In Her Shoes

When my daughter was a child, she sometimes requested at bedtime, “Tell me a story about when you were a little girl.” I don’t recall what stories I told, but I suppose some of them involved my father and mother. At some point it occurred to me that I knew precious little about my parents. I was barely an adult when they died, so I had a limited point of view. Some of us in the family didn’t know until my mother’s death that her given name was Agnes Isabella. She was always Maybelle. I wanted my daughter and her future children to know more about me than I’d known about my parents. That started me on the road to genealogy, which led to discoveries not only about my parents, but about other intriguing relatives. One family became the subject of my first published book, Swinging Sisters.
In 1985, at Christmastime, I published my first reminiscence, Simply Delicious, simultaneously in The Arlington (Virginia) Journal and The Osceola County (Iowa) Gazette Tribune. That launched an unplanned jaunt into writing and publishing, in print and online in dozens of publications, including Reminisce, Good Old Days, Nostalgia, Yesterday’s Magazette, The Tampa Tribune, Catholic Digest; The Washington Post, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Clever Magazine, and The Elder Storytelling Place.
My work has also appeared in a dozen or more anthologies; most recently in two by Silver Boomer Books: From The Porch Swing: Memories Of Our Grandparents, and The Harsh And The Heart: Celebrating The Military. When the guidelines arrived from the editor for an upcoming book on widowhood, I replied that I’d have to pass on this one; that I’m not a widow. She responded, “You’re a writer. It doesn’t have to be about you.”
That invitation opened a door to a subject I’d never fully explored: How my mother’s widowhood and her subsequent death profoundly shaped my life. The resulting submission to Silver Boomer Books prompted me to publish this compilation, with In Her Shoes as the theme.
This book is not autobiography, which covers a person’s full life and is factual. This is memoir, individual stories about a particular time of one’s life, as he or she remembers it. Since this collection is an attempt to know and understand my parents, the settings do not go much beyond childhood, because those are the only years I shared with them—the only place I can find them.
Memoir is both difficult and fun. Difficult because many elements of a particular event are lost to time; fun because hindsight and perspective come into play. Writers take literary license to create dialogue and inner thoughts of how it probably was or might have been.
Most of the material was written over the past 25 years and is presented in somewhat random order, by era and subject. Because the stories were previously published separately, some details are repeated. I eliminated what I could, but for the most part, deleting material mars the clarity of a particular story. I hope you will bear with the repetition. In some places, I used vintage letter excerpts, as they were written, including errors and words that are now considered not politically correct. I sometimes added a word or two, in brackets, for clarification.
Writer Ann Lamott says she once submitted a memoir manuscript to a publisher, who replied: You’ve made the mistake of thinking that everything about your life is interesting.
Ah, yes; it is presumptuous to publish a memoir or autobiography.
Elmore Leonard and James Patterson, whose style is spare, advise writers to leave out the parts that readers scan or skip altogether. With this collection, I ran the risk of turning it into a family history. So, if I neglected to omit material that might interest only family, please use your own literary license to scan and skip.
I thank you for reading In Her Shoes. All or part of it.

Madonna Dries Christensen
Iowagirl1@aol.com