I Love You, NPR

NPR Marketplace has provided a mighty weapon for my memoir arsenal. My memoir will cover one financially and personally chaotic year of my life: April 2007-April 2008. It was one of those game-changing years that felt like a decade, and even now in 2010 it's hard to look back and make sense of it.

The personal part of the memoir is relatively simple: I'm the main character and this all happened to me and my husband and son, so I know the material. Ron and I were talking about a major day in this year, it was the day we hit bottom, absolutely bottom. It was the day we found out that we'd forgotten a credit card bill in the moving frenzy and KeyBank had jacked up the APR on a hefty balance to 29.99% (!) We're talking a $1,000 minimum payment here. I called Ron and a panic, just sobbing over the phone.

So hell yeah, I remember that day. Ron remembers that day. But I want to talk about more than the personal side of that year. I want to talk about the broad financial backdrop that this drama was played out against. This was a crucial year for the country financially as well.

During that year, I was (and still am) an avid listener of National Public Radio's "Marketplace," which is good at summarizing the business news of the day so even I can understand it a little. I remember listening to the little podcasts on the way to work, sensing that something big was coming, something that threatened to dwarf even our own troubles. But gosh, I can't remember what story played what month, etc.

But those Marketplace angels have created something that fits my needs perfectly. They have an amazing archive of every damn episode. By Date. With Transcripts. What a find! Now I have 52 Marketplace episodes at my fingertips that aired in the year I'm describing. Just beautiful.

This is on Me

So I started writing my memoir last week after some pushing and prodding from Ron and my friend Fog City Writer. Writing a memoir sounded a little daunting to me, so I approached it in my typically nerdy way with some Internet research and a few articles from my Writer magazine.

It's actually kind of fun. Truth truly is stranger than fiction, and it's easier to write about my former neighbor who sits in her garden under a camouflage-patterned banner so nobody can see her than make up a crazy-lady neighbor out of whole cloth. The world is full of weirdos, and many of them like to wander through my life.

The challenge, as I see it (and what do I know, I've only been doing this for a week) is to tease out structure and patterns out of the experiences so you're not just writing "and then this happened and then that happened and then this happened and the bird died ..." Pick a definitive time span. Find themes. Write wicked character attacks that will likely get you sued unless you change the guy's name and give him a goatee and a pet iguana. Figure out what you learned. Figure out how you changed. If you didn't learn anything and didn't change at all, pretend you did.

I'm not precisely sure what I learned or how I changed in the year that I'm memoiring (April 2007-April 2008). I'm still a little high-strung. I don't howl in frustration anymore every time I drop a piece of toast on the floor and that's gotta be a plus. I personally hate the phrase "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." Adversity does not always strengthen a person; sometimes it makes said person insecure and twitchy and uptight and prone to irrational behavior even after the adverse conditions no longer exist. Ever hear of post-traumatic stress disorder, Friedrich Nietzsche? I still have problems from a whiplash injury in 1996. No, it didn't kill me, but my neck doesn't feel any stronger. It feels more vulnerable, actually.