How to Curate Your Own Life, with Monica Wesolowska

MONICA WESOLOWSKA KNOWS SOMETHING we all need to learn and she is here to tell us all about it. It is how to curate your own life, and if there is a greater skill needed by all memoir writers, I cannot name it. Monica is the author of the unforgettable memoir, Holding Silvan: A Brief Life. It was named a best book of 2013 by both Library Journal and the Boston Globe and, when I first read it, it literally changed what I thought I knew about how to write memoir. Listen in, read along and take notes as we talk about how to curate your own life.

Monica has published her work in many literary journals and anthologies, including Best New American Voices, the Carolina Quarterly and online at Literary Mama. A former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, she has taught fiction writing at the University of California extension for over a decade. She lives in her hometown of Berkeley, with her family.

Marion: Hi there, Monica.

Monica: Hi Marion. So good to hear your voice.

Marion: It’s so great to hear your voice. It’s been a long time. I think we met through the publication of Holding Silvan. I believe I reached out to you after reading it. The book absolutely fascinated me. Absolutely astonished me as it does all readers I think as it chronicles the 38 day life of your first child. It’s beautifully written. It’s wonderfully told. It has a deeply eloquent simplicity. And I read in a Q&A with you that you feel that you didn’t really have a choice when it came to writing it, that as soon as Silvan was born, you started narrating in your head just to understand what was happening.

And I would love to talk with you first off about that, about that voice in our heads and did it frighten you? Did it just clarify things for you? What did it allow you to do when you recognized that you were narrating in your head?

Monica: Yeah. Well, thank you so much first off for having reached out to me when you did, I remember the feeling of having a stranger reach out after the book came out and saying what you just said about how it had touched you. That was very affirming. I was very grateful to my, I am very grateful to my younger self for starting to narrate in my head and for starting to record what I was going through. Because, well, I was already a writer at the time that I was going through this, and it was incredibly difficult time obviously to give birth to a child and instead of experiencing just extreme joy, which was part of what I experienced, also confronting the horror that this child might die. And I found that I didn’t have any framework. I didn’t have any stories in my head to help me think about what was happening.

I’d never read a book about this. I really didn’t know any stories about a situation like this. And I think my brain just necessarily understood that the way I process things is through stories and that I needed to start telling a story to myself to make sense of it. And that initial story was very simple. That initial story was, I have a son and he’s going to die. And I just found that refrain playing in my head, as I tried to understand what that felt like and what it meant.

And as the days went on and what was going on for Silvan became more complicated and he was revived multiple times and put on life support, the story became much more complicated and I had to start thinking about kind of the ethics of keeping someone alive past the point when they should be kept alive. And because I was already kind of narrating in my head, I could start to put that in context for myself at the time to help me make decisions, very hard decisions.

Marion: It’s a remarkable concept. Apparently you started keeping a diary while he was alive, and then just kept going. How soon after his birth did you grab the journal? And what did that note taking do for you and do for that… How did it work with that story in your head?

MONICA: Yeah. My initial instinct actually wasn’t to grab that journal, but it was a writer friend who suggested I do that. Now this is a writer friend who had actually told me she was not comfortable coming to the hospital to come and hold my son. But in the same breath she told me I should be writing about him. And my initial reaction was really horror. I thought, what I need to be doing right now is holding my son. And if you loved me, you would want to hold my son as well. But her words did start to filter into my subconscious. And I realized that it would be helpful to be able to write a few things down. Again, in order to understand what I was going through.

What ended up happening is that I found that any moment that I wasn’t holding my son, I wanted to record exactly what had happened. And I think I was doing two things. One, I was really trying to record kind of what was happening on an intellectual level, the kinds of ethical decisions and medical decisions we were making. But on an emotional level, I really wanted to capture how much I loved this baby. He was my first son. And for anyone who’s become a first time mother, you know how surprising it is really to discover that you love this being more than yourself, that cliche that you would lay your life down for them, it’s extraordinary, it’s biology.

And so I wanted to record how much I loved him and it became urgent because I knew he wouldn’t be here for very long. And so I started, if I wasn’t holding him, I would be recording his smells, the feel of his hair, what his eyes looked like, that kind of thing. And so it was a way to hold him even more than I was just in person, which I was doing all of the time.

Marion: It allowed for some astonishing details. I remember a phrase about his “starfish hands,” and there was something, you had seen him sleeping with his fists next to his head like you do. And then there’s just these remarkable details that you were able to capture that I think maybe gives us, well, I hope, enormous permission to take a notebook in no matter where we are. This seems like it gave you a bridge, it gave you a different place to use the language, but also apparently you put it, you didn’t start the book for, is it eight years after he died? It’s somewhere in that neighborhood. And did you then go back to the journal and grab it or had you been touching it all along?

I know I’m asking a lot about the journal, but a lot of writers use them. You teach writing, I teach writing and people say, now, what do I do with it? And so I’d love to be able to help them see that moment where you went back and got it and said, now I can write a book or I wasn’t writing a book then in that journal, but now I want to take that and make it into a book. So talk about the relationship with the journal after he died and when you went and got it and started making it into a book.

Monica: That’s right. I didn’t think, oh, I’m going to turn this diary into a book someday. In the memoir I kind of talk about the feeling that he needed to be in a book, but I wasn’t actually thinking, oh, this diary will be a book. It was really for me. But yes, as I said earlier, I feel enormous gratitude for my younger self for having kept that diary, because what happened was I thought, because I was a writer, perhaps this story will come out in my fiction someday. And after several years, I started to write a novel about it. And I tried to write that novel and I tried to write that novel. And one day I literally had this very odd thought that I wasn’t getting the pain of this loss into the novel enough. And I thought, I really need to do some research into what it’s like to lose a child.

It was as if I had gained that much distance for myself that I forgot that I was the source material. Yeah. And at that moment, I thought, oh, I know some source material. And I actually had my diary underneath my desk. And I reached down and I started reading it and I had dipped into it over the years just to see if there was something in it that I wanted to share publicly. And my reaction had always been, oh, this is so sad. This is so kind of overly dramatic, this is purple prose. But when I went back this time, I saw something very different. I think I had enough distance, which is so important to writing memoir, that I could see something in it that made it a story, well, I saw a couple of things.

One, I saw how much love and joy there was in it. So I had enough distance that suddenly it was wonderful to dip into it and see Silvan again. But the other thing I noticed was that there was an antagonist, there was a tension filled story in which my son was born. And after learning how brain damaged he was, I started asking questions about whether or not it was fair to keep him alive. And so I had doctors in there who were arguing with us and other doctors who were supporting us and I thought, oh, there’s a story in here.

And this is a story that other people need to know about. This is a story that’s much larger than me. This is a story about how we die in modern America. And seeing that universality of the story made me realize, oh, my diary is now valuable to me as a writer, as a way to write this story that’s much bigger than me, but in a way that contains these incredibly personal details that I don’t even remember. So those beautiful descriptions of Silvan. I feel so lucky that I can hold him in language again, because I don’t think I would remember him that well if I hadn’t recorded it all in language.

Marion: That’s so kind and generous of you to share. It’s a beautiful concept that you can continue to hold them. And the book was published in 2013, and in 2014, I read a piece of yours — it was published in 2014 — a Modern Love column for The New York Times that utilizes part of the story of Silvan but tells a different tale altogether. And I spent a lot of time with my students explaining how one life experience can be utilized in a variety of ways each time, if it’s about something different.

I call that the X factor. But I’d love to hear your version of this. One life experience looked at then, now, later, looked at from here. It produces as much copy as you might be willing to write. So how do you explain that as possible? Sometimes people say to me, no, I already told that story. And I say, oh, no, you told the story about this, but you didn’t tell the story about that. So how do you explain this to the people with whom you work, the writers with whom you work, that you can take one experience and then hash and rehash, or look at it differently? What’s your language around that?

Monica: Marion, actually, your book has been very helpful to me in talking to students about that. I think you talk about it wonderfully well in The Memoir Project.

Marion: Thank you.

Monica: This lens or this focus that makes such a difference in the way that we tell a story. The time after publishing this book was much harder for me than writing the book. Writing the book was a gift that I got to spend time with Silvan again. Publishing it and being out in the world and especially being asked to reframe the story over and over was incredibly emotionally draining actually. That modern love piece was really a wonderful exercise for me because in it what I wanted to talk about was how things were hard in an ordinary way later.

Marion: Yes.

Monica: Yeah. So, I had the experience when I went out in the world with my book of people saying to me, “Oh my goodness, your husband is so wonderful, I wish I were married to him.” I’ve had more than one person say that to me.

Marion: Oh, boy.

Monica: And I thought, that’s not what I intended to do at all. I was writing about 38 days in which my husband and I were incredibly well paired. We worked very, very well together to love our son well.

Marion: Yes.

Monica: But we have an ordinary marriage. And that means we have days, weeks, months that are really hard. And that was especially hard around the time that the book came out and we were parenting young children. And so in that essay, I write about trying to get the kids ready for school and everyone’s grumpy. And the box of books had literally arrived and was sitting in the front hall messing up us getting ready for the day.

Marion: Loved that detail.

Monica: Yeah. So it was a really hard essay to write because I was writing about ordinary life. And that was really my challenge for modern love. But I think it’s just important as you say, to remember that you tell your story in so many different ways, depending on where you’re standing to tell it.

Marion: Yes.

