When I was 29 I had a chalkboard in my living room. It was one of those two-sided wooden A-frames that stand on their own and fold flat. On one side of the chalkboard I wrote, “The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” Flannery O’Connor and on the other side I wrote, “She sat and thought of only one thing, of her mother holding and holding onto their hands,” Eudora Welty.
The quote by Eudora Welty is from her novel The Optimist’s Daughter, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. It was a book I read again and again and that line about the woman who sat thinking of only one thing was at the heart of the reason why. I sat like that too. Thinking of only one thing. One thing that was actually two things pressed together, like the back-to-back quotes on my chalkboard: how much I missed my mother and how the only way I could bear to live without her was to write a book. My book. The one that I’d known was in me since way before I knew people like me could have books inside of them. The one I felt pulsing in my chest like a second heart, formless and unimaginable until my mother died, and there it was, the plot revealed, the story I couldn’t live without telling. My debut.