It’s an exciting and scary thing to publish your first book. I suppose that’s true for any book. Especially when you never considered yourself a real writer, but I’ve been told to stop saying that. Because the very act of writing something, they said, means I am a writer.
In order to start moving past the distraction of self-doubt, I had to listen to the encouragement from friends and family and get over the idea that I may not live up to my own expectations. I had to face the fear of possibly being very horrible at this new endeavor and just shut up and do it.
Now I had a new problem. Where would I even begin? This particular story was one that I felt so deeply about and was still evolving and growing each year.
"When Allison gives her father the gift of an at-home DNA test, the results seem off. She reaches out to Jennifer, listed as a close genetic match to her father, and they begin to piece together a forgotten past.
As they compare family trees and DNA data, an unwelcome question rises in Allison’s mind: What if her dad’s father was not who the entire family believed him to be?
Everything she knew to be true about her paternal family history was unraveling—and now Allison must make a difficult choice. If she doesn’t continue the cycle of silence to protect the memory of her grandmother, Evelyn, does that mean she must betray her secrets and risk altering family relationships forever?"
After all the family trees I’ve made, conversations with older relatives, pouring through thousands of pictures…I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about my family history, at least for the last four or five generations. Sure there were the natural genealogy ‘brick walls’ and things that would have to wait for me to have the time to research and truly get all the facts. But nothing was earth shattering. Interesting and lovely and important, but not a threat to everything I already had in my archives—those things were absolutely truth, fact, set in stone. But even stones shift.
I came to the realization that the only way not to obsess over the story daily (while additionally finding myself talking to complete strangers about it) was to write about the whole ordeal. I just opened a google doc and started typing.
I talked to my dad, my uncles, my aunts, my grandma’s best friend, and started shaping a narrative with glimpses into the past. I wrote about the events that led up to the discovery and the in-the-moment interactions and surprises that I experienced along the way.
In the first attempt from late 2017 to early 2018, I made it to 6 chapters and just over 16,000 words. I stopped at the discovery of a mysterious postcard that was saved. I had gotten stuck within the first few months of trying, which was discouraging. I had my binder of records, albums of photos to reference, digital files, etc. and I knew I couldn’t tell the story through anyone’s perspective but my own.
But, I’m intensely persistent and like a good challenge so I kept at it. Good or bad, getting published or just sitting as a file on my computer forever, I had to write out what I knew. How I felt and what I learned. It had to be more than some journal entry. I had to do it in spite of any self-loathing and imposter syndrome.
In July of 2019 I sat down with a friend and she recorded my answers while she asked me questions about the story. From there, we developed a rough outline of the pieces. That would help me in 2020 when I finally took it off the back burner and fleshed out the actual plot. I also changed the tense from past to present for most chapters.
Essentially I wanted to examine all the facets of my grandmother's complex life while also drawing parallels to three generations of ‘record keepers.’ My grandma, my father, and myself.
Since it was 2020, naturally time opened up. I was writing almost daily, and took the advice of friends and strangers not to edit during the process, just to write. By the end of the year / early 2021 I had some 70,000 words to work with.
An amazing thing happened when I finished a complete first draft: The weight that had been on my shoulders for more or less four years had lifted, like a deep breath after holding air in my lungs for a little too long.
Then it was editing time. I sent it to some cheapo online printing place, three hole punched it, and stuck it in a binder. Any chance I got over the next year I got my pen/pencil and marked it up. I still loved the story, but a lot of it was, ‘What the heck was I thinking when I wrote that!?’
What I noticed, whether it was recovering from a bad bout of COVID in early 2020 or the process of writing a memoir (plus being a full-time working mother) I was having a hard time sleeping and was super agitated most of that season. Some of the passages I wrote actually sent me into depression, anxiety, and just feeling sick. Which I’m aware sounds completely over the top. But when I tell you that I have always gotten completely into any story I read, movie I watch, song I listen to (that I relate with) I mean it. I’m there. I’m feeling all the feelings at whatever story is being performed, told, or sung. I guess that’s a good quality for any artist to have but it’s emotionally and mentally exhausting.
After a few family members and a few other readers scanned through it and gave initial feedback, I made adjustments and prepped it for sending to publishers. One way or another I was going to get this story out there and out of my head!
Now that publication of The Record Keeper is happening, I’m full of excitement, humble gratitude, but also relief. It’ll be good to take a break from the work of the book and get back to enjoying what led me there in the first place. Time with my living family, the memories and keepsakes, looking at photos and home movies, and the intense rush I get from an investigative doggedness — a Nancy Drew Wannabe on the genealogical trail of yet another mysterious ancestor