I started writing on September 1st, 2020, and completed my first draft, the vomit draft, on December 31st, 2020. There were 105,269 words ranging over 215 pages, and all of them had sprung to life over the course of just 121 days.
The memoir began with a title and a subtitle:
I Should Be Dead By Now
Accidentally Surviving Trauma
It began as a way to pick myself through my teen years and my twenties, beginning roughly in puberty and the death of my father when I was fourteen, and continued on into my four years at college, where I came out as a gay man, and then my ten years living in Japan, where my closet had a revolving door for the first several of those years. A span of twenty years, from 1978 to 1998, with grief, loneliness, self-image, HIV, and love coming together in different proportions on different days.
I started work on the second draft on January 1st, 2021, and am now in the middle of a third, restructuring draft. Since the new year began, I found the printed manuscript of a fictionalized memoir I had written in 1991 or 1992, within my first few years of living in Japan. There is some overlap between that work, called In So Many Words, and I Should Be Dead By Now, in terms of the time frames they cover. I haven’t re-read the former, however. I will re-read it, if only to help me remember some of the things I have forgotten since 1992, but for now it is a time capsule. And that’s fine.
The two works came to be for similar yet different reasons. I’m happier writing a memoir, however. The time for fictions, no matter how lightly constructed, is past.
