Don't Call Me Mother (49 page)

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Authors: Linda Joy Myers

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Personal Memoir, #Retail

BOOK: Don't Call Me Mother
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I’m so pleased that I can help others on their path to writing and publishing their memoir, and it’s such a pleasure to create new programs and toss around new ideas to help memoir writers with my colleagues Jennifer Lauck, Sharon Lippincott, Kathy Pooler, and Jerry Waxler. Thank you Kay Adams for inviting me to teach “The Power of Memoir” and other spiritual and inspiring writing courses at the Therapeutic Writing Institute.

I’m grateful to my oldest friends, Jodie Bevers, Keith Moore, and Eva Brauninger, for allowing me to bring them into my story, and for supporting me in telling it.

To my children, I say thank you for your patience and for the love you have brought into my life, including my three darling grandchildren. When I see them playing and smiling, I know that the path I took through the years helped to give them the freedom to be who they are, free of the pattern that shaped so many generations before them.

 

About the Author

 

Linda Joy Myers is founder and president of the National Association of Memoir Writers (namw.org) and co-president of the Women’s National Book Association, San Francisco. A national memoir speaker and coach, she’s the author of
The Power of Memoir: How to Write Your Healing Story
and the prize-winning memoir,
Don’t Call Me Mother
. Her new workbook,
The Journey of Memoir: The Three Stages of Memoir Writing
, will be released January 2013 through She Writes Press. She co-teaches the program Write your Memoir in Six Months with Brooke Warner, and offers teleseminars and workshops nationally. Visit her blog on how to write a successful memoir at memoriesandmemoirs.com.

Photo © Reenie Raschke

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright

Epigraph

Introduction to the New Edition

Preface

1 - Tracks to My Heart

2 - There Be Dragons

3 - Enid and Aunt Helen

4 - Night

5 - Liebestraum

6 - Daddy is Magic

7 - Liberace

8 - The Plains is Our Mother

9 - The Mississippi Valley Cradle

10 - Blanche and the Garden

11 - Ghosts of the Past

12 - Grandpa the Prayer Man

13 - Spare the Rod

14 - Lemon Meringue Pie

15 - Mother's Shadow

16 - Birthplace in Wapello

17 - The Music Man

18 - Finding Beauty

19 - Who do You Want More

20 - Hate Letters and Harrison

21 - Sex and Beethoven

22 - The Facts of Life and Death

23 - The Wedding Dress and Gram's Secrets

24 - Looking for Lewis

25 - Saved

26 - Happy Twelfth Birthday

27 - Welcome as a Snake

28 - Thirteen

29 - Swan Song

30 - Wasteland

31 - God's in His Heaven

32 - Sweet Sixteen

33 - You Can Wish Upon a Star

34 - Wheat Fields on a June Evening

35 - Who Am I

36 - Alma

37 - I Have been Waiting and Hoping

38 - Endings and Beginnings

39 - Leaving at Last

40 - Don't Call Me Mother

41 - Becoming a Mother

42 - Return of the Bad Dream

43 - Legacies

44 - Gram

45 - Beside the Road

46 - Amanda

47 - Etchings of the Past

48 - For the Grace of Dan

49 - The California Zephyr

50 - Don't Call Me Grandmother

51 - Lost

52 - I'm Not Your Daughter

53 - Motherless Child

54 - Don't Tell Them You're My Daughter

55 - The Diagnosis Manic Depression

56 - Requiem for a Ghost Mother

57 - Epilogue

58 - Afterword

Appendix

Acknowledgments

About the Author

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