How I Started Chapter Five by Freaking Out

I need to write Chapter 5: Recessions I Have Known, but I'm scared. I’ve done everything but write in the last 40 minutes. I’ve posted on Facebook, changed my Apple password, bought a Seal album, helped Benny create a birthday card. And now I'm at my desk again. It's scary.

Who does stuff like this? Who sets their lives against the economy, who strings together the major events of their lives using recessions like fat beads on a string that winds and knots? I’m going to tangle this up.

I’m feeling some pressure. I want to send this out in September. Chapter Five was supposed to be a light revision and now it's a whole new chapter, possibly one of the most important chapters in the book.

 I’m trying to remember everything; the events, the memories, the history, the personalities. I’m having trouble focusing. I'm hyperventilating. It’s 10:52 and I’ve done nothing. I can’t stop thinking about the other things I need to do. I’m in a panic. How do I start a chapter about recessions? I'm in a panic. 

I'm in a panic.

Panic: a a sudden sensation of fear so strong as to dominate or prevent reason, replacing it with anxiety. A Greek word from the shepherd god Pan, who liked to frighten goats and sheep.

It’s also an old-fashioned word for a financial crisis, like the panics of 1857, 1873 and 1907. All triggered by worries over gold, silver or copper. Panic. All the goats and sheep scattered.

I'm trying to write about the 1973-75 recession. But it wasn't a recession, it was a Panic. 

Yay! I'm on my way! An hour later, I'm still typing madly.

There's got to be an easier way to do this.

The Magical Thinking Train

So I just finished the ninth chapter of my memoir, which is now at 20,279 words. The last few chapters have gone pretty quickly, since they hewed closely to my blog posts of that time in my life. We have arrived in San Francisco and fought the first skirmishes to find adequate -- if expensive -- housing and childcare. Although this memoir braids together my personal experiences and the broader economic events of 2007-2008, the last few chapters have been all me all the time. I did manage to tuck in some broader context, specifically addressing our landlord company's appalling business model and the challenges confronting San Francisco families. But basically the last few chapters have watched me ricochet from weird situation to weird situation, gibbering madly all the while. I swear, if this book ever gets published, my readers will probably throw this book across the room in disgust. I almost threw my computer across the room in disgust.

The scary thing was how deluded I was, how Mr. Killer Robot and I indulged in so much magical thinking. We just assumed we'd work things out, just boogie along until a perfect solution presented itself. We started July 2007 with a wretched apartment and no child care and ended August 2007 with a ridiculously expensive apartment and ridiculously expensive childcare. Apparently the only way to solve problems in San Francisco was to throw money at them, and if you didn't have any money, you just put it on the credit card. That's what much of the country was doing in 2007, and even if that made us more typical than we knew it didn't make our actions any less appalling. Much of the country was on some magical thinking train where home prices and credit limits always went up. The Dow hit 14,000 the week before we moved to San Francisco, then the stock market started to wig out a bit and the whole country started its inexorable slide to recession, which began December 2007.

It's very hard, I've found, to honestly lay out all the fateful and wrongheaded decisions Mr. Killer Robot and I made and not turn the whole thing into a pity party. Obviously the situation was kind of impossible, but nobody put us in that situation but ourselves.

Still, I'm kind of grateful to be out of that first week we arrived in San Francisco and I can take a broader look at things again. But a big financial blow awaits our family in August 2007 and I'm kind of dreading that. It's about a credit card bill and I can remember that day as if it were yesterday, sitting on a folding chair with the bills strewn on top of unpacked moving boxes.

But, thank heavens, I'm finished writing for today, so I'll think about that tomorrow.

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.

Old Mortgage Company Declares Bankruptcy

I haven't gotten to the short sale part of my financial memoir yet, but I plan to detail the horrendous paperwork process with my mortgage company. While doing research, I discovered that AwayGo Financial (its nom de plume until I figure out what will get me sued and what won't) has declared bankruptcy. Ha! I'm surprised it took so long.

Actually, as traumatic as the short sale process was for me, it actually was a lot better than most experienced with AwayGo. I'm guessing it's because it was clear we couldn't keep the house, we were current on payments (despite pressure to default) and it was a relatively small amount.