Monica: What you’re trying to understand.

Marion: There are many ways.

Monica: Yeah. We’re always trying to understand-

Marion: There are many ways to tell it.

Monica: Yeah. We’re always trying to understand different things about ourselves in our lives. One would hope. I know in our diaries sometimes we just kind of write the same things over and over. I’m always shocked to look at my younger diaries and realize how I’m trying to figure out the same stuff over and over. But as a writer, I hope that you move on and you try to understand maybe the same thing, but from a different angle. And actually it’s been really fascinating for me-

Marion: Mm-hmm. From a different angle.

Monica: Yeah. it’s been really fascinating for me to move genres actually and look at myself from the totally different angle of children’s picture books, which we don’t have to get to yet. But we’re…

Marion: We’re going to get to them, absolutely, we can’t wait. So let’s just stay with this modern love column for a second because it’s such a totemic thing for people to read. Everybody seems to understand what the Modern Love column is, everybody wants to write one of course. But sort of slapped down on the table and giving people listening to this a chance and of course I’ll link to it. The piece really chronicles the value of the small moment and that beautiful idea of being in the midst of an ordinary life after having been in a cataclysmic event. And there’s a box of books in the hallway to prove it. And I’m quite sure that while marriages may fall apart over the big stuff, they come back together over the small stuff.

One night somebody passes the peas and if touch fingers and somebody laughs at somebody else’s jokes. And I am always saying this to writers, don’t give me the eulogy, show me how you dressed for the funeral and I’ll understand how sad the day was. So how do you advise people to best recognize those small moments that make the big story? The things that you should write down as you’re walking away from something that just transacted between you and another human being or something that you are taking notes in the hospital. What ones are you trying to gather in particular do you think? Those small moment notations.

Monica: Yeah. It was interesting to write that essay around the small moment because I tie it into my kids who are learning every year, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, how to write small moments, how to put details in. And actually right before this phone call, I was volunteering over Zoom in a first grade classroom, working on these small moment details that are so hard for people to believe are important. With my students, I always emphasize that I will be interested in their lives no matter what their lives have been if they give me those small details.

I love for example Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, which seems like a fairly ordinary childhood. And yet the details in it are so vivid that even if they aren’t my details, even if I didn’t live exactly that life, they remind me of things in my life. And that’s the power of those small details, is they give the reader access to something that may resonate for them on a visceral level. I’m not talking about resonating on an intellectual level, I’m not talking about saying something wise that makes someone nod. I’m saying that if you give someone just the right beach rock to hold in their hand, they’ll suddenly remember, “Oh, the first time I went to the beach when I was five and the hat got sucked into the waves,” and suddenly they’re having their own experience along with mine.

Marion: Yes. Oh, that’s good. That’s really, really good. And you speak with such range. You are an editor, you do public speaking. I love the fact that you were just on a call with a first grade class. You’re a teacher. You write fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, essays, and more. And I asked this question a lot of writers, but I want to repeat it here for you because we’re going to move into talking about these two new children’s books you’ve got coming up. But here’s the question, how did you ever dodge that memo that goes out early in a writer’s life that insists that we make a lane and stay in it? Somebody has to have said that to you along the way. And somehow you just said, “No, I don’t think so.” How’d you do that?

Monica: I love that. Yes. I was told as a young writer in front of lots of people at a conference that I could not possibly write in multiple genres. And I was very confused by this because I think many of the greatest writers write in many genres. So why were they telling me this? Clearly writers have a need to tell a story in whatever way it comes out.

I didn’t choose to write in multiple genres. I always wanted to be a novelist. I think as many young writers want to be, I tried to write novels. I have novels in the drawer. I spent a lot of time writing short stories because somehow it seemed that that might be a gateway to novels. And the memoir chose me. When I realized that my novel really just needed to be a memoir, that the only way to get the intensity and the horror and the love into this book was to make it my own story, I started writing it right away. And then I panicked and I thought, I’m not memoir reader, well, how can I write a memoir?

Well, it turns out I had read memoirs. I just never really thought about them as memoirs. I hadn’t made much of a distinction in my mind. So I was happy to join this bookshelf of memoirs. And I love reading memoirs now. And I keep up with them a lot. I love teaching memoir writing. It’s a really profound experience to go through with my students. But I also had had an early love of picture books. And I’d tried to write picture books as a young 20 something person along with poetry, which I think are very tied to picture books. And there was a part of me that thought it wasn’t impressive enough to write picture books, a little voice that said, oh, you need to be a bigger brain than that, where does that come from? I don’t know.

And so I kind of resisted it. And I think after publishing, yeah, after publishing the memoir and being out in the world with the memoir and writing lots of essays, I tried to go back to fiction writing and I couldn’t. Physically, my body would resist. I’d have all sorts of physical pains and aches and I couldn’t sit in the chair and it seemed that fiction didn’t matter anymore to me, as if I told the big story, I’d honored Silvan and what could be bigger than that?

