I recently finished reading a memoir by Susie Kelly. I didn't know anything about her before I picked the book up. I had been reading mysteries, not very good ones at that, but most of them were free, so I couldn't complain of being robbed. But since I had an equal opportunity to get other genres, also free, from BookBub, I chose to add memoirs and historical novels.
Susie Kelly's memoir, I Wish I Could Say I Was Sorry, was the one of the first memoirs among my new selections. And her story was exactly like what I thought an author's life was supposed to be like. All of Kelly's earlier books, eight of them, involved her adventures either on her own or with her husband and one or more of their numerous pets on travels through France or getting themselves settled in a new home in France. But the memoir I read was the prequel, her childhood story leading through her first marriage and the birth of her two children.
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That may not sound like much of a story, but it took place on two continents. Kelly was born in London. When she was about 8, her family moved to Kenya where, after two years, her parents divorced and she had to choose whether to stay with her father or go with her mother. Because what she really wanted was for her mother to stay, too, she told her father she wanted to stay. Her mother left anyway. Almost immediately her father sent her to school in England where she spent school holidays with his parents who made it clear they didn't want her around. Several years later, her grandparents told her she would be going back to Kenya to be with her father. They also told her he had remarried. By the time she rejoined her father in Kenya, she had a half-sister and a plain-jane step-mother who associated Kelly with her father's first and more glamorous wife, the adulteress. The step-mother also didn't want her around. When she finally was able to see her mother again several more years later, she had hope that she could escape by moving in with her mother and her new husband, but her mother died a week before they were to be reunited. In desperation, she married an unsuitable Italian man whose mother couldn't utter an approving statement about her. They moved back to England and after several years of trying to make things work, he kidnapped the children and returned with them to Kenya. In the end, she was able to get the children back and later remarried, the husband in her other books.
The story is full of all those details that I thought an author needed to be successful: international travel, dysfunctional relationships, drama, and more travel. When I thought about my story, my childhood where we moved across the street when we needed a larger house, where the six of us kids had both our loving parents around us to provide us with both discipline and support, I could almost turn my story into one of woe-is-me, I am so unlucky. I was born into my family in a place and at a time that robbed me of all that I needed to be able to write.
But then yesterday I read a piece in the most recent National Geographic magazine by Garrison Keillor, There is No Place Like Home. Keillor is the best antidote to my woe-is-me blues. For thirty years I have been enjoying his writing about the ordinary, the everyday, his story growing up and still continuing to grow in Minnesota. And his writing is wonderful, beautifully crafted. His stories make me laugh and make me cry. His stories make me feel good about where I come from, about all the people I left behind, about all the people who are still there. The laughter his stories provoke is not laughter at anyone; it is laughter with others about our common condition.
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Thank God for Garrison Keillor. His stories make me realize I have stories worth telling, too. And his mastery of writing sets the bar high.
by Mister_Jack 
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