Around 2009 at the behest of a writer friend, I began a blog I called, This Gioia’s Chronicles. A few times a week I created and shared posts that ranged from observational essays of life, shared the impact of how the loss of my parents when I was just a year old affected my life, and some humorous and sometimes painful accounts of how I navigated my world. Writing the short essays on a consistent basis was one of the best things I’ve done for myself and I have that writer friend to thank for it. You see, I’d always wanted to be a writer and until the blog I had never been very successful at it. Since childhood, and especially in my early teens when I started a journal, I have been writing as a way to understand myself, my actions and choices. I’m an obsessive thinker and the act of writing down my thoughts helped me to release the pressure that often built up in my head. In my twenties I really thought I could be a published writer, but found I lacked the discipline, and I would argue the self-confidence to believe I could be one. Even when I had a few successes by way of published works in a college literary magazine, newspaper columns and even a few pieces accepted by magazines I still didn’t pursue it as a full-time occupation. It was the blog posts I wrote and the responses I received from those that found my site, read my words and shared their praise of it that gave me the confidence I needed to say that, “Yes. I am a writer.”
Still, the one writing accomplishment that has alluded me for many years is the completion of my memoir. The process of writing it began at the same time I started the journey of discovery of why I, along with three older brothers, lost our parents when we were children. For decades I’ve written thousands of words describing my efforts to find out how they died, why it happened the way it did, and who my mom and dad were in life to bring them to such a tragic end, one that has adversely affected, in many ways destroyed, the children and people they left behind. I could never feel confident about the writing or the way in which I was telling it. Writing This Gioia’s Chronicles helped me in that I broke up the story into chunks, sharing just one aspect or experience of my life and relating it to either my past or present. It was the best practice for the work I was to tackle in the future.
I stopped writing my blog a few years back. I created a hard copy of all the entries so I would have a record of the work, but decided that it was time for me to seriously get busy and write my book. When I set out to put pen to paper the working title in my head was, Nuclear Family, a play on the term that most think of as a “normal” happy family with a mom, dad, and children. My “nuclear” take was, however, to highlight what happens when a bomb as big as the one that destroyed my family happened one night in the fall of 1958, the aftereffects, much like an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, reach out and harm that is downwind from it. My parents and the pain they experienced in life is over now that they are resting in peace underground; but those they left behind still struggle. It’s generational, too. My children and my brothers’ children feel the impact as well as the four of us have worked, sometimes successfully, oftentimes not, thorough the trauma that affected us so early in life. Hence, the book changed as I began to write it, becoming more a true memoir of my personal life journey, peppered of course by how learning how my parents’ deaths affected how I moved forward in life, the choices I made, and how I overcame challenges. At present, I have no title, but the chapters of what is to be the first book chronicling the first 30 years of my life are complete. I am editing the draft and hope to have it completed in the near future.
While I am in that process, I decided to resurrect the work I did for This Gioia’s Chronicles here on my website. Not only will it inspire me to keep going as the process did before, but will hopefully share with readers what they might expect with the completed book. I hope anyone happening upon my website will come to understand the purpose of the work I do, not only writing my own life, but the passion I have for hearing, documenting, and sharing the lives and stories of others. That is what “Backward Glances” is all about. Looking to the past to help all of us make sense of our present and build a more fulfilling future.
Lisa Gioia-Acres