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preface
- Temple University Press
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preface Some people have told me that this book is upsetting and hard to read. The "dirty details" are, for many, not only too dirty but too detailed. Why would one read such things? How could I write them? When I was eleven, and my sister four years younger, we decided to imitate Anne Frank and keep diaries. Many evenings for years afterwards we sat up in our parallel beds, silently writing. I wrote about my adolescent loneliness, stresses at my suburban but tough junior high school, and the striving to grow up and connect. In some sense I wrote the dirty details. I wrote about math, the subject that had captured my imagination and my heart-geometry with its points and lines nudging each other, and algebra with its little x's and y's crawling around like frightened insects. And often I was aware that my sister was in the parallel bed writing her private thoughts. By age fifteen I was also writing about Joe, my first secret crush, too shy even to talk to girls. Soon the pages filled up with John, Bernie, Connie, and then Jeff, an electrical engineering student who eventually made me girlfriend, fiancee , wife, mother-and well spouse. xi Copyrighted Material preface xii When Jeff and I began to fall in love, I showed him my diary. I wanted him to know my thoughts-those I had not yet spoken, and those I was somehow afraid I would forget to tell him. Jeff wanted to know my thoughts. He'd take the diary home and read it, even the parts about him. Or we'd sit at my parents' kitchen table, he reading the diary, me doing math problems. After a while, as writers in love sometimes do, I decided that now that I had Jeff to talk with-to be patient, understanding , and comforting-I could discontinue my diary. Instead I wrote letters to Jeff that resembled diary outpourings . When I finished college and we were able to marry, these letters stopped. Occasions still arose when I realized that I needed to record my thoughts, but I wrote only on separate sheets, nothing as committed as a notebook or diary. Briefly in 1969, nine months before the birth of our first child, Marielle , I began a "pregnancy diary" and in 1973, another temporary diary about the birth of our second child, Arin. In the midseventies, as part of my involvement in the women's movement, I began taking a women's writing workshop. We wrote about our experiences and beliefs; we read to, responded to, and affirmed each other. In particular, some of my ideas about the position of mothers and children in our society were interesting to the other mothers in the workshop. I realized that writing was a way to communicate not only with oneself, and not only with loved ones. I began to see that what I wrote could be helpful to many women-to many people. Copyrighted Material [54.225.1.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:11 GMT) preface XUl I wrote poetry and articles, and I also reactivated my diary. Shortly afterward, two events in the winter of 1977 made diary writing a necessity for me. In October, Jeff was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis. In December, Kerin, our third baby, died at the age of two days. Kerin, not the MS, took over my diary pages, because she was more immediate, more in the present; the MS symptoms were still relatively mild. Eventually, this diary writing translated into "Kerin poems," which I was asked to read at the pregnancy-loss support group to which we belonged. The poems began to appear in bereaved-parent publications. I was invited to read them at conferences on death and dying , and eventually a small book of them was published. I received letters that moved me. "Your books helped me more than both my therapist and my support group." "If not for you, I would not be sane." It seems to me that what I gave my readers-what they so urgently craved-was not only a passionate demonstration of the stages of grief, but the details: trying to get pregnant again, figuring out when I was ovulating. I supplied plenty of details, and some of them could be construed as dirty. Jeff was interested in and proud of my writings about Kerin. He came to my readings and got to know some audience members; he was part...