Memoir

The Vexing Task of Settling on a Book Title

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 6 Comments
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Perhaps my favorite book title of all time.

I met with my client yesterday to review the third version of the book proposal for his medical memoir. This time we went over the chapter summaries, which I had significantly reworked and beefed up to create a better sense of how the completed narrative will flow. We are hopeful that this one will be the clincher, and that our editor/agent will put her stamp of approval on it. But if it does pass final muster, we will face the daunting task of deciding on a subtitle that might instantly hook some editor’s interest, and make that gatekeeper to publication read on.

I was reminded that all authors struggle with this task by a post on a blog I follow, Writer Unboxed, appropriately entitled  “Untitled,” by author Anne Greenwood Brown. I plan to go back to this post and try out some of the amusing techniques she tested in her own endeavors to come up with a title for a new book. Just to give you a hint of what those techniques might involve, think algorithms.

The good doctor and I have been thinking about subtitles for over a year now, having agreed long ago on a title for the original manuscript, one we will keep now for the new book. To come up with that main title, I had researched extensively the titles of new releases from major publishers. I noted the convention of using one or two key words in the main title, and threw out some possibilities. My client did not like my first choice among all the suggestions that referenced his profession as a spinal neurosurgeon. But his wife loved it, and so did the editor, and he finally came around. The double meaning of the word is what clinched it; it is a word that very effectively evokes not only the author’s profession but also his values and the character strengths that allowed him to overcome great adversity in his youth.

Now, before I reveal that main title, and give you a chance to weigh in on a subtitle, let me run a few of the early contenders for title by you. Remember, my client, the ostensible author of this medical memoir, is an internationally known and respected spinal neurosurgeon who contributed significantly to the evolution of his profession. So for starters we played with the word “spine,” another word that suggests courage or strength of character. The subtitle (included on the first example below) reflected the original trajectory of the life story, from birth until reaching the height of his career. That subtitle won’t work for the reworked medical memoir. Hence, our search for a new subtitle. Here are those early candidates for title:

Early Contenders for Title

  1. Spine: A Journey From Refugee to Neurosurgeon
  2. A Spine Man
  3. A Strong Spine
  4. Spine and Spirit
  5. Spine and Soul
  6. Anatomy of a Spine Surgeon
  7. The Miracle Spine
  8. The Balanced Spine
  9. The Whole Spine and Nothing but the Spine
  10. The Honest Spine
  11. The True Spine
  12. The Straight Spine
  13. The Proud Spine
  14. Nothing But Spine
  15. The Spinemaster
  16. The Stalwart Spine
  17. Spine

Well, we eventually ditched the word “spine.” And, whether or not it was simply my repeating to him endlessly my own preference, my author decided, after enthusiastic reactions from friends, family, and the editor, to go with my suggestion. The working title is (drum-roll) . . . BACKBONE.

Now however, we are stymied over the selection of an appropriate subtitle, one that hints at the career of a spinal neurosurgeon who made game-changing contributions to the evolution of spinal neurosurgery. Some of our current attempts are below.

Current Contenders for Subtitle

  1. Backbone: Tales from the Dawn of Spinal Neurosurgery
  2. Backbone: Adventures in Spinal Neurosurgery
  3. Backbone: Pioneering Neurosurgical Inroads to the Spine
  4. Backbone: A Near Decapitation, a Summons from a Queen, and Other Tales from the Annals of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
  5. Backbone: Changing the Face of Neurosurgery, One Vertebra at a Time
  6. Backbone: The Inspired Life of a Neurosurgeon
  7. Backbone: One Neurosurgeon’s Courageous Quest to Conquer the Spine
  8. Backbone: A Neurosurgeon’s Memoir of Brains, Bones, and Battles with the Spine
  9. Backbone: The Triumphs and Defeats of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
  10. Backbone: The Making of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
  11. Backbone: A (Spinal) Neurosurgeon’s Journey, One Vertebra at a Time
  12. Backbone: Courage, Hope, Hard Work and Other Timeless Tools in the Trade of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
  13. Backbone: A Tool in the Trade of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
  14. Backbone: Scaling the Heights of Spinal Neurosurgery in Game-changing Times
  15. Backbone: A (Neurosurgeon’s) Story of Breaking Barriers between Brain and Spine
  16. Backbone: The Life and Game-Changing Career of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
  17. Backbone: The Struggles and Triumphs of a Spinal Neurosurgeon
  18. Backbone: Twists, Turns, and Triumphs on the Road of a Spinal Neurosurgeon

