BEHIND THE BOOK: The Author’s Note that helped me begin my memoir WISHFUL THINKING when all else seemed lost.

The first in a series of articles about my forthcoming book.

I’ve always wanted to write a memoir about faith and my family—or, really, about how I grew up in a family replete with faith (devout Catholics), and how I didn’t seem to get that gene. My mother tried so hard to win me over to being a person of faith, and I continually turned my back on her and this thing she wanted for me.

Faith just never made sense to me, no matter how my mother framed it for me, and no matter that I went and got a Ph.D. in Religion and Gender Studies in my effort to figure things out. Of course, the Catholic Church and its horrors did not exactly help the case for belief. Though I’ve never been picky, either. What I’ve longed for is a clear sense of a something more, a belief in the beyond, and that whatever divinity my family had tapped into could also be mine.

So I knew whenever I wrote this story, the stakes would be high. That this would be a journey into my own Dark Night of the Soul (a la the mystics I studied in grad school), or my wilderness story as some would call it. That this memoir would be a story of living in doubt for my entire life and my attempts to find my way out of what I’ve always called “my darkness.”

This is also why I resisted signing this book up for nearly 20 years. But then I finally decided to do it—to gather my courage and dive in and see where writing this memoir might take me.

A few weeks after I committed to doing this memoir, my father died.

In my despair about his loss, I thought: I will never—can never—write this book. I railed at myself for signing it up, and the timing of my decision to finally explore the doubt that has plagued me felt like some kind of cosmic joke.

How could I possibly write my way through so much darkness to a something more after losing my dad?

For months, I did not write this book. My original deadline passed, more months went by, and I could not bring myself to begin.

I resisted—even though writing has always been the thing that has saved me—and I knew this. I also knew that if I could just get going on the writing, it might help me to also grieve my dad. And to be with him too.

So one morning, I finally did for myself what I often tell my writing clients and MFA students to do when they are trying to figure out how to begin a book they’ve always wanted to write, or when they are lost in the book they are currently writing and need to remember why they began it in the first place:

I dug for the why behind this book—and decided I’d keep on digging until I found it. I went back to the most basic question of all and forced myself to answer it:

Why had I always wanted to write a book about faith in my life?

The answer wasn’t far away after all—and it came fairly quickly.

Faith was a mystery to me—a mystery I wanted solved.

How could I grow up in a family like mine, with a mother, grandmother, and father who were so sure there was a God and a community of saints all around us, and not be a person of faith myself? Where did my faith go—when, exactly, did I lose it? Why and how? And if I could answer those questions fully, could I somehow get it back? Could I finally participate in this beautiful thing these people who loved me from the moment I was born possessed, yet I did not?

So to force myself to begin, I sat down and wrote the following author’s note, which sets up this memoir like a cold case. I decided to write the memoir as a kind of unsolved mystery—my faith, gone missing long ago, but where, how?—to see if I could finally solve it.

Wishful Thinking Author's Note

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And writing this author’s note, is what helped me to do what had seemed impossible after the death of my dad—to begin. To write again.

To all of you writers reading this, I hope seeing this author’s note is helpful to your own work (or at least, interesting as a method for getting unblocked), and for all of you readers, I hope you enjoy it!