I am in an abusive relationship again. This morning was the first time it occurred to me to label it as such. Not a lover or husband, or friend, but the memoir. My own. A book I have been writing—too embarrassed to confess for how many years. And like one of these kinds of relationships, it’s been on again off again. I have finished a tweaked and polished draft, some of it quite good but there seems to be a problem.

So, the other day I’m sitting in C’ville Coffee with Susan, Mitzi, and Nancy. We were discussing Abigal Thomas’s memoir, A Three Dog Life. The conversation veered into our memoirs and how we felt about them. I spoke of mine and how discouraged I had become after a comment from an editor. Even though she writes, “your memoir is glamorous and gritty, painful and exciting, personal, often archetypal—it has everything a memoir needs (plus Hollywood!) but under the heading “Trudy’s Personality” she writes: “You are the main character in this story—so we need to get to know you better. I don’t think the Trudy on the page always corresponds to the Trudy with whom I have come to know. You are a warm and compassionate person, charming and witty and fun. But if I were to describe the person in the bulk of this story, I would say she is depressed, frustrated, angry, smart and hurt (always smart and creative!) The Trudy on the page isn’t always sympathetic, sometimes she seems mean.”

Mean? Good heavens.  How did this happen?

One of the questions we ask in the memoir group: Do we feel the author is being honest? Some memoirists write themselves to look good, conspicuously so. What happened to me in the memoir? I’m making myself unlovable. Unsympathetic. . . . the kiss of death in Hollywood or used to be. I can still hear my late husband, a director, while reading a script, shout, “Who are these people and why should we care?”

From my memoir: Why does my persona seem so dull up against characters such as my mother and husband. I’m not dull when I tell their stories, but when I write as the first- person narrator, the “I” seems flat. Uninteresting and undefined. I am dull, because I’m not interested in me, but in the glamorous ruins I’ve attached myself to.

After that editorial shock, I lay in bed in the gray barely morning light seeping through the panes, and suddenly MORTALITY loomed large. The overwhelming thought: I am going to die and I’m going to die without finishing this book.

A week or two of overwhelmed-ness and then I had a little talk with myself. Writers come to my writing retreat carting reams of editorial notes and umpteen dozen drafts and have to do this very thing. Write and rewrite. Why am I moaning and groaning. Get a grip, girl.

In the coffee shop, Susan suggested it may be because I was hiding when I was writing myself in the memoir. She suggested that I just begin writing a piece on my discouragement about this. What was happening in my relationship to my memoir.

I did hide when young. I remembered the shame I felt about myself, my family’s weird religion, and my mentally ill mother. Hiding was my defense. I hid in the corner of the classroom, hoping not to call attention to the shabby hand-me-down clothes and when the last bell rang, I’d slip out the school doors and duck behind the parked cars, creeping my way home, praying no one would see where I lived­—in a scraggly run-down rental duplex. To be invisible was to be safe. I hid my personality from an unpredictable, jealous, bi-polar mother. To avoid punishment, I shut down my personality. That was then.

It seems, while writing the memoir, I have retreated back into the hiding child.

This summer while traveling in Italy, I wanted to be free of the memoir, the expectation of working on it. But in an Airbnb on Via de Negri, I surprised myself when I wrote: I’m missing my memoir. It was a distinct and unexpected emotion. The missing part. To be separated, if only for a few weeks, from the memoir, a troublesome relationship, as it were, felt similar to missing a real person, an old flame, a loveable talkative, fascinating, noisy, high-maintenance still very much alive somebody.

And now back in Virginia, I don’t lie in bed thinking about death so much anymore.

Trudy Hale is Streetlight Magazine‘s Editor-in-Chief. Born in Memphis, she lived a somewhat chaotic and semi-glamorous life in Hollywood, married to a director and raising their two children. She moved to Virginia and opened Porches Writing Retreat in Nelson County, a retreat that supports and encourages writers of all stripes, regardless of age or checkered past. You can find out more about her on www.porcheswritingretreat.com.