Janice Gary

When I was seven years old, my mother and father took the family “house hunting.” We drove around New Jersey looking at brick cape cods in leafy neighborhoods and split levels with clapboard siding – window shopping basically. It was 1960. My parents were dreaming the big American dream, hungry to move up and join the ranks of homeownership. It was a dream that would not become a reality until several years later.

For me, a skinny seven year old kid with bowl-cut hair and crooked smile, the idea of a new house represented more than wall to wall carpeting and an all- electric kitchen. A fervent believer in fairy tales, I was sure a new home would mean a new beginning –lots of friends, pretty dresses, my own bedroom and most of all, two happy parents.

A child can see possibility in the smallest of places. When my father drove down a street of a new development, I saw magic in the muddy holes of new foundations, beauty in the half-finished homes and a life that would bloom like Jack in the Beanstalk seeds for all of us. After we visited the model home (a blur of white walls and dirt-brown lawn), I sat down and wrote my first story: The Little House. It was about a lonely, empty house whose dream came true when when a mother, a father and two little girls moved in. Under its roof, the family lived the kind of life all little girls wish for – full of love, security and happiness.

It was fiction, of course. We never bought the house and the one we did eventually purchase was, for the most part, not a happy place. I went on to write more fiction, stories of magical possibility and improbable alliances. But as the years progressed, I discovered that truth was more mysterious, stranger and more shocking than anything I could make up.

As a writer, I find myself overwhelmingly drawn to personal narrative and memoir writing. Writing is not therapy, but it can be transformative. For me, crossing the same river twice allows me to see the many things I missed the first time around, including the patterns and themes that have criss-crossed throughout my life. From this rich material, I am able to create a tapestry of story woven from the threads of experience.

“Memoir,” the author Patricia Hampl says, “begins as a hunger for a world, one gone or lost, effaced by time or a more sudden brutality."

This life, this startling reality, still amazes and confounds me. This is why I take the journey twice, the second time mapping the terrain of the heart and the mind, hoping to make sense—for myself and others—this sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible, always astonishing world we live in.