So, is your mind all agog now? Or perhaps it’s numb. Mine sure is. But I’d love to hear your take on the subtitle in the comments section. Give me your top five choices from the above list, or  if you would like to submit your own subtitle—or even suggestions for an entirely new title—I welcome all efforts heartily. Happy Wordsmithing!

Serendipity, Sakura, and the “Scribblers”

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 13 Comments

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I am averaging about a post a month since I created this new blog. Ideas roil in my mind; I catch a small one and pin it to a page of notes; I let the rest flutter into the rosemary bush. But today I am inspired again by writer and blogger Charli Mills at Carrot Ranch. This week’s theme is serendipity, but as always with Charli, other deep currents call for reflection. I resonated deeply with her reflections on taking the necessary time with the writing process:

Take action without holding tightly to outcome. Yes, have a goal, a plan of sorts, but keep an open eye to the unexpected. The agent who turns you down might buy you the time you needed to find a different path to publication. Or, in my situation with Miracle of Ducks, I knew something was off with the intro. My editor noted it but beta readers said it was fine. Because I’ve sat on it all summer, when I read the first chapter to my mother-in-law and her twin, it jumped out at me what was wrong. Truly a gift of sight! Sometimes we need to slow down and this process of writing invites us to do it, but we feel impatient. Fill the slow stretches with other projects. Learn to dance with your writing as if it were a life-long partner not some quickie date at the nightclub.

In my work on a re-write of a book for a retired neurosurgeon (coming on three years now), this slowing down is what I have had to accept. I feel pressure to deliver a completed project, and yet, I have discovered that stretches away from the book give me a fresh and much-needed perspective. These breaks allow me to work out, in those quiet moments while washing dishes or walking or watering the plants, the changes I know are necessary in my experiment with “genre metamorphosis,” that is, transforming my client’s completed life story into a commercially viable medical memoir. There’s much more to Charli’s post today, but her thoughts on writing triggered a long reflection on process, and resulted in a separate post on how that has developed with my current project.

Is Serendipity What You Make It?

But back to serendipity. Defined as a “pleasant happenstance” or “pleasant surprise,” the word has only been in use since 1754, and it rings with the fascination the British had for the exotic lands they so avariciously set out to possess. The English earl Horace Walpole coined the word from the place name Serendip, or Ceylon, inspired by characters in a fabled tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, that were always “making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

We often use this word as a synonym for luck or chance. Of the former word, we often like to say that we make our own luck, and of the latter, that chance favors the prepared mind. It’s with those qualifiers in mind that I think of my own serendipity when it comes to writing. While we may not always see it when it arrives (take Charli’s example of being turned down by one agent as the avenue for another to open the door) or be prepared to accept the prize it brings, it seems in some ways that serendipity may very well be what Walpole originally intimated when he made up the word: equal parts accident and sagacity—or at least sagacity’s low-heeled but respectable cousin, preparedness.

Serendipity and the Writing Group

It was in some ways preparedness that brought me my own serendipitous moment, which came in the form of the flame-haired friend I call Sakura (cherry blossom in Japanese). I met Sakura some four years ago when my sister and I formed a small writing group we called “The Scribblers,” each of us inviting one writing friend to join us. Sakura was then the senior editor at the publication department of the top neurosurgical institute where the man who became my client, Dr. S., had built an illustrious and game-changing career in spinal neurosurgery. A shrewd and gifted science editor, Sakura is also a writer of sensuous and intelligent poetry, one whose high Romantic sensibilities immediately found resonance with my own, and whom I could easily imagine inhabiting Paris in the 20s or the island of Lesbos in the time of Sappho.