This news is yet another reason to include an epilogue in this memoir detailing not only what happened to the Killer Robot Family, but to the the other characters and companies in this saga. It will take a page just to list the bankruptcies. I'm just grateful we weren't one of them.

The Perils of Consumerist.com

So apparently I'll be unable to read any mortgage related posts on Consumerist.com while writing this memoir, because I'm sure that the site's take-no-prisoners community will make short work of this book if it ever gets published.

In this post, a young couple moved into their first house a few years ago. Then the husband lost his job and they couldn't make the mortgage payments. They asked their lender PNC Mortgage for help, and we all know how that goes.

They moved out of the house, sold their Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel furniture, and moved into an apartment with some IKEA furniture. They still pay the HOA fees and are trying to negotiate a short sale. PNC is being awful and now calling their relatives about the missed payments. Now there's a short sale under review and the bank's locked them out.

It just seems like PNC has made a bad situation unnecessarily horrible. They're obviously doing their best, though, so why is the Consumerist community piling onto them and treating them like whiny ax murderers? The reasons are legion:

1. They had Pottery Barn furniture.
2. They had Crate and Barrel furniture
3. They signed a mortgage, so tough titties.
4. They didn't have enough savings -- obviously because of the Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel furniture.
5. They bought IKEA furniture.

So I've decided not to read Consumerist posts about mortgages for a while because there's no way I can write this memoir with visions of the Consumerist hive screaming for my blood. But this does remind me to keep the "poor little me" attitude out of my writing. I must never forget that Mr. Killer Robot and I got ourselves into this situation. The recession just made it worse.

Doofus Analyst

Don't you love it when your opinion is validated by an unexpected source?

I've spent the last two days writing down key economic events from March 2007 to March 2008 in a little notebook, including expert quotes. Some of the best quotes came from Mark Zandi, who said:

July 2007: (Market at all-time high, nudging toward 14,000 mark) Zandi says fundamentals are OK. "What's driven the marked in the last few days, couple weeks, is the relief that the economy is going to be able to digest the housing downturn and the mortgage-market mess without falling into recession. I think there was a lot of concern about that."

Well, thank heavens ... what a relief!

Of course, Zandi works for Moody's, which said in August 2007 that a "limited contraction" of the economy could be beneficial because it could moderate consumer spending and keep a lid on inflation.

Zandi also loved Bush's lame little effort to help the situation in December 2007, freezing rates for 10-15 percent of the ARMs (adjustable rate mortgages) set to reset to a higher interest rate.

So I googled Zandi to see if he'd been fired yet, and no, he's still the go-to pundit for journalists covering the economy. But I did get some small validation from an article at RealClearMarkets, a site that aggregates market news. In June 2011, they posted this article titled "Mark Zandi: Always Quoted, Often Wrong, Never in Doubt."

Ha!

Writing Headaches

This memoir writing is hard. I'm not even sure what I'm writing even makes any sense. I'm trying to unravel our decision to move to San Francisco in 2007, but that year is so fraught with emotion. I'm trying to write about the day I truly understood what we were trying to do, that it wasn't just about selling the house for a good price, but about changing our lives. I'm trying to write about why we wanted to change our lives and what we were missing in Michigan that we hoped to find in San Francisco.

But it's hard. I don't think we really understood what we wanted, and didn't want to see the obstacles. I thought that if we just worked hard and made to-do lists and found a way to clean the dining room's Roman blinds, everything would be fine. But it didn't work out that way.

So now I have a splitting headache and I'm pretty angry at myself for being so blind and shortsighted. We weren't living the life we wanted in Michigan, we were living the life we thought we should want. And even when we decided to sell the house and leave, we still acted the way we thought we should act; I ended up trying to sell the house the way its former owner sold it to us in 2003. But it wasn't 2003 and I wasn't a Mad Professor with an EverQuest addiction. It was 2007 and nobody was going to buy a 50-year old Sears home at a premium price, even if I did polish all those $5 brass cabinet knobs that the Mad Professor had installed.

