On Writing A Memoir

Golden Gate Bridge from Buena Vista Park, San Francisco

After eight long years of my writing and publishing journey, my baby, LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER, will be released into the world in only four months’ time.  Crack out the champagne, let the celebration begin!  Especially after being rejected by over fifty agents.

In fact, there would be nothing to celebrate today had I not been introduced to the amazing Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press and Spark Press.  Brooke is arguably the Queen of Memoir and the Queen of Hybrid Publishing, and from her TED X talk and her weekly online column, “Writerly Things,” I learned that traditional publishers rarely take a risk on any type of memoir other than celebrity memoir.  After all, who but celebrities can boast a platform of a million or more followers on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, or all four?  What could be more obvious to risk-averse traditional publishers than that a million followers will easily translate into at least tens of thousands of sales?

Essentially, the memoir genre is divided into three basic categories—celebrity memoir, trauma memoir, and adventure memoir.  Probably the smallest category, adventure memoir covers such unusual and extreme living scenarios as, for example, a family that home schools four children on a boat while sailing around the world.  Much more common is trauma memoir, which usually revolves around sexual abuse, divorce, or surviving long-term cancer.  But where do LGBTQIA+ stories fit?  Most gay memoirs are variants of trauma memoir, while a few—like Jeffrey Sellers’s “Theatre Kid” and Billy Porter’s “Unprotected”—are celebrity memoirs with, as in Billy’s case, a trauma component.

LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER is obviously not a celebrity memoir, as my unimpressive tally of Facebook followers attests, but neither is it a trauma memoir.  Yes, a tragedy occurs within its pages, but it was a type of tragedy that did not leave me with on-going PTSD.  What it is, first and foremost, is a story about coming out of the closet and navigating the confusing, clandestine gay world that I first encountered in 1980.  It’s every bit as much a story about the challenges I encountered attracting and building gay relationships, and it’s especially concerned with the unique nuances of interracial gay relationships.  At the same time, it’s also a story about what it means to become a landscape architect—it’s a career memoir about a type of career rarely written about outside professional publications like Landscape Architecture magazine.  (As a genre, I guess you could say that career memoir is a particular subset of adventure memoir and/or celebrity memoir.)

In other words, LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER is a memoir that crosses several sub-categories, and that, I believe, is its greatest strength.  But what on earth possessed me to write a memoir in the first place?   The answer is that my book germinated from a tiny seed that was randomly and arbitrarily planted in a tiny pot, except that the pot, of course, contained not soil but a part of my soul.  The seed got planted early in 2018 during a random social encounter.  I was toweling off in the locker room of my local YMCA after one of my accustomed lap swims—I’m pleased to report that I have faithfully swum a quarter mile of laps three times a week, every week for going on fifty years.  Getting dressed, I overheard a man about my age, which is to say a newly minted senior, talking to another man about how he had lived in London for many years.  He soon approached a locker near mine, so I said to him, “I hear you lived in London.  I too lived there for a year, in 1975-1976, and I could tell you some stories about that.”

“What happened?” he asked me.

“Well, to set the scene, first you need to know that I won a prestigious scholarship called the Thouron Fellowship for British American Student Exchange, allowing me to study architecture at University College London.  All of us students competing for the scholarship were interviewed at length at a country club in New Jersey by a panel of professors from the University of Pennsylvania—my alma mater—along with some British professors who had once attended Penn.  One of the British interviewers was Sir Ian Davies, who lived in London.  When I was fortunate enough to win the scholarship, an official from the program handed me Sir Ian’s business card and told me that if I encountered any difficulties in London, I should contact him.

                “As it turned out, I did encounter a difficulty within the first two or three weeks of arriving in Britain.  Once a month, we were told to expect a check (or as the Brits would call it, a cheque) from the scholarship to cover our living expenses, but my first check did not arrive and I was nearly broke.  Probably the reason it didn’t show up was because I had been accepted for residence in a London dorm at the last minute and had only just moved there from a room I was renting in Kentish Town.

                “Fortunately, I managed to find Sir Ian’s business card, and I set about making an appointment with him.  When I arrived at his office, it turned out to be housed in the Royal Dental School.  After waiting a short time in a large waiting room, a door opened, and Sir Ian Davies appeared in a jacket and tie, ushering me into his luxurious private office, with its vintage mahogany desk and elegant Persian carpet.

                “ ‘What can I do for you, Brooks?’ he asked. 

                “Well, I was supposed to receive my monthly Thouron check and it never arrived.  I’m running out of money.  What should I do? 

                “At that information, Sir Ian wordlessly reached into his jacket pocket and proffered his personal checkbook.  ‘How much do you need?’ he asked, and when I told him, he produced a fountain pen and wrote me a check for that exact amount right on the spot, no questions asked.

                “Naturally, I was not only infinitely relieved, but also very impressed.  So that’s why this scholarship is prestigious, I thought, as we shook hands.  Then, when Sir Ian said goodbye and closed the door, I noticed that it bore a plaque in gold lettering.  The lettering proclaimed ‘Director, Royal Dental School.’”

                “Well, that’s a story!” my locker room companion said, and the seed was planted.  As I drove home from the Y, I began to realize that if I could tell that story, I could tell a hundred others, perhaps a thousand, and I began writing.  Of course, at the beginning, I had no idea what I was writing about.  In fact, it took at least two years until the eventual themes and momentum of my story emerged, with the help of several talented developmental editors.  But first, I jettisoned hundreds of anecdotes, dropping them as if they were so many snippets of film swept off my desk onto the editing room floor.  One of the dropped snippets was the Ian Davies story.

As I wrote and wrote, dropping some snippets and rewinding others, I slowly began to understand what my story was about.  I remembered how, when I first came out of the closet, I enthusiastically asked every gay man I met how he had first come out, and I was fascinated by their answers.  The stories they told were as varied and vivid as painted strokes on a colorful abstract expressionist canvas, but one theme that emerged was how many of the men had come out in their teen or even their tween years.  This was in direct contrast to my own experience, since I didn’t come out until I was twenty-six years old.

Then, as time went by, I realized that I had once been fortunate to live in a time and place that were uniquely important in the history of gay rights in America:  San Francisco in the 1980s.  As I describe it in LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER, I arrived in San Francisco less than four years after the great gay leader, Harvey Milk, was assassinated in an impulsive act of rage by the homophobic Supervisor Dan White in City Hall, along with Mayor George Moscone.  That singular and tragic event led immediately and directly to the impressive political rise of the mayor-in-waiting, Senator Dianne Feinstein.  And, as I next mention, when I arrived in San Francisco in 1982, AIDS was a distant train barreling down the tracks toward us, its terrifying cyclops-like eye illuminating the night sky. 

From the confluence of Milk’s assassination with the hurricane force of the AIDS epidemic, the main themes of my story were born, but there was another reason why my writing became increasingly urgent as I plowed on.  It was urgent because, as I thought back to that time in my life, I realized I had lost touch with my younger self, the person I was in those long-ago days, when I was in my thirties.  Who was he and why did he do the things he did?  I urgently wanted to know, I needed very much to find out.  And I wanted to tell him that things have turned out all right, that I am another person today, but the person I am today owes everything to him and who he was.  If you read LANDSCAPE IN LAVENDER, and I sincerely hope that you do, you will meet a Brooks that you have never known until now, no matter how many similarities you recognize between him and me.