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A memoir is made on the cutting room floor

It takes tens of thousands of unpublished words to write a book—all those deleted scenes and unseen notes to self are essential.

Tracy Clark-Flory

Apr 2

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I was just scrolling through an old document titled “unused book bits.” It’s where I would toss notes to self, half-formed thoughts, and deleted scenes while working on my upcoming memoir, My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past. That document contains roughly 40,000 words. For reference, the book itself is around 76,000 words.

Looking back at this document now, five weeks out from my publication date, I am struck by all these unpublished words—nearly half the number that ended up in the final product.

Those 40,000 don’t even account for all the words I’ve scribbled onto Post-Its that I stuck to my wall while trying to figure out the structure and various thematic arcs. I have 4,000-plus entries in my Notes app and probably half of those are book-related. That’s to say nothing of all the text messages to friends. Or this early visual sketch I created of the book’s themes and chapters:

Or this more developed map:

Or this rough representation of some of the gendered tropes and tensions around sex in the book:

If you’re new here, I should mention: My book is about how a DNA test connected me with my half-sister Kathy, who my mom placed for adoption at a home for unwed mothers in the sixties, 20 years before I was born. This set me off on a journey to understand what happened to our mom back in 1965. It's a story about shame, family secrets, race, motherhood, and the control of women's bodies.

This “unused book bits” document traces my years-long process of sifting through these themes. Plenty of it reads like nonsense. There are sentences that use “TK” as a placeholder. For example: “I saw this TK TK TK as relevant to my sexual coming of age tale, mostly as a TK TK TK.” Any time I’m having trouble writing—if I have only a vague sense of a connection that I want to make or the exact words are escaping me—I will toss in some TKs to keep things moving. Sometimes you return to the problem sentence; sometimes it just gets cut.

The document is also sprinkled with notes like this one, where I casually and unselfconsciously remind myself to make sure this book is no less than cosmic in its scope:

Our place in the world and in community.

Our connection to all humanity and the universe.

Expanding the sense of mother.

Of course, I’m filled with self-consciousness re-reading that, now that I have some distance from the inferno of creation. But I also think that you need some of that cosmic grasping and gesturing if you’re going to create a memoir that succeeds in transcending your personal story.

Early on in the doc, well before I actually sold my book proposal, there are lots of questions for myself:

What did being sent away mean for her as a person, a mother, and a sexual being? What did her greatest pain and shame mean for me as a person, a mother, and a sexual being? Who did we, mother and daughter, become as a result, together?

Again and again, I take various swings on what the book is about. (That dreaded question! “What’s your book about?”) Some of those descriptions have stayed with me, but then there are those that I’ve abandoned: “a story about loving my mother—and a story about mothers as lovers.”

And then there are scenes that I tossed for various reasons—space, pacing, relevance. Here’s one where I start to realize that my mom was traumatized by being sent away, and I’m trying to make sense of what some would call “survivor’s guilt”:

I imagined my mom’s trauma like an impassable and treacherous river. I pictured her standing in it, rubber waders on, like she was in it for the long-haul. This image came to me from an illustration from The Runaway Bunny where the mother goes fishing after her little bunny turns into “a fish in a trout stream.” My imagined mother in the waders was not coming after me. She was gesturing toward me as I stood safe and dry on land. “Stay there, stay there,” I imagined her urging me. “Save yourself.”

But happiness, the very thing that she had been so intent on giving me, would have set me apart from her. It would have left us both abandoned. I hadn’t wanted to stand on land; I had wanted to be with her. I saw myself wade in, trying to get closer, going against her wishes for me. Happiness was betrayal, but so was sadness.

This was a scene that I wrote while I was still very much in the mix of living this event. Eventually, other scenes came to feel more meaningful and representative, so this one was scrapped.

There were other scenes that I cut—like this one about my mom’s death—because they felt too similar to what showed up in my first memoir:

In those early days of grief, I lived inside an existential howl. How could I possibly continue without my mom? I found myself longing for a literal piece of her. Why hadn’t I thought to preserve a locket of her hair? I imagined encasing her brain in resin or turning her ashes into a pendant that I could wear around my neck. My grief was elemental. I imagined a globe spinning in my head—maybe my mom was just hiding somewhere out there in the world. I knew the absurdity of this; I had seen her dead body with my own eyes. A few days after watching my mom’s body turn to stone, I thought of my sister. That’s where she is.

There is a common impulse among writers to self-deprecatingly talk about everything that is left on the cutting room floor. All the wasted time and effort. The inefficiency! But I think we also know that this discarded material is essential, that it’s not wasted at all. There’s this Barbara Kingsolver quote:

It’s frustrating to write a hundred pages you know will not survive, but this is the dirt you have to excavate to get to the vein of gold. These are pages of your novel too, just the unseen ones—let’s call them pages negative-100 to zero—and you can’t skip them.

It’s the same for memoir. In my experience, I often don’t know that those pages won’t survive as I’m writing them. I’m not sure I could bring myself to write them if I believed that they would be cut.

We’re carried forward by all sorts of delusions. I think my visual maps above have been highly useful; I also think they are part of a process of coming up against what I can’t yet know, and then surrendering to it. I will push and push to crack the code of the structure, to sketch it out ahead of time, to have a full and detailed map of where I am going, so that I don’t get lost.

Ultimately, though, there are the parts you just have to muddle through, As with life, the muddling is required.

My Mother’s Daughter comes out May 5th. That is just five weeks away. Kirkus calls it “deeply researched,” “lyrically written,” “trenchant and moving,” and “a powerful rejection of white-male dominated systems of oppression.” Booklist says it’s “a stirring family history… reckoning with race, power, privilege, and women’s roles.” Publisher’s Weekly calls it a “poignant family saga” and one of the most-anticipated memoirs of the spring. If you pre-order, you’ll be among the first to get it—and you’ll help me set this book up for success.

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