Camilla Gibb on the transformative power of writing a memoir
The novelist Camilla Gibb is a strong believer in the power of narrative. In fact, Gibb says, "nothing has meaning unless we put it into a story."
The truth of that statement came home to her several years ago when, after a few devastating blows, her life as she knew it fell apart. She wrote her new memoir This is Happy to make sense of the chaos.
Excerpt from "This is Happy" by Camilla Gibb
It is a crisp fall Saturday and I am alone with my daughter, without plans, daunted about getting through the day. My parents have two new cats—I welcome the spontaneous invitation to come over and meet them. My daughter has become a cat herself; it takes two hours to wrangle her into a diaper and a dress, and then the fight over sitting in her car seat begins.
She is two years old. No, I don't want to, I don't have to, I won't—she has various ways of expressing a consistent opinion.
It is 11:15 a.m. and we have been up for six hours. We have had a bath and cooked breakfast and made tea and read books and done art and sung songs and played soccer and I am ready for adult company and the distraction of cats and grandparents. But my daughter wants to drive the car. She wants to play with the lock and tune the radio. She wants to do anything but get into her car seat.
I'm promising cats! Grandparents! Riverdale Farm!
Goldfish! Dora Band-Aids!
My daughter sits in the driver's seat punching the buttons on the CD player. She helpfully pronounces it broken.
I give up. I sit down on the pavement and tell her I'll wait until she's ready to get into her car seat. I wait a very long time.