When I look back at that summer, what I remember best is the fear — thick and tangled with shame and loneliness. I don't really want to revisit those feelings and I'd like to think that I'm in a better place now. But am I really? Have I really grown, or am I the same self-absorbed, magical-thinking person, just with a better apartment and a fatter bank account?

The chapter I'm writing opened with me sitting on the redwood deck of our Michigan house, with soft breezes blowing the spring leaves and the big camouflage draperies our neighbors hung on their trees. (Our neighbor didn't like people looking at her when she sat in her garden.) It was quite idyllic. Now I sit in my sunny apartment in our pretty San Francisco neighborhood and I can see the Bay through the narrow crack between two houses across the street. Have I changed at all? Have I learned anything?

I guess the only way to find out is to write this memoir. Let's hope the answer is yes.

Memoirs Old and New

It was a beautiful little house, with cheery green shutters and a perky, pointy, red-shingled roof and little blue trains painted on the windowsills in Benny’s room. It was a beautiful little house.

And I hated it.

Here we have the first three sentences of my memoir. Yes, that memoir, the one I've been threatening to write for three years now. The tentative title is "Too Small to Succeed" and it's about how the Killer Robot Family changed their lives and barely avoided bankruptcy as the country slid into recession. 

I don't know much about writing a memoir, but I've read a few, and some of them I actually liked. My memoir covers one year, from March 2007 to March 2008. I'm still amazed we got through that year; we were definitely walking a tightrope without a net. We had both good luck and bad — the bad luck was always expensive. Heck, even the good luck was expensive. What am I saying: We live in San Francisco — everything is expensive. 

As I see it, memoirs generally fall into four categories: My Time Living Abroad ("Eat, Pray, Love"), My Famous Life (Meredith Baxter's "Untied"), My Kicky Concept ("Julie and Julia") and My Horrific, Traumatic Childhood ("Angela's Ashes"). The recession has bred a fifth category: My Financial Train Wreck. I'm trying not to read any of them, despite the advice in writers' magazines, since I'll probably get discouraged. The one I did glance at ("Made for You and Me") promised commentary on the loss of our small towns, homelessness, joblessness and the increasing economic divisions between Americans. My memoir makes no such promises, although I can guarantee a few meltdowns in the "Julie and Julia" style. Anyway, I find browsing memoirs kind of a depressing experience as I find myself looking at the book jackets of "Unwanted" and "A Child Called 'It'".


Nothing like trashing the genre you're writing in, I always say. My two favorite memoirs are nearly 50 years old: long and rambling, with a wry, funny voice. One is "Minding Our Own Business" by Charlotte Paul, which is the story of a husband and wife who chucked their comfortable lives in Chicago and moved to Washington state to run their own newspaper.

To say their decision to move was impetuous is a drastic understatement. Charlotte and Ed gave themselves two months to quit Ed's job, sell the farm, find a newspaper on the West Coast, buy it, move across the country and start making a profit. They took shocking risks. The whole journey was harrowing. The work hours were insane. The debt was enormous. The entire book gave me a heart attack. Ed himself had a heart attack in Chapter 8. Compared to them, Mr. Killer Robot and I are hopelessly conventional. Perhaps journalists just shouldn't marry each other.

The second one is "The Egg and I" by Betty MacDonald about her adventures as a young wife on a chicken farm in Washington state.  I liked how she described making breakfast in the cabin on her enemy, Stove. (Yes, she called her stove "Stove" the way Holly Golightly called her cat "Cat. I guess a person gets lonely on a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula.)

"I cleaned Stove's suit and polished the metal handles, poured in half a can of kerosene, and Stove began balefully to burn a little," she wrote.

MacDonald personified everything, like Mountain, with its shawl of pine trees and little Town, spurned by her railroad suitor. She liked to write in her chicken logs regarding chicks' cause of death; "Egg-cema and Suicide." Chicks, I'm told, are really dumb.

What I ought to do, actually, is find some good Great Depression memoirs. Or maybe just read "Grapes of Wrath." Last year I read Benny the Little House books, and one of them, "The Shores of Silver Lake," resembled their situation. Pa had to travel to South Dakota first and the rest followed on the train. Then they lived in a tent, spent the winter house-sitting, and then built a shanty on their claim.

