Why We All Should Have a “Good Art Friend”

His memoir began when he was a child, watching his father die young. Mine started when my young children learned their father died by suicide. We were drawn to each other’s perspectives, thought they could inform our own. In a writing class, students often make alliances such as these, friendships based on narrative bonds and stylistic affinities. In our very first Zoom meetings, amidst other students writing through their particular losses—children of Holocaust survivors, a former cult member, sufferers of schizophrenia and poverty—Doug and I quickly saw that we could be a perfect editing match. In the nearly four years I knew him, we sent more than 600 emails back and forth. The first one from him with feedback about my memoir, Us, After , began this way: ​​Dear Rachel: Thank you for sharing this. My mother was widowed a week after I turned 12, about the age Sophia was, and any story about a mom trying to raise her children by herself absorbs me. I thought a lot about her while reading your story… What was the nature of this writerly love, I wondered, where you know but also don’t know. Then he launched into editing my book, which is about rebuilding life with my daughters, who were 8 and 11 at the time of their father’s suicide: I think your memoir would benefit from a clearer, stronger story arc. This is something I have been struggling with in my own manuscript (as you shall soon see), and it often feels like trying to get a double mattress up the stairs by myself… He went on, over three full pages, to offer incisive, bullet-pointed questions on structure and stakes, recommend craft books and a couple of videos to consult. Attention such as this tends to make me swoon: How often are our words and thoughts attended to in such intimate ways? Doug was not my lover, of course, nor a relative, or lifelong friend. He was not a child, beloved pet, or any relation who might typically elicit such deep, enduring adoration. Yet I loved him. He was […]

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