The first memoir was called An American Comedy, and I (somewhat pretentiously) adopted the three-part structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. It was a “comedy” in the classical sense that it was a story that begins in misery and ends in happiness. It starts with a loss of faith and a major illness and depression. It ends with the discovery of community and my own involvement in an art scene.
The first memoir ended around 2012, and I was doing pretty good. I was teaching at two colleges, co-owned an art gallery, and was one of the main organizers of the Downtown Fullerton Art Walk. I kind of thought that would be how things were for the rest of my life. But of course things didn’t turn out that way. In 2018, the art gallery closed down. In 2020, the global pandemic ended the Art Walk, and cut me off from a community that had sustained me. Plus, the hopeful Obama era turned into the much more perilous Trump era. Things changed, and not for the better.
Which is not to say that everything was terrible. In 2016, I began writing for, and then (briefly) editor of, the local newspaper, the Fullerton Observer. During Trump’s first term, I documented lots of protests, community events, and other things that sustained me. But in 2022, I left the paper. I became sort of burned out with teaching. I started to focus most of my energies on writing a history of Fullerton. I also met a woman who became my partner.
Things have been a mixed bag of trauma and joy. It is now 2025, I am 45 years old, and I have begun thinking about writing another memoir. It doesn’t have the neat trajectory of the first one. It’s a story that begins in happiness, but also includes loss and loneliness and perhaps larger concerns about the future of America. The country has changed since 2012. I have changed. And so I want to kind of document that journey.
As with the first memoir, I don’t know how this one will end. I am at a bit of a disadvantage this time around because throughout my 20s, I was a devoted journal-writer. I wrote pretty much every day about the things I was going through and thinking about. At some point, I kind of stopped journaling. I had other outlets for my writing–a blog, the newspaper, and my history writing. This time around, I don’t have dozens of journals to draw upon. I will have to, in part, rely upon my memory.
Why do I want to do this? Partly for therapy. Partly to process my experiences. And partly because I think it might be of some value to try to chronicle these strange and difficult years. I suppose I’ll begin by just diving into writing random memories and vignettes, perhaps ultimately combining them into a coherent whole.
