Writing Lessons: Writing About Friends

WHEN I HEARD that Mardi Jo Link had another memoir out I was overjoyed. After all, her most recent book, Bootstrapper, From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm was as much fun to read as the title promised it would be. And now we’ve got The Drummond Girls: A Story of Fierce Friendship Beyond time and Chance, and at least from where I sit (and read) all seems right with the world. I invited Mardi to write a piece about how this book came about, and the choice of writing about friends. Here it is.

Friend: A Memoir in Six Letters

By Mardi Jo Link

Friend me! Two words social media has thoroughly absolved of meaning.

You can friend a bag of potato chips, a lawn mower, and a fifth of cinnamon-flavored schnapps. You can even friend a box of Tampax.

You can “friend” your insurance agent, the neighbor you don’t like, and the stranger messaging you from across the world who, “just viewed profile and think you lovely happy looking woman yes?”

I confess I do thoroughly enjoy social media; it has connected me in sincere ways to thousands of readers I wouldn’t otherwise have interacted with. And yet the word “friend” is altogether something else; a noun not a verb. Six letters conveying a rich world of meaning into which only a few have entered. I hope you have a world like that, too.

The relationship between eight very different women, friends all, provided the emotional framework for my newest book, The Drummond Girls: A Story of Fierce Friendship Beyond Time and Chance. In 1993, when I was “a 31-year-old wife and mother of two, a bar waitress with a college degree,” I was invited to go along on a girls’ party weekend.

I did have dreams of being a published writer back then, but not a one of those dreams involved writing about my own life. No, I was going to be a serious journalist. More specifically, my publication dreams did not include writing about waiting tables at a bar, leaving my husband and young children for the weekend and going off with my co-workers to drink too much, drive in the woods at night looking for bears, and silently ponder my lack of close friends.

But then I accepted their invitation, got into Linda’s rusty red Jeep, and rode with them across the Mackinac Bridge, through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and onto a car ferry, until we arrived upon a rocky hunk of mythic northern wilderness.

And the next year, we did it again.

And again.

And over and over, every autumn for a quarter of a century. The same weekend, the same island, the same women. The oldest Drummond Girl will celebrate her seventieth birthday this year and you know what? We’re still doing it.

“When are you going to write our story?” the girls asked me, after my first memoir, Bootstrapper, was published in 2013.

By then, I had taken a turn at being a serious journalist. I’d published three investigative crime books, one of which spent several months on the New York Times Crime & Punishment list. I had studied for and received my MFA in creative writing, my first memoir had been well-reviewed, and I’d won several awards. I well understood that personal writing is no less valuable, or difficult to do well, than serious journalism is, and yet I’d still never considered writing about my friends.

Drummond Island was for living life, not for writing about it.

I tried to explain to my non-writer friends there wasn’t just one Drummond story, there were eight. I tried to explain that by writing about our trips, some of what had been private would be made public, which could have unpredictable consequences. I tried to caution them, but they would not hear of it. And here’s the kicker: One Drummond Girl does not say no to another Drummond Girl. Ever. I could certainly not say no to all of them!

And so, our friendship is now chronicled in the pages of a new book, July, 2015, from Hachette’s Grand Central Publishing. The best part? Writing The Drummond Girls has allowed me to not share my most personal work with my very best friends, and readers, it has allowed me the luxury of re-living every minute of it. Serious journalism just can’t compete with that.

Author bio

Mardi Jo Link is a New York Times-bestselling author of two memoirs and three non-fiction accounts of historic Midwestern murders. Her first memoir, Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm was named a Michigan Notable Book, a Great Lakes, Great Read, received the Bookseller’s Choice Award, as well as the inaugural Housatonic Award for Creative Non-Fiction. Academy Award-winning actress Rachel Weisz has optioned the film rights. Mardi studied journalism at Michigan State University, received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, and is a columnist for her hometown paper, the Traverse City Record-Eagle. Her latest work, The Drummond Girls: A Story of Fierce Friendship Beyond Time and Chance was just released by Grand Central Publishing. She lives with her husband in northern Michigan on The Big Valley, the small farm featured in Bootstrapper.

The Drummond Girls, an excerpt

The publisher requests you visit its site for an excerpt of The Drummond Girls. Enjoy.

HOW TO WIN A COPY OF THE BOOK

I hope you enjoy Writing Lessons. Featuring well-published writers of our favorite genre, each weekly installment takes on one short topic addressing how to write memoir.

It’s my way of saying thanks for coming by.

Love the author featured above? Did you learn something in the how-to? Then you’ve got to read the book. And you can. I am giving away one copy, and all you have to do to win is leave a comment below about something you learned from the writing lesson or the excerpt. I’ll draw winners at random (using the tool at random dot org) after entries close at midnight Monday, August 10, 2015. Unfortunately, only readers within the US domestic postal service can receive books.

Good luck!