Full Circle and Finishing Touches – Or How I Wrote My Book

Sad Cafe

Two years ago I sat in a café in Trieste and penned a few pages that I thought would help me get over an ill-conceived love affair. It was a self-deprecating and funny article on expectations and the myth of happy endings. At least I thought it was funny.

“Love the article, but don’t you think the title is a little negative?” friends would tactfully ask after reading the piece.

“Okay,” one friend said after waiting a decent amount of time, “who are you and what did you do with the real Cat?” The Cat he knew had been replaced by some clone he didn’t recognize.

At the time, I was riding a tsunami of emotions and getting swept away in the undertow of a minor depression. This optimistically idealistic girl was drowning in her own pool of sorrows.

All that was left was a bitterly disappointed, sad and cynical woman. You could tell from the original title of my article, “Ain’t No Such Thing as a Hollywood Ending.” where my head was at during those post “part-him” days.

The questions haunted me. Why did it have to end this way? How had I missed the signs? How could I have been so stupid, so blind? Why?

I remembered the innocent early days before friendship blossomed into romance, I remembered flying to Trieste for the very first time to be with him. As the plane crested the Alps and the clouds danced around their peaks, I looked at the blue sky and said a silent prayer. “God,” I said, “please just hold my hand.”

But like some distracted parent in the mall, God let go, and I got lost.

I got lost for months and months. I was angry and sad. I couldn’t understand why, after I had asked for some backup, God hadn’t listened, and so I stayed angry and sad. From the wellspring of those feelings, I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, continuing to ask why, but never getting any answer.

Some months later, feeling a bit better, I reworked the article for the e-zine More.com, and it was featured it as a lead article in the dating and relationships section. The article’s new title, “Between Marriage and Menopause,”  resonated with a lot of the e-zine’s readers. Later, it appeared in my blog and got the same reaction.

Along the way, I had gotten into the habit of writing as a distraction. Before I knew it, I had written 200 pages and had planted the seeds of an idea for my femoir, Any Color but Beige. 

Two years and three drafts later, I am back at my café in Trieste, putting the finishing touches on the final version of the book. I have come full circle. The old Cat may be gone but the new and improved Cat who replaced her now realizes that if it weren’t for this experience she wouldn’t have written her book.

And now she knows why.

Advertisement