Judy Goldman has written the most wrenching and beautiful love letter this year. Together: A memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap is about time and resilience, and oh yes, love. And it's remarkable. Judy's the author of Losing My Sister, a finalist for Memoir of the Year by both Southeast Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) and ForeWord Review.
Her two novels are Early Leaving and The Slow Way Back, a finalist for SIBA’s Novel of the Year, winner of the Sir Walter Raleigh Fiction Award and the Mary Ruffin Poole Award for First Fiction. And she's also a poet: Holding Back Winter and Wanting To Know the End, which was the winner of the Gerald Cable Poetry Prize and the top three prizes for a book of poetry by a North Carolinian – the Roanoke-Chowan Prize, Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize, and Oscar Arnold Young Prize.
I'm so honored to host Judy here. Thank you, Judy!
I loved reading about how you changed
and grew resilient, brave and strong. Do you ever look back at your early years
of your marriage and wonder how things would have unfolded if you had been that
way back then?
One
of the biggest lessons I learned about writing memoir is that you need to
include sparks of reflection -- what you knew then, what you know now. Who
am I in light of who I was? Well, what I know now is that I
actually was resilient, brave and strong all along. I just didn’t know it.
My grandpa called me “Flimely,” a Yiddish word meaning little bird. That image of me
stuck. I was sweet, demure, too small to
be taken seriously. Even though I broke
my engagement three weeks before the wedding (not to the man I’m married to), even
though the all-white high school I taught in was one of the first schools in
Georgia to admit black students and there were fierce fights every day, even
though after teaching for two years I moved to NYC alone, I did not see myself
as strong or brave. But here’s the
truth: I was strong and brave and
sweet and demure. I didn’t know you could be more than one thing.
It took writing this memoir to find all the parts of me, to understand
that we are all many things.
There is one line in your book that made me
burst into tears: young love turning into old love. There is, to my
mind, something extraordinary, about going through something with another
person over a long period of time. It’s easy to be in the rush of love, but
navigating the sharks and man-eating jellyfish that pop up are something else,
yet it is these very horrors that make love deeper. Can you talk about this
please?
Oh,
Caroline, I love that my book made you cry! In my memoir, I write
about how, on our wedding day, my husband and I believed everything would stay
exactly the same as the minute the two of us ran down the steps of my parents’
house in a snow of rice. Look at that
brand new husband and wife on the cover of my book -- the wife’s “going away”
outfit, how she holds her little white gloves in her hand, the husband’s suit
pants too short. But really, if we’re lucky, if we're fortunate enough to
spend years together, we’ll face change — both the slow, ordinary changes that
life’s forward momentum brings and the sudden, dramatic ones that take us by
surprise. Identities will shift. Roles
will switch. When my husband had an epidural to relieve his back pain, something
went terribly wrong and he was paralyzed from the waist down. We had both colluded in seeing him as the
strong one in our partnership. I used to
joke I was like Patty Hearst: I married
my bodyguard! But then I was forced to
take over. My husband was forced to give in. I write in my
memoir: These shifts do not necessarily cause a marriage to falter. They can strengthen it. If we take the aerial view. And keep creating our marriage as if from
scratch. And keep falling into bed with
each other.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
I
tell creative writing students we have to write about what keeps us up at
night. What’s keeping me up now? I’m working on a new memoir about
how I walked alongside the civil rights movement, never for
one minute linking arms with the people marching down the middle of the street.
Because I grew up in Rock Hill, South Carolina, attended the University
of Georgia, taught school in Atlanta – during the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ’60s -- I kept
finding myself in situations that turned into junctures.
Junctures interest me. We neglect one path in favor of another. We go straight instead of turning. Our lives play out.
Junctures interest me. We neglect one path in favor of another. We go straight instead of turning. Our lives play out.
What else am I obsessing about? How my 10-year-old grandson’s report on Louisiana is coming along. What kind of drivers my 16-year-old identical twin granddaughters will be. I’ll be 77 when my new memoir comes out in February — will I be too old to remember how to give talks and readings? Do I need new boots for the winter?
Should I keep going with my obsessions, Caroline?
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
What have I learned about writing, success, failure?
Here’s what I know: You can spend years working on something you’ll end up throwing away. The truth is, when you begin a new book, you cannot know if it’s going to be okay, or even if it has the potential to be okay. My second collection of poetry was titled, Wanting To Know the End. But we can’t know the end. We can’t know if our children will flourish and be happy. We can’t know if our house will sell. We can’t know if we’ll be successful in what we write. Who even knows what success is?
After I’d written poetry for years and was yearning to write prose, I studied The New York Times Book Review to see how long a novel had to be in order to be called a novel. I found one that was 206 pages. Great! All I had to do was fill 206 pages.
There’s a lot you cannot know when you begin. No one out there is begging you to write. No one even knows if you got a single word down today. Your job is to just push on. Your job is to write the next word, the next sentence, another page. Try to make it to 206.
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