Dr. S. had been pestering Sakura for some time with the proposal that she help him write a book. That’s just what my overworked friend wanted to do after editing the dense and convoluted prose of a gaggle of brilliant demigods all day. She had declined, but now, the small size of our group allowing her to become familiar with both my abilities and my dissatisfaction with my job as an academic program director, a kernel of an idea popped in her head. Might she be able to provide a solution to both Dr. S.’s predicament and my own? Six months after meeting Sakura, I quit my day job to take on the project she had declined.

Now, it was serendipitous indeed that I met Sakura. It was serendipitous that I met her at a particular time—just as Dr. S. was intensifying his search for someone to help him with his book. Certainly the opportunity to quit my day job and delve into a full-time writing life was a “happy accident” that I was not consciously “in quest of.” But wasn’t there also some preparedness in the turn of events? Some sagacity in having committed to participating in the writing group to begin with? In seeding the bed in which a writing life might take root and grow? I dare say there was.

A Flash Memoir on Serendipity

The above ruminations were sparked by Charli Mills’s weekly flash fiction challenge at Carrot Ranch. Here’s the prompt:

October 14, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that reveals or explores a moment of serendipity. How did it come about? What did it lead to? You can express a character’s view of the moment or on serendipity in general. Use the element of surprise or show how it is unexpected or accidentally good.

My phone again. A drowned alarm clock palpitating in my purse. No doubt Jill. The dean and her urgencies. Fuck this 24/7 access!

Driving back from lunch. Fumbling for the squawking little warden in my bag. I’ll die in my car some day, I think. Dammit! Missed it. No, the predictable whistle of a text message. Immediacy is Jill’s mantra.

But it’s not Jill. Dear one,” the text reads. “Poss opptnty! Doc needs help w/ book. 30K, maybe more. Talk? Sak

Ahh, sweet little communicator. Cellular herald of new possibilities! Sit in my lap while I ponder the what’s-ahead…

 

 

 

 

From Autobiography to Memoir

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 8 Comments

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So, what about that book you were ghostwriting?  I hear that a lot from friends I haven’t seen in a while. After all, it’s been three years. And it’s true that at times I feel like I’ve been sucked into a black, bottomless hole, or tossed upon some steep Sisyphean slope the peak of which I will never reach. Then again, what did I expect? It’s a book not a sandwich. A book doesn’t have a clear blueprint, or at least if it does (an outline), it is one that has the unnerving habit of morphing even while you are adhering to it fanatically.

The Decision to Jump the Genre Track

I punched out the first version of the book in a year. It was a straightforward life story beginning in childhood and ending with the author’s retirement and reflections on his life and career. I had, as William Zinsser put it in his acclaimed guide, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, imposed “narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events.” Several readers responded favorably, but these were mostly swayed by their fondness for either the author or myself. Then something happened to change our trajectory. (Long and complicated story there, one I wrote about in July.) Brakes were applied to the publishing schedule. Acting on the suggestions of a professional publicist and editor, my client and I pulled back to explore a more commercial version of the story in the form of a medical memoir.

Steps to a Genre Metamorphosis

At that time, I think I had some vague notion that I would be able to simply cut and paste my first autobiographical version into a cohesive new memoir. How wrong I was. What was needed was a complete overhaul. I would have to jettison parts of the book I (and more importantly my client) had loved, and if anecdotes or scenes did not support the memoir, out they would have to go. Following are the steps I have taken these last months in the process of transforming a life story to memoir.

