Beginning My Memoir About My Father
At Camp NaNoWriMo (which I described in my last blog post here), I got set up to start writing my memoir about my father, who was a political scientist named Paul M. A. Linebarger and a science fiction writer whose name you can read here, in his own hadwriting, from the header of my website about him.
My goal is 1000 or more words a day. The first day, yesterday, I wrote up several memories to reach my quota. The writing isn't on their site... all we writers put there is the number of words we come up with per day.
Well, today I typed in a letter full of advice that he wrote me in 1943, when he was in China during the Second World War and I was back in the US with my mother. I was just learning to talk then and certainly couldn't have understood his philosophical ramblings.
His advice was, in a nutshell, to be true to my own personal sense of Right and Wrong. Yes, capitalized like that.
But here is my favorite bit from that letter:
I love to think of you, a darling little old lady, walking around in 2013 A.D., long long after I am dead.
Seven years ago I wouldn't have thought of myself as a little old lady, but I do now!
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Good for you, for getting started. You can't accomplish a thing unless you begin it...so you have taken that important first step. Hope it goes well.
Thanks for your touching article. I hope I can write a book for my father. He is a man with endless ideas to survive. Miss him a lot.
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What a beautiful memory, the fact it is pictorial is yet more glorious and heartwarming
Good luck with the memoirs and the 1000 word goal per day.
Thank you so much for sharing such a personal and touching memory. 🙏