Jed Wolf

Though I’d dreamed of Judy Garland’s spotlight, my origin story played out in a storm drain pipe behind our Stamford home. No makeup towels or footlights – just daddy long legs and gravel echoing in a dank vortex beneath my hands and knees. When they found me, the cop’s gentle tone told me what I already knew: no one noticed I was missing for way too long. My show-stopping wails as they dragged the river were my first real performance.

I’ve began memoirs a hundred ways: riding to boarding school in my parents’ BMW, counting potholes to distract from the pubescent embarrassment they caused. Breaking my nose to look less dainty -secrets that led to my friend’s death. My neglected kid story demanded telling, but the soul-wrenching nights of shameful revelations and manically written pages led nowhere – until truth, like choking on a plastic Jesus in a King Cake, cracked through.

I kept writing not just because people said I should, but because being lost in that pipe demanded it. My mother’s negligence seemed destined for pages and pages. Like a creature trapped by its own origins, I returned to early memories, urged on by well-meaning friends.

The pedestrian significance of being “lost,” not wanting to “go back,” having “no choice” didn’t stop my daily writing ritual. Any truth-teller knows the filleted feelings. Why spend three hundred pages making stents rattle if mysteries won’t dissolve with each draft?

What do we gain from others’ lives? After reading Demi Moore’s “Inside Out,” I felt worse about my progress as both writer and human. Her celebrity problems taught me nothing except this: memoir-writing is better therapy than reading others’ memoirs.

For those with low self-esteem, I recommend the attempt. Exploring your rat holes through plot and arc creates its own kind of pedestal on which we might pet ourselves. After using memoir to curate what I missed as a kid, I can purr on my platform of daily confessions about my pathetic, unholy, toxic, and generative need for attention.

“What a relief to be posting short essays on Facebook again,” I say to no one, still listening for echoes.