Emails With My Editor at Graywolf
How do you finish and structure your memoir-in-progress when your life blows up over night?
Chloé Caldwell & Yuka Igarashi in conversation
Behind the scenes of structuring a memoir in real time or How To Structure a Memoir About Your Life While Your Life Is Blowing Up.
***This post is particularly good for people / writers who think a book “pours out of you” or that you know what you’re doing or that it’s cathartic.***
Context: March 2023: CC sells a book (title at the time was Orphaned Passages: Notes On Trying; the title changes during writing process) to Graywolf on basis of “book of notes and observations on fertility industrial complex” as CC was experiencing unexplained infertility. Book was 20ish pages, plus a letter / proposal. May 1st 2023: CC learns her husband is a closet sex and drug addict living a double life. CC’s entire life changes over night. CC and Yuka have lunch in late May 2023 at Jack Wife’s Freda in Chelsea when Yuka is in NYC from Hawaii. CC tells Yuka what happened. Yuka responds like this:
CC and Yuka attempt to figure out the book from there. What it is. What it might become. (Yuka later admits to CC she was waiting for CC to drop the book or ask to change the concept. But she didn’t! She persevered.)
Summer 2023 CC is manic in Paris and when CC and Yuka have a meeting planned, CC completely forgets about it while in lalaland walking around Montmartre, Paris.
At the time there was not yet a pub date for Trying. Yuka realized CC needed some time to continue writing and used, in Yuka’s words, “time as a revision technique.” Yuka said she’d never experienced this with a writer, where they sell a book under one premise and then the book / author’s life becomes completely different.
They start emailing. This conversation from 2023 to 2025 has been condensed for clarity, and many emails have been omitted.
*Note: Yuka was also the editor of CC’s book The Red Zone, and their relationship is seven years long at this point. If the emails seem sort of LOOSE or intimate, that’s why.