And in the midst of that kind of hell, because I am a writer at core and I wanted to be writing still. Somehow I got an idea for a children’s picture book. I think I was again, volunteering in a classroom for my kids. This was maybe 10 years ago, 13 years ago. And I had an idea for a picture book. And this time because I was already a professional writer, I said to myself, okay, you don’t know how to write a picture book, study them. And I studied them, and I studied them and I started working on that picture book. And then I started having all sorts of ideas for picture books. And I realized that it was, it felt like the right genre because, well, I just recently heard someone say that you write picture books to reach out and hug your younger self. And oh, that really gave me the chills. I thought, oh, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, but I think I am.

Marion: I love that.

Monica: Yeah.

Marion: So you’ve got two coming out.

Monica: I have two coming out. Yeah.

Marion: You do have two coming out. So people say that the children’s books are the hardest of the divisions to break into. Is that true? Is that not true? I’ve just heard it so many times.

Monica: Well, I don’t know what the statistics are, but yes, anecdotally really, really difficult. It was really difficult to find a new agent because the agent I had for my memoir was not really focused on picture books. That took several years. It felt really weird to be kind of starting over again. However, once I found my absolutely wonderful agent, Kelly Sonnack, so far, it has not been hard. I sold two books, the first one at auction, the second one in a preempt.

So I feel, oh my gosh, I have to knock on wood. But I feel as if I found a genre that really is working for me right now, I can’t say I don’t want to write for adults again because I do. But I’m really excited to be writing stories that I can read to children. It’s so… What a shift. It has been an incredible honor to be read by adults and to receive the kinds of fan letters I receive for Holding Silvan. Very, very moving.

My book has helped people survive their own losses. It’s helped people talk about mortality. But I got to go and read a draft of my forthcoming picture book to a classroom of second graders. And I just loved how smart they were in terms of identifying what’s going to happen in a story. And, oh, he’s going to find a friend, that kind of thing. So…

Marion: The enthusiasm. So is that Leo Plus Leah that’s coming out by Scholastic? Is that the first one?

Monica: Yeah, that’s right. That’s the first one.

Marion: And so working with an illustrator has got to be a whole new thrill in itself. But why don’t you just give us the one sentence synopsis of it so we can go stand by the bookshop door.

Monica: Yeah. So it’s called Leo Plus Leah. Leo is a little boy who doesn’t really like to talk. He prefers counting things and he eventually meets a little girl named Leah who doesn’t really like to talk, she likes to draw things. And what connects them is a math pattern called the Fibonacci Sequence. A book is written in that pattern. So the words accumulate page by page based on the Fibonacci Sequence.

Marion: That’s so cool. And that’s going to be so fun for your illustrator to illustrate, my goodness. So that’s going to be out in ’22 and then you’ve also got Elbert in The Air, which is coming out from Dial. So what does Elbert explore?

Monica: Elbert is a boy who floats into the air at birth and his mother supports him even though no one else in the town does.

Marion: It sounds like you made the proverbial bagel there, Monica, in terms of the little boy who does something that maybe is very surprising and brings out so much. That’s fascinating. When you get the idea, and I know we have to wrap this up, but I can’t leave this without asking. You get an idea and it seems like, “Ooh, that’s good.” Do you try to talk yourself out of it or do you try to talk yourself into it? I mean, a lot of us think, well, that’s too crazy, there’s a kid who floats in the air or that’s too crazy basing a book on the Fibonacci Sequence. Just tell us about that first, second. Do you push the gas or the brake initially when you have an idea?

Monica: Yeah. I think it’s important to do neither at first. Actually I have a lot of ideas that come and I just have to let them sit there for a little while before I decide. I decide when I feel this kind of stubborn urge to keep going. In fact, I would say that almost everything I’ve written has been in response to feeling that perhaps I shouldn’t or I can’t. And that stubbornness, when the idea keeps returning to me means it is something that interests me enough to make it through the incredibly long haul that is writing a book all the way to getting it into the world.

Marion: Well, you just keep on being stubborn, please because we love everything you do. Thank you Monica.

Monica: I’m so excited for you to see my new books. Yeah.

Marion: I can’t wait.

Monica: Thank you. It’s been very fun talking to you.

Marion: Well, the author is Monica Wesolowska. The book is Holding Silvan: A Brief Life. You can see more on her at monica wesolowska dot com. I’m Marion, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. Subscribe wherever podcasts are available. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com and take a class with me on how to write them more. And thanks for listening.

Want more help? I am a memoir coach, memoir teacher and memoir editor. Come see me in any one of my online classes.

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