1. What is the core message of The Rest of Our Lives?

Life is simply a series of life passages where you find yourself in new, uncharted territory. You can almost connect the dots, see how that final stage of life is similar to all the previous stages. Some crack your brittle shell open and leave you undefended—oh, the fear of the unfamiliar! But they can also bring the exhilaration of trying out a new kind of existence.

 

2. Give an example of old age being similar to an earlier stage in your life.

My first year of teaching was in an all-white high school in the most disadvantaged neighborhood in Atlanta, and the school had just been court-ordered to admit Black students. Such a volatile situation! I was scared for my personal safety and scared for the safety of the Black kids—those star students so carefully selected, plucked from their home schools and deposited in classrooms at Roosevelt High, how unwelcome they were. How was I to take on this broken world? There were limits all around me. And because of how unready I was to face such volatility, I also became aware of the limits within myself.

Old age is also volatile. When I open my eyes to a new day, I understand that anything can happen. I am as unprepared for what is before me as I was the first year I taught. The tension of not knowing when the unexpected will invade. Something coming out of nowhere. The possibility of a stroke, heart attack, dementia, cancer, a fall and a fractured something. Lurking danger.

 

3. What did you learn from your new awareness that old age is like young age?

Old age offers the promise of being exactly where we need to be. Which is similar to my years of teaching at Roosevelt High School. When the pendulum swings us into a new place so stripped of familiarity and protection, it is possible for us to upend our limited ways of understanding and our ground-in cowardice. Maybe even find inklings of courage. Life can be a continuous act of creativity—if we look at it with a frank eye.

 

4. What is the most important thing you’ve learned about writing memoir?

Every memoir seeks to answer this question: “What do I know now that I didn’t know then?” That question leads to the heart of memoir. We write through the layers of memory to discover the deepest patterns of our personality. Here’s how I ended up the way I am.

Writing The Rest of Our Lives, I learned that old age is not so foreign, after all. Just by proceeding through time, one moment and the next, we learn, bit by bit, the truth of who we are. Everything we experience, this time like that time, the back-and-forthing–all of it reveals who we are. All of it amounts to a life.

 

5. What is a crucial trait for a writer to have?

I’m going to name two. First, you need to be arrogant. Why else would you think that anything you write might have meaning for someone else? You also need insecurity, because that is what keeps you going back to your manuscript to revise, to try to make it better.

 

6. You’ve published poetry, fiction, and memoir. What is your best advice for all writers, regardless of genre?

Show up!