THE GOLDEN EGG

A tad wiped, writing-wise, from the week.  I'm up to 23 chapters in a memoir about my mother's last six years, which is to say, our new life together when she moved in with me after being widowed.  Intense -- such that I ended up as well spinning out a 3,000-plus short story from the experience.  In fact, I just sent that short story out as a submission yesterday.  It's the first short story I've written in months, actually, years.

Synchronistically, my post this week at SitWithMoi is on MY VERY FIRST BOOK!  Yes, a historic occasion (hah) ... and it's a book in which my mother played such a key role since I wrote it when I was about two years old.  If you want to see my FIRST BOOK, check it out HERE.  Literary criticism welcome for my newbie writing efforts (heh).

Okay, back to the memoir.  As you might glean from the title, it takes a toll to write -- but the poet does what the poet must do.  It's working title is

SELF-LOATHING AND THE GOLDEN EGG: A Mourning Diary

The sub-title was inspired by the title of Roland Barthes' book that he scratched out after his mother died--its title is MOURNING DIARY.  This Slate review has an excerpt that indicates why I'm empathetic with this book (even though I'm only on Page 2 as I write this -- but, the fragments from page 1 and page 2 are so harrowing I have to pause.  It's so unusual for me -- reading so ... slowly):

It is eminently Barthesian that Mourning Diary isn't a book one reads in a traditional sense but rather a questioning space one enters, imagining what happens in the interstices. Barthes espoused the idea of what he called a "readerly" rather than a "writerly" literature, in which the reader must actively interpret the text, rather than passively follow an explicit explanation or narrative. His mode was one of interrogation more than explication; grief works in a similar way.

Onward....into this questioning space.