When the Laundry is Dirty and the Tea is Hot

Why I chose to write a memoir and include the messy parts.

These are two truths I know: people love gossip, and they love it more when it’s not about them.

I’ve been on both sides of that equation as a novelist who writes fiction about upper-middle class women in a country club neighborhood. My characters deal in gossip, secrets, and maliciousness, and not a single one is likable, and yet my readers love them.

But I didn’t begin publishing those books until eight years after my husband suffered a traumatic brain injury in traffic accident, and my life took a long slide toward rock bottom. At first, my Type-A personality had me running around after him, trying to clean up his messes and protect him from himself. Keeping a “normal” public appearance was my number one priority, and I filled Facebook and my blog with idyllic images and posts of our perfect life as I hid the spiral of chaos surrounding us.

The years that followed James’s accident were consumed by infidelity, a bipolar diagnosis, bad parenting decisions, and so many versions of self-harm and addiction that I’ve lost count. It was ugly, messy, and painful. And honestly, it’s surprising no one ended up dead. People were gossiping, but I was unaware because no one talked about it with me.

I was adrift, alone, and afraid.

Eventually, after years of tears and therapy, I realized the characters in my novels were all versions of myself: a depressed woman dealing with infidelity; a mom looking for love; an embarrassed wife trying to figure out who she is. I had been trying to share my story through fiction, but my true story gnawed at me, begging me to be honest with myself and address the stories being told about me.

I needed to tell a raw and emotional story about how mental illness had attacked my family and me but didn’t win.

As I wrote my memoir Always Yours, Bee my dueling desires to be uncomfortably honest about who I was and simultaneously protective of myself and my marriage resolved. I told my truths and my pain and tore back the picture-perfect social media façade I had nurtured. But after years of hiding what I felt were my faults, I feared how my deepest secrets would be perceived not just by my family and friends, but also the greater public.

And yet, I kept writing because I believed others who struggled with mental illness or infidelity needed to know that they too could climb out of the seemingly unbearable misery. I wanted to be what I had needed: a light showing where the path to recovery started.

I realized didn’t need catharsis or revenge; what I needed was distance to properly reflect on what had happened, and I needed time to make sense of things. Somehow, despite everything my marriage had healed. My children had flourished. And I discovered I wasn’t broken or unlovable.

That was the real story. Good grew from bad.

With Always Yours, Bee I spilled tea all over the white tablecloth and hung it out dirty for everyone to see. I put a face to the pain of mental illness and infidelity and claimed it as my own. I stopped pretending to be what I thought I needed to be and allowed myself to be authentically messy me.

Because this one thing I know: it’s easier to tell the truth than keep up the lies.