  • Book-ending the narrative: A crucial distinction between an autobiography and a memoir is focus. According to Zinsser, a classic memoir recalls “a particular period and place in the writer’s life.” It is “a work of history, catching a distinctive moment in the life of both a person and a society.” Accordingly, I had to identify new starting and ending points to my story. This being a medical memoir, I would focus on the years my client worked at the top of his field, building the new narrative within strict bookends from the time his reputation took off to his retirement. While I didn’t want to completely abandon important events and key experiences that took place in his childhood or training, I had to find a way to incorporate them through flashback within the new truncated time frame.
  • Building a new chapter sequence: With a clear start and end point, I now went back to the original chapter sequence, pulling out the chapters that took place during this span, and using them to anchor the new narrative arc. Scrivener was helpful in this endeavor, allowing me to easily build the new structure by first importing all the chapters from the original manuscript into the binder of a new project, and then selecting from them to build a new sequence. However, since my client’s childhood and training had taken up nearly half the original book, I was left with only a dozen or so chapters that fit in the new time frame revolving around his career.
  • Identifying events in existing chapters from which to build new chapters: Now I had to explore the chapters that dealt with his career and identify material that I had given less importance to that could be the basis of complete new chapters. This has been tough but edifying . An author makes so many choices focusing on one anecdote here, eliminating another there. Guiding my search was of course the strictures of the medical theme. However, I had to be careful not to settle for “fluff,” minor episodes that did not have enough meat to expand into a real chapter but that I was tempted to use out of desperation to replace chapters I had dumped.
  • Integrating earlier key events through flashback:  A real challenge has been how to retain some really dramatic scenes that on the surface did not directly support the new focus. I could integrate key childhood experiences through flashbacks but only when they supported or related to something that was happening in the new present of the story. The flashback must also be triggered by something happening in the present; there had to be a reason the author reflected on his past when he did. While a number of acclaimed memoirs have served as a good model, I found myself dipping time and again into Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, to see how she accomplished such a seamless shift from the present (the hike on the Pacific Crest Trail) to various points in her past that pertained to and illuminated her struggle.
  • Identifying high and low points: This exercise was one of the first tasks the editor gave me, but it has turned out to be the cornerstone of my approach. Scanning the original manuscript (and working from memory) I created a table with two lists, one the high points/successes in my client’s life and the other the low points/failures/challenges. These I put in chronological order, then referred back to them as I built my new chapter sequence. Those that fit in the main narrative became, in many cases, the basis for a chapter. Those from earlier periods of his life could be included as flashbacks interspersed around the main action. The challenges in particular—and how the author dealt with them—reveal character and motivation, while the successes allow for a release from tension and provide variety and movement to the narration.

A Memoir Takes Form

This process has been slow and sometimes frustrating. Working with so much material (97,000 words in the original manuscript, as well as two dozen audio recordings) often feels like wading around in a flood grasping at flotsam as it floats by. And while I did get a good start on transforming the book into a memoir using the steps above, it was when my editor suggested I hold off on actually doing the rewrite and create a book proposal instead that the new book began to emerge in more clarity. I will be blogging about how creating a proposal expedites the actual writing of a book in an upcoming post.

 

 

Wednesday Word of the Week 6

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 4 Comments

Reading Lolita

Word of the Week 6: Screed

Welcome to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from a New York Times bestseller that Margaret Atwood described as “a literary life raft on Iran’s fundamentalist sea,” Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

I was inspired to return to this poignant and searing reflection on life under Iran’s Islamic regime by two dovetailing events, one personal and one that is playing out its cacophonous and dissonant notes on the global-political scale even as I write. I’ll get to the personal event presently, but that global political reference should be obvious to anyone following the breaking headlines: the so-called nuclear deal reached just yesterday with our long-time swathed and turbaned foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

So, now you rightly ask: What personal connection could Jeanne possibly have with Iran, that fervent hotbed of repression, that evil bullhorn spewing vociferous calls of “Death to America!” for the last four decades? Just this: my husband (aka the Professor) quite unexpectedly received, just two weeks ago, an invitation to teach a 3-day seminar in October to engineering  and social science students in Isfahan, Iran’s third largest city and home to several World Heritage sites. Naturally, the invitation includes the Professor’s wife and partner.

