Greetings from Portland, where I am back home after the fun of traipsing around the Pacific Northwest on book tour. All the events were terrific, but my time in Boise was especially delightful. There, the booksellers greeted me as though they already knew me, which in a sense they did, because they'd read my book. Windfall is many things, including a work of journalism. But it is also a memoir, one that divulges intimate details about parts of my life.
Since I'm asked about it often, I thought I’d share how Windfall became a memoir, as well as how this newsletter helped teach me to write in the first person—and how my family feels about the book.
I didn’t set out to write a memoir. I’ve said this often in the smattering of interviews and events I’ve done since the book’s release. When I started out, I had this idea that memoirs are selfish, that true journalists obscure their presence in their work, and that they were a genre mostly for women.
Obviously, I changed my mind, especially as I began to report and research a book about a woman lost to history. That's when I understood that my notions about memoir were based on internalized misogyny, stemming from the same culture that kept my great-grandmother rotting in an asylum.
As I started working on this book, I had written only a handful of major first-person pieces in my career. One was in 1996, as a very young reporter at The Item in Sumter, S.C., when I covered the Air Force base in town, and got invited to write about my ride in an F-16 with the Thunderbirds air show team. (I barfed.) The other was a piece I wrote about visiting the Grand Canyon for the Miami Herald. I also wrote an op-ed in 2010 for NPR about the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and a travel piece in 2104 for the Washington Post about the early days of book research for this project.
When those pieces were published, I was a newspaper reporter who always wrote at arm's length from her subjects, with so-called objectivity. But I liked the freedom that accompanied those first-person articles. Those personal pieces elicited more feedback and interest from readers than most other stories I wrote. It was clear that readers also appreciated the honesty of an identifiable point of view, perhaps because it allowed them to more easily step into my shoes and experience the world I was eager to show them as a journalist.
I can't pinpoint the exact moment I understood I was writing a memoir, in part because I continued to resist it—even as I knew that's what the book would eventually be.
It might have been on my first trip to North Dakota. That's when I first saw methane flares spewing planet-warming gases into the atmosphere and understood that I had a personal connection to climate change through the mineral rights on the land my great-grandmother homesteaded in 1906. It might have been when I sat on the tarmac at the Minot airport to fly home after my first trip to North Dakota. I cried, knowing I was returning a different woman, one who had to summon the courage to do something different with my life. It might have been a few weeks later in 2013 when I picked up copies of Wild and Eat, Pray, Love and marked them up to understand how to write a commercially viable story of a woman going on a journey. The very first inkling might even have been on Feb. 18, 2011, when I saw a screening of Josh Fox's film Gasland, and reached out to his publicist asking for his email address so I could talk to him about how he used a personal story to tell something bigger. Who knows?! How we form ideas is mysterious. I may not have truly embraced it until 2019 when I signed up for a memoir-writing class with Justin Hocking here in Portland.
But I suspect I understood when I began this newsletter in 2013. At first, it was just a way to connect with people who were taking my yoga classes. From what I knew of newsletters, though, the best ones weren't constantly selling you on something. They had extra content that made people want to open them to see what else you had to say. By writing to all of you every so often, I cultivated a voice. I understood what it meant to construct something that would connect with people who liked my writing enough to sign up and stay signed up. I understood I was writing for a very specific kind of reader, and that I needed to bring that same intimacy of correspondence to my book project.
Yet I still had to teach myself to write in the first person and I did that by delving into books about writing, including The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick and The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts. Over the years of working on this book, I read other excellent accounts of women digging into their pasts. My favorites by Americans are those that use personal stories to tell bigger truths that help us better understand ourselves and the forces that shape us and this country. Those that I read while working on Windfall that were most meaningful to me are Homeland by Sarah Smarsh, The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom and The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit.
And then, something happened while working on this project that required Windfall to be a memoir, which is that Chris and I struggled with infertility. It colored our lives from 2013 to 2017, and cast its shadow over my creative work. It was inescapably part of the story of going in search of Anna. I cut much of the nitty-gritty of infertility out of the book, because it was 1) boring, and 2) my ultimate goal for Windfall was to demonstrate the link between Anna's homestead claim and how it connects to climate change in our present day. But the story of infertility is in the book because it had to be. If it weren't, readers would intuit that something was missing, that I wasn't being entirely forthcoming.
I didn't detail in Windfall how sad I was in the aftermath of our failure, because I didn't need to. Instead, at my editor's urging, I added one line: "It was time for us to find a way to live lives rich with satisfaction," which was a call back to an earlier moment of happiness that we had in our marriage, also detailed in the book. The rest of Windfall demonstrates how I overcame that sadness: I devoted myself to writing and the journalism work I love.
Finally, people often ask how my family feels about the book. I think this is because memoirs can be controversial within families, particularly those that detail abusive childhoods, such as Educated by Tara Westover or The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.
I had a very happy childhood. And my father accompanied me to North Dakota once in 2013, so he understood what I was trying to do with the project. He heard about it over the years. I gave a finished copy to him for Christmas this year. When he completed the book, he texted me from his recliner in the basement: "Great book. Well done. I'm very proud of you." He told me last week that he is re-reading it now to catch what he missed the first time. My sister saw many versions of the book proposal as well as the draft I turned in to my editor in late 2021. I read out loud many chapters to my husband, particularly the ones where he is a “character” in them. But Chris didn’t want to read the draft versions of the book—he wanted to read the finished copy. I got a special PDF from my publisher so it was easy for him to read the completed version.
You would have to ask all three, but I think they not only trusted me, but also are the kind of people who know that artists need the freedom to interpret events from their point of view. This is among the reasons I love them all so much.
Thank you for reading,
Love,
Erika
P.S. Thanks to all of you who have been leaving reviews of Windfall on Amazon and Goodreads. I could definitely use more, especially on Amazon, which requires at least 50 reviews for a book to be ranked in any meaningful way. Please keep ‘em coming!
THE NEWS
All the links…
You Don’t Have to Be Complicit in Our Culture of Destruction. An interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” on the appetite for her book’s message of ecological care and reciprocity.
A reckoning in documentaries. How streaming has changed what many people think of as a “documentary,” and what that means for more traditional, journalism-based works of visual nonfiction.
If you happen to be in Carmel, California in the coming months, please check out Sarah Christianson’s exhibit at the Center for Photographic Art. Sarah is a photographer who now lives in Oakland, but she is from North Dakota and returns frequently to photograph her family’s farm. I consider myself very lucky to own one of her images.
Should copyediting exist? For the editors in the audience.
I can't wait to dive into it, and loved hearing about this journey.
It was so nice to meet you in person and hear your insights to your writing process. Loved that picture of Sisters' Oregon, it is so pretty there.