Reliving That Year

So when you write a memoir about one of the most difficult years of your life, you find yourself — and I can't be the first one to have noticed this — reliving that difficult year in your life. That means I'm reliving March 2007 to March 2008, and let me tell you, it's not doing much for my equilibrium.

Thankfully, of course, I'm writing a financial memoir. There's no childhood trauma, no wartime struggle, no drug use, only a smattering of alcohol use. I didn't live on the streets or sell my body or hike the Mojave ... gosh, now I'm starting to wonder ... will anyone even read this book?

But even though that year's struggles might seem trivial to some, they certainly don't feel trivial to me. When I look back at that year, the strongest emotion I remember is the fear. I spent that year walking on a precipice, convinced that the smallest slip would cast us into financial failure. I choked on that emotion, walking around every day with my chest constricted. It was often an effort just to put a pleasant look on my face, since I often considered other people — even my own family — as unwelcome distractions from my single-minded focus on Getting Us Out of This.

Now, when I sit down at my laptop and fire up the next chapter (I just finished Chapter Five) I must drop myself into that cauldron of swirling feelings again. Every so often I have to come up for air, remind myself that we don't own a house anymore, we're not in debt anymore, we have money in the bank. Not the Suze Orman six-months-of-expenses money in the bank, but a tidy sum. Enough to help me sleep at night, when I'm not freaking out about our credit card APRs in July 2007. Actually, we don't even have any of those credit cards now. Nope, not even one. We had nine cards at the height of our debt in 2008 and now we have two. And neither one carries a balance.

I had to keep reminding myself of that when I wrote a difficult chapter, a chapter with a fight between Mr. Killer Robot and me about our biggest credit card. In July 2007 we went over-limit on that card — a card with a $25,000 balance. And $18,000 on the second-biggest card! It takes my breath away. Exceeding the limit on the bigger card triggered an APR hike from 9 percent to 29 percent. It nearly sunk us.

I hate writing about that month. I hate reliving those days. But I have to because, well, that's the whole point of the book, how we navigated a volatile economy and the consequences of our own choices. How our mistakes made us vulnerable, while the housing crisis and investment banking mess and December 2007 recession almost finished us off. I'm writing this book to try to make sense of what happened, to both my family and a country as a whole. And I can't do that unless I relive the summer of 2007 during the summer of 2012.