When I was little, my mother delighted in telling me the story she was going to write someday, in her book. She was going to use all her experiences, and everything she’d learned about all the people she knew, and write a novel. I always loved when she’d start telling me about it, because somehow just talking about it seemed to make her happy. What a wonderful thing it must be, I thought, to write something so beautiful! We were all going to be famous and rich, she’d promise. And I believed it; just talking about it made her so happy. I couldn’t even imagine how happy we’d all be when it came true.
As I got older, I would get impatient if she began talking about her book. After all, even then I knew that if you were going to be a writer, you had to write, not talk about it. Somehow, she never did.
But I did.
A couple of miracles started my writing career. The first, my newborn daughter, only weighed about three and a half kilograms. If I hadn’t lived through the unique experience of having my first baby in Japan, I would never have written—and sold—my first article about that experience.
But she was only the catalyst; ten more years of “ifs” would happen before the birth of my first book. After that first miracle, if we’d chosen to vacation closer to Japan instead of coming back to California, where I happened to go to a writers’ conference . . . If the editor I met there hadn’t been a friend of a woman who, many years later, heard about the orchestra I conducted . . . If she hadn’t happened to be too busy that day to make it to her own interview with the publisher, and if I hadn’t just happened to call her that day, and she hadn’t offered me her interview spot . . .
. . . years and years of “ifs” . . .
. . . then I never would have written and published that first book.
Which became the second book, then the third . . .
The list of “ifs” is so long that I can’t think about it without amazement. Surely there’s another explanation, more reasonable, rational, I always tell myself whenever I think about how I got started on this strange path of sharing my written words with strangers.
I’ve always believed, in a nebulous way, that we all inhabit circles that move about in the universe, bumping into each other once in a while. And when these circles touch, things happen. Sparks fly from one circle to the other, linking our lives and our selves in ways we could never dream of. If I invented such events in my fiction, people would tell me, “Real life doesn’t work that way!”
Can it all be coincidence?
The circles collided, and I was going to be published. A company I’d never heard of before, three thousand miles away, was going to publish my first book. And then, before I had a chance to break out the champagne—the publisher went bankrupt.
I knew it was a salable book, since I’d done a lot of the regional pre-marketing research for the publisher. But the book had just died with the company that was going to give it—and me—life. I was furious. I was bitter. It was obviously not meant to be. But unbeknownst to me, my defining moment was there, daring me to take the next step. So I did.
My turning point was more of a leap—into the deep-end-scary world of independent publishing. If I’d been just a little less knowledgeable then, or if I’d known a little more of what I know now, I might not have done it. But instead, at just that moment, that turning point, I was just stupid enough and daring enough and naive enough . . . And here I sit, holding my fifth book.
If I’d known, then, that once I became a publisher I’d be a businessperson first and foremost (anathema, to a writer-type), that my days would be filled with phone calls and business letters instead of creative writing, that my free time from then on would be filled with speaking engagements . . . But I didn’t. So I jumped in with both feet—and now have nine awards, a foreign contract, hundreds of articles and two novels.
A few years ago, my father called; it was time for my brother and me to go see our mother one last time, just in case. We both had to fly from the West Coast to the East. John arrived earlier in the day; my plane landed in Pennsylvania almost at midnight. That cloudy, numbingly cold winter night, he met me at the airport, and we drove directly to the hospital to see our mother. It was almost too late. She was unconscious.
Later, around two o’clock in the morning, before I slipped into bed in the front room of my parents’ home, I knelt to look out the window. As I gazed unseeing across the empty, dark street at the fir trees and the statue of Mary on the church grounds, it began to snow. It was beautiful. Without a sound, slowly, the fir trees turned white, and the street lamp was surrounded by a silvery haze. Snow fell on the lumps of car-blackened slush that already lay in the gutters of the street, turning them pure white. It was perfect.
A perfect night to die, I thought. Take her now, I prayed.
She died before morning.
And her book died with her.
It would have been a wonderful book. Its story had warmed me, comforted me, cheered me and made the two of us closer while I was a child. It had sustained my mother’s dreams and hopes, and given her something to yearn for.
It died that night.
A writer must write. That is my mother’s legacy to me. That lesson, learned so profoundly over years of disdain, of impatience with her, has driven me to produce more writing than any class I’ve taken, than any article I’ve read, than any advice I’ve ever heard.
How I’ve wanted to read my mother’s story!
I must see to it that my own children never feel such remorse, such yearning to know their mother. I must see to it that the words in me have a voice that can be shared. I will write. And on the night when I die, my children will know me. They’ll know that I loved them and why. They’ll know what I loved about life, and that I was a writer.
Then it will be a perfect night to die.
Dierdre W. Honnold