How this invitation came to be is fodder for a much longer post. Suffice it to say that the responses to this bit of news were uniformly ones of alarm. “Iran? You’d have to be crazy to go to Iran.” “Don’t go!” “What, you want to disappear into a dark cell for five years?” My brother went so far as to ask to be added to my will.

Yes, we need to move cautiously as we consider this invitation. As I like to explain to loved ones, we are practicing due diligence in researching the possibilities (including calls to the State Department). But for me, the thought of getting an unvarnished view of the people and culture of Iran, of practicing some citizen diplomacy at this historic moment, fills me with excitement.

I’ve met several Iranians, going back to my teaching days. I gaze now at the the lovely inlaid box an Iranian student gave me in the late 1990s and think of the rich aesthetic sensibility it represents. I reverently turn the pages of an exquisite illustrated volume of the classic Rubaiyat by the 13th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam, a gift to the Professor from an appreciative Iranian attendee at the recent conference we attended in Finland (a nice companion to the three volumes we already own of this work.) I remember my very first exposure to this exotic land when, during my freshman year in college, a couple of Iranian students invited me to their apartment for lunch. I had never eaten yogurt with meat before; it was a culinary epiphany of sorts.

Persian Box

Rubaiiyat

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And then I think of tyranny, of how I know nothing of what it means to experience a loss of my freedom. I think of Islamic morality squads and radical Islam’s war against women and the mysterious way our Iranian friend, a futurist and scholar, regularly disappears for days or weeks at a time from all social media. I think of fanatics and of crowds shouting “Death to America.” I wonder how much and how little I really know about the situation on the ground in that far-off land against which my country has waged a bitter ideological war  all of my adult life.

So, hovering in the space between safe consideration and final acceptance of the offer, imagining with equal parts trepidation and intrigue all the “what-could-be’s,” implicit in such a visit, I return to this week’s word and book. Re-reading select passages should serve as a necessary reminder of just how nefarious the regime under which I may soon place my fate has been. But I think it may just also fill me with an even greater desire to grab at this unprecedented and unique opportunity to visit Iran at this historic moment.

Dr. Nafisi is a professor of Western Literature and essayist who left Iran in 1997. In this braided memoir, she reflects on her pre-Revolutionary days as a student,  her increasingly repressive reality as an academic teaching English literature at the University of Tehran, and on the clandestine study group she led at her home in the final months before she left. Through her vivid descriptions of the eight women who joined her weekly, we witness both the terrible stress of authoritarian rule on young lives and the ultimate futility of such repression to quell the human spirit. In the following passage, one of the young women present explains her vicious jubilation upon hearing news of the death of one of the leaders of the Muslim Students’ Association.

“You don’t know him, Mojgan told me. Next to him Mr. Ghomi is an absolute angel. He was sick, sexually sick. You know, he got a friend expelled because he said the white patch of skin just barely visible under her scarf sexually provoked him. They were like hounds. Then Nassrin jumped in with a screed about one of the female guards. Her searches were like sexual assaults, she insisted. One day she squeezed and fondled Niloofar until she became hysterical. They expel us for laughing out loud, but you know what they did to this woman when she was discovered? She was reprimanded, expelled for a semester and then she was back at her job.”

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a sad and sparkling tale of transcendence over tyranny. It is also a reminder of the critical role that scholars and teachers play in the lives of a free citizenry. I will return to it again and again for Professor Nafisi’s inspiring critiques of the best-loved work in Western Literature, and thrill each time to the layers of thought she unveils.

That’s it for this week. If you’ve encountered ‘screed” in your reading recently (as I have just this morning in the New York Times), consider sharing your thoughts here.

A Dawn Concert for Margaret

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 5 Comments
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Margaret: An indomitable spirit.

