I think this is the longest I’ve ever gone without writing a blog post since this I started writing here. In my last post, I was despondent; my agent had all but given up hope on selling my memoir, and I didn’t want to pay to publish it via a vanity press. I had spent nine years living the story and six writing and trying to publish it, building a platform, researching and learning and thinking about the ways to reach families like mine. It was incredibly painful to think that my final goal of publishing our story in a real-honest-to-goodness-book had finally been stamped DENIED.

The day before I heard for certain from my agent that she was basically out of ideas, I went for a walk with my good friend Sarah. She and I had sat in the windows of the student union at Northwestern University, two years before, when I’d received a rejection from a dream publication for an essay I had felt was my best work yet. I was ready to give up, to decide that writing and publishing were too hard. She sat and listened in this serene, patient way she has, with long pauses before she speaks. She has a habit of looking straight at me almost the whole time we’re talking, not off to the side or up at the ceiling. She’s comfortable with silence and tension and she’s comfortable with waiting. After I doused both of us with my self-pity and negativity, she smiled a little bit and shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have a feeling that something is about to shift for you.” Continue Reading…

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