The true purpose of memoir is to transform your tired old narratives into new meaning. In Boundless, my forthcoming memoir, I find personal liberation and a way to reinvent my own story about myself.
My memoir, Boundless, is nothing but a house of cards.
Comes a moment in “Alice in Wonderland,” when Alice cuts through all the illusions. At this point in Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice has been stretched and shrunk, vexed (Mad Hatter) and further vexed (Red Queen), plus played croquet with a deck of cards and sleepy flamingoes, which is probably not the look she was going for.
“Why, you’re nothing but a pack of cards!” Alice bursts out when she is put on trial, and when she does, the whole house of cards tumbles down on her. All the animals in her storied jury revert to their unmagical selves—mere unenchanted mice, frogs and birds. The cards swirl in a storm above her head.
None of this is real. None of this matters.
The subterfuge of memoir: No more old stories
If you sympathize with the trouble the narrator of Boundless gets in—that would be me! I must like trouble!—if you empathize with the emotional box she is in—that would be me! My own emotional enemy!—then my work here as author is done.
My subterfuge is to make you think that all those things the narrator needs to be right in her life so she can be happy actually really matter. I want you to get caught up in it, maybe even root for her, invest a few more pages of reading with her—only so you can see how you get caught up this stuff, too!
The true purpose of memoir is to transform old narratives into new meaning. To those false narratives and outdated stories, I say, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” It takes a committed meditation practice and the alchemy of creating a literary work, but it works!
Boundless is a story of personal liberation, about regaining your emotional agility and reinventing your own story about yourself.
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Boundless is available for pre-order!
My memoir about how we are always becoming someone new is arriving with perfect timing -- on a day of rebirth, Winter Solstice, which happens to be my birthday. Mark the date -- 12.21.2024! Read about it here. Get on the pre-order list here.
Order it here!
BOOKSHOP - proceeds go to Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque
I wrote bits of Boundless at FeelLove Coffee in Springdale, Utah, near the entrance of Zion National Park, which celebrates Alice in Wonderland with this fun sticker.
My super-sad, sweet love story, with a touch of tragicomic
Chapter after chapter, I relentlessly pull you into this old narrative that I intend to bust.
It’s a sweet sad love story about my twins emptying the nest and going to college anywhere-but-here—I am a single mother who always poured all of myself into their future and never in mine.
It's a tragicomic drama about the last days in the dying print journalism business that has sudden and cruel consequences—I was a journalist and magazine editor who believed I was making a difference. It had to get worser and worser, as Alice would say, until I could see. It had to get so absurd that the only recourse is to stab yourself—or laugh.
“Things are worse than ever,” Alice proclaims, “for I was never so small as this before, not ever!”
Then it gets worse: “As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt water.” Two seconds later, she is drowning in a pool of her own tears.
As she said, worser and worser.
I relished my two identities as mother and journalist. That’s how I found my happy. It’s how people saw me. I believed this was why people liked me. All of that felt right and good.
Naturally, when you build the container for your life, you want to keep it. You’ll fight to keep it, even to the point of unreason.
All the useless things
Boundless is a story about being stripped of the core of your identity—and I’ll just say here, most of your possessions. That summer when I moved across the country and back in one season, I lived without things—and realized I didn’t need things. A chapter near the end, titled, “Useless Things,” goes full-grenade on the house of cards and all the emotional furniture I’d stored in it.
Every construct I ever had about who I was and what I owned, what I needed to be happy and whether I was taken care of—falls away.
The True Self, the one to which we can do no harm
It takes one thousand cuts of the knife for it all to fall away, and that’s why I say Boundless is a story about discovering the True Self, the one that never can fall away. The spiritual teacher Thomas Merton makes the distinction between the False Self, which is merely a poor substitute for the True Self, our deepest and eternal truth. You might think of the False Self as the facade. It is a necessary container for our lives—the False Self is useful—but it is not who we are.
The True Self is the one to which we can never do harm. This is what Merton was getting at when he wrote that we must die to ourselves—completely lose ourselves—to find ourselves. It’s the way we find personal liberation from all that troubles us—it’s the path to transcendence. When we live in the True Self, we live fully and freely.
But first you have to arrive at your own little point of nothingness, which is what I did in Boundless.
In one scene, when I’m living on the rarefied air of nothing more than my hour-by-hour breath, I come to this:
Slivers of me were everywhere, but I was nowhere. Except here, standing at this pearl-gray wall in the loft, staring at sticky notes for my novel. Here, the days in Saratoga dwindling to countable, still no destination known, I read my writing on the wall. Here, it seemed that every atom of blue light from the doughnut store, every leathery grain of dirt kicked up from the track, every leaf and every swatch of blue sky, every bit of stardust that spun in the galaxy, all of it had collected in and around these boxes, my writing desk. The light that fell here at all times of the day, where the words were. All of it seemed to reverberate from this center, this place that greeted me every morning, where the dead and the living seemed to find me but not one of them knew my name. I was reduced to this: ink and paper. Words, and a voice.
Hello, I’m Carolyn Dawn Flynn. I am these words. Thank you for listening to this voice.
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I wish you all the best with your memoir!