Aloha & Welcome to My Blog!
Each week I will include an excerpt of my new memoir A Southern Belle In Paris, which will hit Amazon & IngramSpark (order through your bookstore) the end of September. You can pre-order your copy HERE.
FIRST: A WORD ON WRITING YOUR MEMOIR
Writing and telling stories about your family & friends and then publishing it for all the world to see? What could go wrong? Amazing writers like Amy Tam said writing her memoir was the most difficult writing she’d ever done & Mary Carr of The Liar’s Club memoir fame, strongly advised against it.
Most writers who have written & published their memoir or are working on one will tell you: It’s a ton of hard work; it’s a marathon, not a sprint. You’re constantly plagued with questions like, what will my family think; will I have any friends after they read what I’ve written about them; will I be sued; am I supposed to “write the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me god?” and will anybody even read it?
SO, WHY DO WRITERS PERSIST IN WRITING THEIR MEMOIRS?
In spite of these warnings & the hard work involved, memoir writers like myself and others persist for a variety of reasons….they want to leave something of their lives behind for their families, like a legacy of sorts; or, they have a burning desire to share their stories & experiences in hopes they will inspire others, guide them through some of the tough times the author had; or, for others, it is a profound way to revisit past, sometimes painful, experiences and learn from them by having distance & likely, a more-accepting perspective, leading possibly to forgiveness of self and others.
Today’s Excerpt:
TWO STEEL MAGNOLIAS WALK INTO A FEMINIST MEETING…
My memoir A Southern Belle in Paris: Bikinis, Bombs, de Beauvoir & Billy Bob tells the story of my growing-up years in the Deep South of the 50s & 60s. After living in numerous unique locations around the world, I come full circle when I return in the late 70s after having lived in Paris for four years. The following excerpt from the book tells of my mother and aunt, Steel Magnolias, who visit me in Paris where I have become a staunch feminist & women’s right activist. The story begins when I invite them to attend a feminist meeting in Paris with me.
When my mother and aunt, solid Steel Magnolia women from the Deep South, came to Paris to pay a visit, I lost no time in letting them have a heavy dose of my newly-found feminist swagger, insulting them with innuendoes and not so subtle remarks pointing out their outdated and narrow viewpoints belonging to Christianity and its failure to embrace women’s new emancipated role in society and the church.
To bring the finer points of feminism to bear on the occasion of their visit, I invited them to attend our monthly feminist meeting; actually, it was more like I dared them. “The program will be a psychodrama, called Defending Feminism: What do you say when somebody says..? and the participants will fill in the blanks,” I explained. Then a few members will explore their feelings in various situations through role-playing.” I felt fairly confident that my mother and aunt had no idea what a psychodrama or role-playing was but I wanted to take every opportunity to show them the error of their small-minded beliefs.
To my surprise, they agreed to go. This was going to be great, I thought gleefully as we loaded into our Volvo station wagon to drive into the city.
For our feminist meeting, we’d rented a large room in Paris’ rundown, working-class district which fed the illusion for some that we were part of the worker’s revolution, which clearly most of us were not, and that we were supporters of the idea of a new economy focusing on downward mobility, which clearly again, most of us were not. This diversity of women’s political and social views in our group, however, was only one of many problems I’d written about in an article called “Difficulties in Starting a NOW Chapter in a Foreign Country,” which was published in the handbook distributed to attendees at the First International Feminist Conference at Harvard that I, along with my friend Lisa and hundreds of other women from around the world had just attended.
Once we arrived, I helped mother and my aunt get settled in chairs at the back of the room, while others on the program helped to get everything ready for the meeting. One of our members, a practicing psychotherapist, was going to lead the psychodrama for the group after I’d given my report about the feminist conference at Harvard. As the meeting was starting, I noticed a few new women who had entered with one of our Latin American members. They sat off to the side, in the back near my mother and aunt.
Our meetings had settled down a lot but were still somewhat on the chaotic side, although this one had gone smoothly at first, and I even got to give my entire report on the Harvard conference and some of the resolutions; but the calm was definitely one that precedes a storm. As the therapist member stood to announce the psychodrama, one of the new women sitting in the back suddenly stood up and in a loud, booming voice announced that she’d just arrived from Amsterdam where she’d been working the streets as a prostitute. “You women know nothing about my life and the issues of real women like me who have to use our bodies to earn a living!” she exclaimed. An audible gasp went up around the room.
“I’ve been living on the streets of Amsterdam for years now. I suck cocks, large or small, the cost is the same. I fuck in alleys and filthy rooms; use dildos or whips; front or rear penetration; cost still the same. There’s plenty of women like me and we’re constantly getting vaginal diseases and anal lacerations for all the fucking we do for a living. Once you’re in this world, there’s little chance you’ll make it out alive.”
Several lesbians spontaneously jumped up and joined in the diatribe to convince the obviously distressed woman that her problem was due to her having fallen victim to heterosexual propaganda that fostered her addiction to masturbating herself with the male penis!
“What you need,” Arlette said, “is a woman lover who will treat you with respect and give you all the good loving you deserve.”
“Caroline and I will demonstrate,” she said, motioning for her partner to stand up, and they began kissing and caressing one another.
“See,” Arlette said to the woman from Amsterdam, “we don’t violate one another, and female being with another female is completely satisfying. You don’t need a male penis. You’ve just been brainwashed!”
Caroline continued the conversation intended to enlighten the new woman, while everyone else in the meeting space remained more or less comatose. “A woman with a woman can bring each other to orgasm over and over again and orgasms between women are far superior to the illusion of a good orgasm with a simple, overrated male penis fucking itself to orgasm inside the female vagina.”
The evening’s agenda had taken on a life of its own and soon the entire group was participating in a spontaneous, real-time psychodrama. There was hardly a woman present who eventually didn’t have something to say to the, by now, overwhelmed woman from Amsterdam. Personally, I was so thrown off guard that I couldn’t speak, especially since my mother and aunt from Georgia and Alabama respectively were sitting in the back of the room. What had been an initial effort on my part to embarrass and humiliate them had totally backfired and I had “egg on my face.” I’d never imagined that a prostitute from Amsterdam would appear out of nowhere and incite such frank talk about sex at an “ordinary” feminist meeting.
How did it end? What did the Steel Magnolias have to say after attending a feminist meeting in Paris? What did I learn from the evening’s events?
Pre-Order your copy of A Southern Belle in Paris HERE and find out!
Aloha,
Marjorie St.Clair
Stay in touch with me or to comment: visit www.writersadventure.com or stclair@writersadventure.com
Do you have a copy of my writing workbooks?
Wild Women Write: Reconnecting with the Wild Feminine
Wild Women Write takes you to the core of your instinctual feminine essence by familiarizing you with tales & stories of women who walked in their power, providing archetypal models to reclaim & reconnect to that sacred place within ourselves that is both wild and powerful. Writing & art exercises help you to dive deep into your own unique self & to express what you find there!
Writes of Passage: Writing Through the Seasons of Your Life
Have you been wanting to write your memoir… tell your life story but don’t know where to start? Writes of Passage is the perfect book to help you get started. For each of the four phases of your life: childhood, young adult, mature adult, & elder, there are writing & art exercises that will give you all the material you’ll need to begin your memoir!