Margaret Egger Belisle was her name. Loyal wife, loving mother of five, dedicated nurse, rheumatoid arthritic. She suffered from her illness from just after my birth in the mid 1950s until her death in 1975 at the age of 53.

While I was growing up, I was oblivious to the harsh reality of her condition. It was just was the normal state of affairs. By the time my memories began to stick, she already relied on a cane. Then crutches. When the first wheelchair appeared, it was a hoot to take it for a spin down the hallway of our ranch-style home. Apart from those aids, she was like other working mothers I knew. Off she went to care for her geriatric patients every morning at the nursing home she had established with my father in 1967.

Mother’s disease followed its due trajectory through my high school years, reaching its pitch just as freedom sounded its shrill whistle most insistently in my ear. I was a freshman in college by then, commuting to class from home. I longed to move away. But Mother was still at home, deteriorating in front of our eyes. Not that RA takes a person quickly; it dawdles, inflaming another knuckle here, twisting another joint there, conspiring with a wicked cocktail of drugs to render the body a desiccated skeleton draped in swollen, mottled flesh.

It was the first stroke that put her out of commission. It hit her at dinner. One moment she was hunched at the end of the table forcing down spaghetti. The next, the left side of her body went slack, she slumped, and food fell from her open mouth. Two more strokes followed, successively robbing her of her few remaining comforts: reading, speaking, sharing meals. Like the first two, the third one cruelly refused to deliver the merciful coup de grace.

She languished in the family nursing home through the long summer before my sophomore year at college. I grew accustomed to her limbo state. Like the rest of the family, I visited, but I grew careless, even callous. I wanted to be out in the world, not sitting in that sterile room watching the arthritis tighten the screws, watching her wince with every small shift, trying to decipher her garbled speech. After one visit, I sat in my car in the parking lot raging at God for his abject cruelty. Why, why, why wouldn’t he take her?

The last time I saw her alive may have been the visit that coincided with my brother Jack’s janitorial shift at the nursing home. Jack was the big man of the family. He had been Mother’s arms and legs for several years, lifting her in and out of her wheelchair and bed, in and out of the car. Jack made sure to see her everyday, stopping in several times on his rounds. When he saw me sitting there, he lit in. “Where have you been?” he said angrily. “When was the last time you came down to see her? Your mother’s dying and you can’t be bothered to get your ass down here?”

I think I shot up and went at him, lobbing fervid excuses in my defense, my fervor growing in proportion to my guilt. Then we both heard a distressed, even indignant, sound coming from her bed. I turned. Her hand was raised, her finger pointing at me. Her eyes flashed the old spirited anger. Clearly articulating the words, she said, “I like you.”

Jack got his reward though. The only one down at the nursing home the morning she died, he was the last to see her alive. But even he wasn’t at her side when she breathed her last; he had slipped out to mop another floor. It breaks my heart that she died without Dad or any of her children at her bedside, but it would be even sadder if it weren’t for one small detail. Once we’d all assembled there, it was plain to see. Gone were the traces of pain that had gripped her face for so long. Instead, a peaceful smile graced her lips.

It’s too late now to make amends to my mother. How I wish I could sit by her side now, read to her, play music for her, take her mottled, broken dove of a hand in my own and hold it. But I can’t. I can only roll the memories and regrets around in my head. I can only belatedly offer apologies to the air.

This post was prompted by Charli Mills’s May 13, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that shows a hard place and a connection.

A Dawn Concert

Four a.m. The pain a staccato knock. No going back to sleep. She pushed up on gnarled hands, scooted, let the sharp ache push her into the wheelchair.

She followed the grooves in the carpet, pushed past the girls’ rooms, imagined their young bodies. They looked like her, thirty years ago, before the arthritis made a crippled birch of her.

She parked at the kitchen table. No coffee until Dan rose to percolate it. She waited.

At last a pale lemony light washed through the window. The familiar room emerged. And the concert began.

The robins never forsook her.