Books as Vessels, Memoir and Non

It seems like decades since I wrote memoir, though one might argue (and indeed some have) that blogging is memoiring, too. I tussled with the genre, ultimately let it go, moved onto poetry, history, fable, and also the YA novels that I have been writing for HarperCollins.

What I have never relinquished, however, is my belief that memoir's highest purpose is to put into place, for all of time, the people, geographies, and ideas that have earned a permanent vessel. In Still Love in Strange Places, my third book, I wrote about my husband's birthplace, El Salvador—the wars, the coffee farm, the people of Santa Tecla, my marriage. I wrote and researched and photographed for more than ten years, and in the final weeks of my work on that manuscript, a terrible earthquake shook Santa Tecla to the ground. Still Love had become the vessel for that which was no more.

In my novels, I look for ways to keep the true alive as well. To celebrate an English teacher who mattered (Undercover). To honor a young man named Nick, whom I have watched grow up over these past 13 years (House of Dance). In a book coming out next June (Nothing but Ghosts), each important person bears the name of someone important to me—my nieces and nephews, for example, my editor, Jill Santopolo (whose doppelganger is actually a young, smart, patient, curly-headed blond named Danny Santopolo). In The Heart is Not a Size (which I've been editing of late), there is a young man named Drake, who is fashioned after K., the rising poet with the enormous heart whom I sometimes write of in this blog.

Our first responsibility is to readers, of course. But I have discovered that I write truest when I am writing from the truest corner of my heart.