Writing is in my DNA.
I can’t not write. On napkins, in journals, with a blunt pencil or my beloved 19-year-old Montblanc fountain pen.
And devouring trillions of lovingly-crafted sentences goes hand in hand with my compulsion. I adore Maya Angelou, Carrie Fisher, Tina Fey, Mitch Albom, John Donne and Mary Oliver. Mostly, non-fiction. Mostly, stunning memoirs. But biographies? I can take ‘em or leave ‘em. I don’t want opinions or remotely sourced insights.
Maya is a deeply magical memoirist. She wrote seven volumes of autobiography, climbing back through her history to life as a little girl growing up in the segregated south with her grandmother and uncle.
Legend has it that Maya would take a stack of yellow notepads to a hotel room and spend lost weekends writing her memories down, one by one. Her powers of recollection remarkable. Her courage supernatural.
She didn’t just spill the tea, she splashed it around! Mess was necessary.
My memoirs write themselves in my head on a daily basis. Sometimes on fast forward. Always in luxurious detail. The only thing holding me back?
Good old fashioned, hairy fear.
‘What will people think of me if I write it all down?’
But aging is a quiet and untamed liberating phenomenon.
And I relish the thought of taking no prisoners on the page. Of writing words that will free me and possibly (hopefully) piss people off.
I saw an interview with a writer once who said,
“If my family didn’t want me to write about them, they should’ve behaved.”
© Phyllis Foundis 2025