Christmas memoirs

Getting tangled in my own tinsel.

I didn’t publish a Substack last Sunday, and I’m late this week, because I’ve been writing a Christmas song with Jack instead. It will be released later this week, so that’s got me feeling very festive. Writing lyrics is a joyous diversion, a hit for the creative reward centre which energises and motivates me while I’m working on the longer haul of my memoir.

With this uplifting side quest completed, returning to my hefty manuscript feels like rummaging around in the loft for the Christmas decorations. I know the sparkly bits are in there somewhere, but I’ve got to dig around in a lot of unnecessary junk to find them.

I was up in loft this weekend (literally) and we decorated the tree yesterday. I’m thrilled that my 15 and 16 year old boys are still up for it. We found the bauble shaped like a Christmas pudding, a thoughtful gift from my friend Becky a few years ago. It opens up, so you can pop something special inside. Last year when we took the decorations down, we all wrote a wish for the year ahead, before carefully wrapping the bauble and packing it away again. Yesterday, when we opened it up, I found the postage-stamp sized piece of paper on which I’d written:

I hope I finish my book this year 02/01/24

Not all Christmas wishes come true, apparently. But to be honest, there hasn’t been a huge amount of writing going on in recent weeks. There’s been thinking, for sure, and therapy, and reading, and crying, and note making, and hot flushes, and napping, and memoir group, but not so much of the old scratchy-scratchy pen-to-paper. My job at the moment is to rework the synopsis for the book. I’ve promised my memoir group I’ll do it, so I will. The last synopsis I wrote is over a year old, but as the idea continues to evolve all the time, it needs updating.

The idea with a synopsis is to capture the essence of the book, its hook, themes, story, tone and why anyone should care about any of the above, in no more than a page or two. I’m trying to take the approach I use with my clients when I’m helping them to get clarity around the foundations of their brand. What can we get rid of, where does the magic really lie, why does it matter anyway? It’s hard to do for yourself, and harder to do with something as big and messy as a memoir. Imagine looking at all your favourite Christmas decorations, sentimental and a bit crushed, and deciding which are for keeping and which are for chucking out (oh, and you can only keep 500 words worth). I’m so close to the material, and there’s so much of it, that I’m tangled in my own tinsel.

So, the purpose of this post today is to help me pick out the ideas that sparkle for me, that come direct from my heart and make my book what it is. That will be the foundations of my synopsis. In no particular order:

My body and I are a team, we’re in this together.

I try to experience my body from how it feels on the inside, rather than judging how it looks from the outside.

My intuition is the voice of my body, learning to listen to it is a practice.

My body will always be changing, there is no fixed or correct version.

Creativity is my life force, it is witnessed and made in my body.

I feel better when I’m in nature or around natural things.

Movement is medicine.

I believe in these ideas, and the magic they bring to my life. I hope I can tell the story of how I discovered them in a way that is inspiring and entertaining for other people to read. This is my wish. I hope I finish my book next year. I will keep writing.