So obviously memoirs have a long and proud tradition and I am glad to be joining it. Maybe I'll open Chapter 3 with my struggles with my own enemy, Blender.

"Scattered Thoughts Diabolical and Immoral"

When you're struggling through distressing times, there's nothing like a smug quote on adversity to make you feel worse. Here are a few supremely unhelpful thoughts from great minds on the topic and my churlish responses:

1) "If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."
— Anne Bradstreet from her 'Meditations Divine and Moral,' in 1655.

Can you imagine the moxie it must take to title your random thoughts "Meditations Divine and Moral?" If I were to choose a similar name for my memoir, I"d call it "Broodings Cranky and Self-indulgent." Did she think of the title first, and then cast around for thoughts that could live up to that title? Such pressure!

And that whole "you must suffer through winter to appreciate spring" stuff sounds ridiculous anyway. I live in San Francisco now and consider its lack of seasons a huge benefit. I don't need to shovel snow for five months to appreciate flowers. I enjoy a nice daffodil as much as anyone.

2) "Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue."
— Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626)

I have serious problems with this quote, which looks like a fancy Renaissance way of saying "That which does not kill you only makes you stronger." Apparently if you take a nice, good person and crush her like a bundle of tarragon leaves, her virtues are supposed to shine all the stronger. I contend if you take a calm, thoughtful, nice, caring girl and give her a chronic disease, a foreclosure, some hefty medical bills and a cheating boyfriend, she won't be so nice and calm anymore. Let's add a crazy boss and a loser nephew who sleeps on her couch for three months too. I'm not saying adversity can't be a learning experience -- I think it depends on the person. If our poor Tarragon Girl was snooty, entitled and self-satisfied, obsessed with decorating her house and unsympathetic to sick people, well then a little adversity could only help. Hmm, maybe I'm proving Frank's point here after all.

Here are two adversity quotes from unknown authors:

1) "A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner, neither do uninterrupted prosperity and success qualify for usefulness and happiness. The storms of adversity, like those of the ocean, rouse the faculties, and excite the invention, prudence, skill and fortitude or the voyager. The martyrs of ancient times, in bracing their minds to outward calamities, acquired a loftiness of purpose and a moral heroism worth a lifetime of softness and security."

I was actually with this one, until it started going on about martyrs' "loftiness of purpose."

2) "Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with."

Yeah, yeah, we all know it's the speck of grit that makes the pearl, etc. etc.

So learn from these four quotes about adversity. Time to get off your sofa and go get crushed!

Unearthing the Skeleton

So I got out my little literary whisk broom and started sifting through my research, hoping a skeleton of my memoir would emerge. And by golly, it has.

It's like a little misshapen skeleton in the back of a dusty museum . There's a title written on a crooked placard, some themes molded into a bony skull, and a vertebrae of 12 chapters clumsily strung together with chicken wire.

I know the final product will in no way resemble this outline. Annie Dillard said it best: "Original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen." Often, Dillard says, in revision you must throw out the best-written part, the part that was supposed to be the whole point: " the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin."

So now I have a title, a theme, an outline and a 600-word beginning. They make up a rickety little scaffold that will hopefully support me while I build something better.

____________________________

Tentative title
"A Hill of Beans"

Tentative subtitle (just to make Fog City Writer crazy):
How three little people changed their lives and teetered close to bankruptcy as the country slid into recession.

Theme:
People can change their lives if they’re willing to take risks and pay the emotional, financial and professional costs.

PROLOGUE: Sneaking Out of the House.

CHAPTER 1: This House Won’t Sell.

CHAP. 2: Facing Reality.

CHAP 3: The Final Push.

CHAP 4: Welcome to San Francisco.

CHAP 5: The Lucky Streak.

CHAP 6: Devastated.

CHAP 7: The Great Pretender.

CHAP 8: The Bleak Christmas of 2007.

CHAP 9: The Short Sale.

CHAP 10: Goodbye Big Foot.

EPILOGUE: The View from Ashbury Heights.

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.