I didn't know it when I took this picture, but I think this might be one of my favorite photographs of two writers.
Neither of us had published a book.
Neither of us had a book deal.
One of us wasn't entirely convinced she was a writer at all.
But there we were.
My mom, Joan, and me.
Top down. Sunglasses on. Looking fabulous.
And in my hand was the beginning of our first book.
Everyone Said She Should Write a Book
For years, people told my mom that her life could fill a book.
She had lived through extraordinary highs, devastating lows and enough unexpected chapters to make fiction seem tame by comparison.
Whenever someone told her, “Joan, you should write a book,” she'd usually laugh.
I didn't.
Eventually I told her, “Mom, I think we should.”
So in the summer of 2023, we decided to find out what that might look like.
We spent an afternoon at my apartment with Mom talking and me typing.
I connected my computer to the television so she could see everything I was writing.
She remembered.
I recorded.
She corrected.
I reorganized.
She'd tell one story, which reminded her of another, which led to another.
Four hours later, we had taken decades of a life and begun turning them into the bones of a story.
Not a manuscript.
A zero draft.
Her Story. My Words. Our Book.
We decided early that we didn't want to write a traditional memoir.
We wanted fiction inspired by her life.
Partly because fiction gave us room to shape decades of stories into something larger.
And partly because changing a few names seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea.
Protect the innocent. Protect the guilty. Let the readers wonder which is which.
Mom had the stories.
I was beginning to discover that I might know what to do with them.
That afternoon, I don't think either of us realized how significant that combination would eventually become.
Because I wasn't an author yet.
We Printed It Anyway
When we finished, we took our notes to a local print shop.
We had the zero draft printed, climbed into my convertible and put the top down.
I held those pages up and snapped this selfie.
It was our little celebration.
We were going to write a book.
Not someday.
Not wouldn't that be fun.
We had pages.
Obviously, this made us very official.
😂
Then Another Story Found Me
Our book didn't become my first published book.
Life had other ideas.
The zero draft eventually got tucked away, and another character wandered into my life.
An owl.
In March 2024, Oliver the Owl: The Culinary Pro became my first published book.
Then came another.
And another.
Somewhere between that afternoon in the convertible and everything that followed, I became what Mom and I were pretending to be in this photograph.
A writer.
And maybe we weren't pretending at all.
Because publishing isn't what makes the moment in this photograph important.
We had already done the most fundamental thing writers do.
We had decided there was a story worth telling.
And we'd started telling it.
Two Writers in a Convertible
I still have our zero draft.
I haven't finished the novel, and I'm not going to tell you everything that's inside those pages.
Some stories still belong to us.
For now.
But I look at this photograph differently today.
I used to see Mom and me having fun in my convertible after a really good afternoon together.
Now I see something else.
I see a woman whose life had given her an extraordinary collection of stories.
Beside her is a daughter who hadn't yet figured out that storytelling was about to become a very big part of her own life.
And between us was a stack of paper.
Her stories. My words. Our beginning.
Turns out, we both had a story to tell.
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