Paris is my obsession, has been since I was a young girl. I think it was the Madeline books that sparked it, way, way back…
I wrote a memoir about 13 years ago, set mostly in Paris. When I read the manuscript now, oh lord, how I cringe! You can hear me cringing from the other side of the planet. But you know what? It was never meant for publication so who the hell cares?
What it was meant for was healing and it really helped in so many ways.
The memoir was written under the working title of From There to Here: via Paris and it detailed the period of my life from seventeen to twenty-three.
When I look back on that six year period I wonder how the hell I survived! It was a crazy time when I was battling strange medical issues and a depression that just wouldn’t lift. The doctors thought I had a rare form of hepatitis, but it turned out to be a severe gluten intolerance and fatty liver. Happy days…
Then, right in the closing weeks of my senior year at school, I met my birth mother. I was more emotional than a tired toddler and no-one around me had a clue how to deal with it.
Cue emotional roller-coaster ride…
After attending university, and within two days of starting a stressful new job, I began treatment for early stages of cervical cancer and only months later, lost my high-school sweetheart in a motor vehicle accident. We’d been married for just nine weeks.
I was 22 and barely hanging on by a thread.
It was hell at the time, but nearly two decades later I was able to find a bit of humour, not in the situation, but in my response to it all.
Sometimes life is fantastic. Sometimes life is awesome. And sometimes life throws us a curve ball, or to use the Aussie term, a hospital pass. I thought life as a newly-wed trying to repair a dodgy cervix, cope with the new in-laws, and manage an off-balance relationship with both of my mothers was a struggle. When the shit really hit the fan, this naïve young woman was forced to grow up quickly, and not at all gracefully.
This is my story. It’s got a little bit for everyone. It’s a story for anyone who loves Paris. It’s a story of hope that may offer some help others who’ve had dramas and think that life may be out to get them. It’s got everything; humour, romance, even a bit of horror, and that was really just my travel wardrobe.
This story won’t solve all your problems but it might just help you to avoid the tragedy of wearing stretchy bike pants with Doc Martens in Paris.
“We don’t read to know what happens, but how the writer processed what happened.”~ Catherine Lanser
I’ve begun dancing with my own story again, but this will be a far different book. I want to capture the happy ending, not the sad beginning, and it will be a softer story. Even though there is humour there, I was angry when I wrote that memoir. That was how I coped with anger and sadness then. But now I want to show the reader how my love for Paris has helped me through the bleak times and how the city I love has been there to celebrate the best of times.
I am writing it under the working title of Remembering Paris and I hope it will be released for my 50th birthday as we celebrate at a rooftop bar overlooking the Eiffel Tower
Quote of the Day…
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