the moment before

on revising memoir

what ophelia gave

Preparation has always been one of my favorite parts of a play. There is physical preparation, emotional preparation, and the task of concentration. I have always loved connecting to the moment before, the circumstances of my character’s life before the action begins. I have loved listening intently, hand on the doorknob, waiting for my cue.  

I’m telling you this because I’m revising my memoir again. I wrote the book in a few fervent months in 2019 and have since spent years tinkering with half-hearted revisions. My agent took it out on submission earlier this year. It hasn’t sold, and I finally understand why. 

The book is called Ophelia with Child. It’s part literary portrait, an investigation into the character, her madness, her presence in popular culture, the ways we’ve misunderstood her. It’s also part memoir about desire and motherhood and art and creative companionship, about how playing Ophelia and the decisions I made during that production changed me profoundly. 

Hamlet promotional image, October 2016

I’ve been thinking about my process as an actor and how it differs from the way I write. And this has led to a revelation about why I’ve been so careless in my revisions. I have been, rather like Hamlet, afraid to act. A weak book won’t sell, and a part of me has believed that not selling the book means safety.  

A memoir is an exposing thing. I wonder, What if I’ve changed my mind about that? What if the circumstances of my life are no longer what they were? What if I’ve misunderstood? Afraid of the snapshot quality of memoir, I have felt like an artist hesitant to paint a self-portrait in case her appearance shifts. 

I’ve also been embarrassed by my fervor—embarrassed to admit how deeply I feel, how much I want.  

And there is, of course, the harrowing notion of laying down a narrative line on the events of a friendship, loss, love, or birth. There’s a feeling I can’t shake that by writing this book the record will be set. 

And the truth is, I thought it would end differently. I always thought there would be a bright epilogue in which we figured it all out—art and friendship and love and parenting and collaboration—in which we all found what we were looking for. If I held onto the book long enough, my friends might come back. If I held onto the book long enough, I might emerge with some grand revelation about art and motherhood, about how to keep the things we love.

memorizing lines with sleeping toddler, fall 2016

By not doing the rigorous work the book needed, I’d been allowing myself to stay in a moment of excitement and safety, a suspended place where things might work out. 

I’ve always felt the moment before to be a beautiful and expansive space. I thought I was keeping myself in the wings, one foot forward, waiting for something to begin. But I’ve realized that what I’d been doing to myself and to the book was something worse than that. 

During our production of Hamlet, the dressing room after Act III became known as “Purgatory,” filling with characters as they died, now just actors awaiting curtain call. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Polonius, me. In rehearsals, Are you dead yet? became a regular inquiry, a steady way of knowing where we were in the play. 

Avoiding hard revision work has placed me and this book in a purgatory. Here I am with it still, eager to write new things. Eager to give this story away.  

Hamlet and Laertes fight call, November 2016

There is a line I have always loved in the late Antony Sher’s Year of the King, his diary and sketchbook of playing Richard III at the Royal Shakespeare Company: “The time for hesitation is through.” 

I used to write this line on scraps of paper and hide it in my dressing rooms. