Adding Backstory to an Essay Collection

I recently read a memoir in which a woman shared a traumatic health emergency she ultimately survived. In addition to sharing this story, she also wrote about her background.

 

At first, I wondered if she added this background about her life in order to make the book an actual “book” in the event that her chapters documenting her health emergency were not sufficient. But as I read more about her background and everything else about her life leading up to the health emergency, I realized that it was a good thing she provided that background about her life, because it helped me to understand her and know her better. Of course, I do not know the author personally, but reading about her life helped me to get the full scope of what her life was like before, and after.

 

This made me think: Should I do the same for an essay collection I have been writing?

 

I have been working on an essay collection about my experience in sobriety, and I felt that it was a good idea to do so since I am going on my sixth year of being sober. Some people have asked me how I have managed to get this far being sober, so I thought it was a good idea to write about just how I have managed to do it.

 

But I am also writing my memoir. I am writing about my experiences of being a burn survivor, being a person who is deaf (and lost her hearing when 13 years old), and a person who has been coping with certain health issues – namely, panic attacks, a heart condition and a sleep disorder that have all wrecked havoc on my chances of getting and keeping a job. (The only job I have managed to keep despite all that? Working as a freelance writer! But, mainly, working from home, since I work my own hours.)

 

I am starting to wonder if I should combine the two books. If I should provide some background on the kind of life I have lived, my experiences that threw me deeper into drinking (plus a suicide attempt), and basically all the things I went through that shaped me into the person that I am today.

 

I will, of course, write about my experiences with alcoholism in the memoir, but now I’m wondering if I should throw ALL of those stories together into one book.

 

A part of me wasn’t sure if I should do it, because that’s like saying, “All of this bad stuff made me drink!” or “My crappy upbringing is to blame for my alcoholism.”

 

I don’t want to blame my life for my drinking problem. I don’t want to say “I was an alcoholic because of THIS!” or use bad stuff from my past as an excuse for why I drank. Yes, it did contribute to my drinking problem, but it’s not why I started drinking in the first place. I started drinking in the first place because EVERYBODY in my family drank! My parents, older siblings, in-laws, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc. EVERYBODY DRANK! It was like an initiation into adulthood. Although, some of us started drinking before we were legally old enough to drink.

 

And the more bad stuff that happened in my life, the worse my drinking got. That’s all there is to it. The bad stuff did not make me drink, it just made my drinking problem worse.

 

Then I think, well, it’s easy to judge people you don’t know. Readers might see that essay collection on sobriety and wonder, “WHY did she even start drinking? Why did she keep drinking?” And who knows what kind of conclusions they would reach about me from that line of thinking.

 

Probably wrong conclusions. I’ve been judged by a lot of people my entire life, and they usually get me wrong. They usually don’t understand me, my line of thinking (which was at its worse during my drinking days), that I wasn’t raised the same way as them, that I grew up with violence in the home, and that I’m JUST NOT LIKE THEM. I don’t think the way they do or see things the way they do. People often misjudge me. They usually get me wrong. Very few people know the real me.

 

Maybe sharing some of my background will help people know the real me. And better understand things about why the alcoholism happened.

 

Not only this, but I could basically tell all my stories and share my success at sobriety in just one book. Maybe my success at sobriety and not so much my material accomplishments in life are the highlight of my story, and should go towards the end of the book. (My success at sobriety is definitely not the end of my story, though; there’s more to tell.)

 

The more I thought about doing this, the more it made sense. And the more it made sense, the more I was able to figure out the organization of the book. Yes, it could definitely work.

 

One thing is certain: I am not my past. I am NOT the person I used to be. The beauty of sobriety is that my thinking is clearer, and healthier. I am not what I have lived through; I am what I choose to become. I am not where I come from; I get to choose where I will go.