My Stories Update

I have finished the first draft of My Stories. In an earlier posting here, I talked about the difficulties for a novelist trying to write a memoir. Out of the imagination into reality. A comedown that takes a bit of working through. At one point, the answer seemed to be to intersperse the lived world with the world in my head. In other words, have eight pages of Cora, an elderly actress so self-centred that she sees everybody as an audience, including her children. Or Henry, who for just thirty minutes transforms the girl in his office into the only person he can ever love. These alternated with eight pages of how I first saw bomb creators in London when I was five, and walked through a minefield on the Sussex cliffs when I was six. Or survived a man with a gun entering our home on Sierra Alta Way, Hollywood. Or visited the Dubai woman’s prison when attending the national literacy festival there. The trouble was, early readers preferred the stories of my own life. So then I reconsidered. And now I have a first draft.