The month of May almost killed me. I didn't get any real writing done. My family had a crisis--my dad, a stroke patient, half paralyzed with big cognitive deficits, checked himself out of his personal care home with no notice, and decamped back to my 90 year old grandmother's house. A suspicious new money-grubbing, mentally unstable "girlfriend" was behind it all. Who knows how it's going to play out, but this new crisis, heralding a "new normal" in the family, completely stopped me from writing my memoir. It wasn't jus the new time constraints--the constant phone calls around the family trying to untangle my dad's new unpaid bills, the time it took for me to learn to run a federal background check on the new girlfriend, the sleepless nights when I worried about my dad's unsupervised medicine-taking, the Sunday he called and said he hadn't eaten for 9 hours. (He is one-handed; he can't open a jar of peanut butter by himself...)
The big metaphysical problem was that this new crisis caused my interpretation of the past to change. Paragraphs that I'd written no longer seemed to contain the emotional truth I was aiming for.
I bet this happens to other folks--life never stops, and current happenings in our lives color the past events that we are interpreting in our memoirs. Without going into a lot of details, this new crisis in my family made me see my parents in a new light, and what seemed "true" in March 2013 no longer seems absolutely true here in June 2013.
What helped me start writing again? Giving myself a short break, regaining the strength and equilibrium to open up my word file ("official narrative") again. The realization that life would probably never just stop and the story would probably never be "over." That the act of writing a book required honoring some arbitrary constraints.
What emotional hiccups have you experienced in writing your life stories? Do you have any advice about how to write memoir as life's rich pageant continues before our eyes?