I said, “No former classmates in the audience, tonight, which is always a plus.”

“You’re almost in your mid-forties, Art. You need to let those high school grudges go.”

I laughed. “Says the person who still complains about when she was a freshman and her senior brother let his friends make fun of and embarrass her at a high school dance.” It was kind of mean to bring that up, though I didn’t do it to be mean. I took an odd sense of comfort from listening to a seventy-year-old (one who had lived a full life, a life blessed with a roof always over her head and loving, if not dwindling, family and friends, but a life certainly not free from upheaval, tragedy, loneliness, and disappointment) remembering the slights and cruelties of her youth with clarity and purpose.

“Well, that was an asshole thing to do. They were all assholes.”

“They certainly were.” I poured the rest of her wine bottle into my glass so that she wouldn’t have to finish it alone.

“Whatever happened to that friend of yours? Mary? No, Mercy.” She asked me like she didn’t know her name, like she didn’t ask me about her every six to eight months.

I said, “I don’t know.”

“Are you still working on your memoir?” novel

“Oh yeah.” Seven years and an untold number of rewrites. I never spent more than a week away from the manuscript. Some days I wrote one sentence and crossed out one hundred. Other days the ratio flipped. I started writing it because it felt like the only way to pick through the rubble of everything, and I didn’t know what else to do. I discovered writing allowed me to turn off my yammering brain. Well, I didn’t turn it off, more like I could trick my brain out of living and perseverating in the anxious now and the doomy what’s-next. Even though the past was full of regret, ridiculousness, and fear, at least it had already happened. I knew what I would find, so I could control it, etch it out onto paper, and then I could do whatever the hell I wanted with it. I could examine the worst with a magnifying glass or bury it between the lines. And ultimately, I could destroy it if I wanted to. There were times when I fantasized about printing everything I’d written and burning it, turning all the ghosts to smoke.

“Where are you?” Mom asks.

“Huh? I’m here, in the kitchen?”

“No, in the book. What part of your life are you writing about now?”

“I’m up to … right now, actually.” I tapped a finger on the kitchen table.

“Oh wow, that’s great. Does that mean you’re done?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You can’t write a memoir novel about things that haven’t happened to you yet. It sounds like you’re done to me.”