"You should write a book," my next door neighbor said to me today (November 12, 2008),
not for the first time; nor was she the first to say it. She thinks my life is
fascinating, finds me witty and charming. Sometimes. Others, she's thought me rather
otherwise. But whether she's thinking of me as a hero or a villain, a bore or a
Scheherazade, she thinks I have led a storybook life.
I am a writer. I think of my books, written and unwritten, as novels, but my forays
into non-reportorial fiction have been brief and unsatisfying, and my best writing is,
I think, autobiographical; in it I have changed names, sometimes altered dialogue, and
(in LOVE NOTE) often edited monologue, but my experience is my work's outline and its
fictional element is minimal. My two finished novels, THE HEALING and LOVE NOTE,
arguably are not memoirs, but they are memoiresque, and though my neighbor's
strongly-held opinion I should write about myself is not hers alone, I have been trying
my damnedest to do as she suggests for more than forty years and, as yet, no publisher has called.
Hello web.
