It was the morning after I had my eight-hour back surgery. The Spinal Fusion surgery, where two stainless steel rods were fused to my spine to stop its continual movement that was in the shape of a very mild letter S. I woke up and saw my mother with a concerned look on her face, standing on one side of the bed, while a nurse stood on the other side and said that she had to roll me over to change the bed sheets and the dressing on my incision. And the very second she turned me over on my side, the pain was so incredible, I started gasping for air and blacked out.
This passage would've been the opening to my memoir, if I ever wrote one.
My son's girlfriend seems to think that my life has been so interesting, that it needs to be told in a memoir. And quite honestly, I don't think my life has been all that interesting at all. But she's basing it on some of the stories I've told her. Putting my life story in a book reveals such personal stuff. I've never considered doing a memoir, and the only thing that comes closest to it, is the mini serial There's Been A Death In The Neighborhood, which are stories that are hardly about me, just what I saw and experienced. Everything else, it's too personal to share.
There's a Banksy quote that makes so much sense:
"I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of the private life in public. They forget that invisibility is a super power."
My mother always said that if you write a memoir or an autobiography, you must always tell the truth, about everything. Leave nothing out. When I used to work as a Script Reader back in the day, I had to read Aretha Franklin's biography. And she held back a lot of personal things that happened in her life. She refused to name the man she had been having an affair with for several years, and only referred to him as Mr. X. And because she talked a lot about her beautiful gowns that she wore when she performed, it became clear to me that she should've had a colorful coffee table book of images of her gowns and when she wore them and the stories behind them.
I found out from the producer I was working for, who said that the only reason why Aretha wanted a biography was that she was envious of how Tina Turner's movie, What's Love Got To Do With It had a huge success that was based on her autobiographical book. Basically, Aretha wanted what Tina Turner had. I remember thinking, well, she can't have any of that with this book she wrote, because she didn't completely tell the truth, and withheld a lot of it.
I guess, if I ever consider doing a memoir, I'll do what Lucille Ball did and work with a biographer and let someone else write it.