city.
By then, I’d had enough.
I decided to go in my own direction.
We parted ways when I was 16.I never told my mother some of the most frightening and painful moments of my teenage years.