My high school memoir (My Nineteenth-Century Life) was waylaid by a narrator challenge. I could not find the right voice in which to tell my story. Was I writing the right memoir?

There was a hard incident. in this story that I was challenged to tell in the right voice—and to tell, period. If I opted for the neutral voice, was I not abandoning the adolescent I was then, an adolescent who needed an ally? If I wrote in a cynical voice, wasn’t attributing a point of view from my adult self but which was not shared by the “I” character who had little perspective other than feeling his hurt?

The result of this questioning was that I stopped writing—for a while. I knew that one day, I would pick this book up again and I would write it to the end. But that time was in the future.

To my surprise, when I returned to the manuscript, the book presented another writing challenge which brought me to a standstill.

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