Guest Blog featuring Debra Whittam’s Am I Going to Be Okay? @debrawhittam

For More Information

• Am I Going To Be Okay?
  Weathering the Storms of Mental Illness, Addiction and Grief is available
  at Amazon.
• Pick up your copy at Barnes & Noble.
• Discuss this book at PUYB
  Virtual Book Club at Goodreads.

Let’s Start Talking About It

I am a first time author so, let’s starting talking about the two questions I am asked most often by nearly everyone concerning my having written a memoir/self help book.  “How long did it take you to write the book?”  and  “Aren’t you worried about what family members will think?”  Really?  Are these questions that pertain to the author?  I think not.  What I sense is the people asking are only interested in the answer to see if THEY could do it.  So, let’s talk about this.  How long did it take to write?  I wrote, on and off, for about three years.  The most difficult part was the edit, of course.  What I thought was going to be an easy, fairly simple week or two process to get my “shitty first draft”, as Anne LaMott calls it, to a final proof copy actually took six months.  Good thing my editor knew how to handle my impatience since she told me we would start going from the first draft to revisions.  Well, after the sixth ‘first’ draft I wanted to say ‘I’m done’.  But just in the knick of time she announced we were on to the revisions.  Ah yes, now we were getting somewhere!  After the revisions to the revisions, many times over, we moved on to the changes to the revisions.  We were now in month three.  Too late to turn back yet I hated the thought of reading one more word of what was once a beloved manuscript to me.

Then, of course, we went from the changes to the changes to the changes.  Then finally, my friends, we were at the final manuscript!  Yea!  What joy.  What bliss.  At final manuscript 12 I rebelled and said ‘NO!”.

This was just in time for the Final Proof copy.  The galley or advanced reader copy as it’s called.  Great.  After three final proof copies we have now officially gone to print!  Oh my gosh.  How do people do this for a living?!

So, do you see how my answering, to the unknowing questioner, it took three years to write the book leaves me weak in the knees.  It’s not about me or what I went through, for heavens sake (!), it’s about them.  Of course it is.

Question number two is more lengthy to explain however, equally uninteresting to the one with the query.  Are they still listening as I explain that my first writing workshop was with Carol Henderson in Little Switzerland, NC where she explained to any of us thinking about writing creative non-fiction, memoir, to write as though everyone in the story has already died.  Or don’t do it at all.  That was a heady first bit of information for me as I already was sure I was the only who did not belong at the workshop.  I’m was a pretend ‘wanna be’ writer while everyone else was serious about it, better at it, etc.  However, through the next three years of writing, I kept that thought firmly in the fore front of my mind as I traveled the road of writing; what I remembered, my perception of the things I saw, heard and how I was treated from littlehood onward.

Is there any possibility that a family member will agree with my experience being true for them?  If, as they say, accuracy is based on perception, then every sibling in the same car having the same horrifying experience of riding with our drunk father at high rates of speed will invariably not have the same or even similar experiences as I did.

We all have our own examples of being at the same dining room table with all the siblings and have a different narrative of what happened when someone spilled milk, triggering a major brawl which in turn lead to yelling, crying and sometimes people coming to blows.

So do I answer to these random people, who I don’t even know, “Well, I can’t go to each person to make sure they are okay with it because blah blah blah.”   The person is already not listening.  No sibling, aunt, uncle, cousin would agree with what I had as my experience.  Parents would, absolutely, not agree.  So who ends up being the crazy one here?  And, how does anyone begin and end writing their memoir/ creative non-fiction narrative if they are,  indeed, a Pleaser.

Was and am I concerned with telling family stories that were always meant to be kept secret?  The point of my book is to see how insane it is to NOT talk about family member’s mental illness, their  addictions and the loss of a beloved through death or a relationship.  The impact on everyone in the family, especially the little ones watching the adults act like little monsters, is what creates the beginnings of chronic ‘IV drip’ of anxieties where little ones are sure of one of two things.  Either they did something wrong or there’s something wrong with them.  Those are the choices.  Silence and denial run the show and eventually become deadly in  one form or another.

So, my dear person with the questions, yes I considered everyone in the story.  Alive and not alive.  My experience is my truth.  If someone could have been in my shoes, at the same time with the same experience there might be a chance for some convergence of truth.  Doubt it, but maybe.  This memoir is a story of my life with my mom, entire family, but mainly her from my birth until her death interwoven with the untreated mental illness, untreated addiction and unacknowledged grief that flows through everyone’s family tree.  We just don’t talk about it.  Any of it.  Until, of course, on someone’s death bed they sob out some essential bit of  information that would’ve made everyone’s life different had they known it was NOT their fault.  Whatever ‘it’ is.

Answering these lame questions will become habit down the road and I will say, “Three years and yes I considered everyone.”  Let’s keep talking about it.

Book Excerpt:

No longer living in a world governed by my need to numb myself through copious amounts of alcohol, I started doing what I wanted
to do with my life. Encountering the self-doubt I had always carried within me became the guidepost by which I continued to prove my “what ifs” unnecessary in 

order to keep myself safe.

• Visit Debra Whittam’s website.
• Connect with Debra on Facebook and Twitter.