Hi Welcome Sharon. Thanks for sharing your "Memoirettes!" They sound amazing. I wonder if you ever thought about writing a book of essays. You have a great story. I think you have to just keep writing until you find a common thread in them. Thanks again for joining the group. Phyllis

Hi Phyllis and everyone, I'm so glad to have found this site. I've been writing little short story "memoirettes" for years. (Yes, I think I coined that word.) They are 800 - 4,000-word essays chronicling an episode in my life. The main themes that run through most of them are growing up with a mentally ill family and fighting my own depression, being Jewish in a non-Jewish and anti-Semitic community, feminism, racism, interracial relationships, substance abuse, single motherhood, raising biracial children, working in corporate America, health and illness, music, being a baby boomer, and relationships relationships relationships. One of the things I've been struggling with as I watch these stories make their way out of my brain and onto paper is that they are not terribly related, unless you look at all the stories together as different sides of me. When someone has finished reading the book, then they would have a picture of me. But if you were to read Story 1 and Story 9, you would not necessarily assume they were about the same person. And in some stories, I am not the main character. Rather than try to force the stories into some kind of chronological, thematic order, what do you think of the idea of simply throwing them together as a collection of essays that represents me? Each of them has a moral or a lesson I want to leave as part of my legacy, expressed either subtly or directly. The other option would be to use them as the basis of the stories I would fit into a more traditional chronological memoir. Thoughts? Ideas? Has anyone read the other kind--collection of memoir-ish essays? Thanks.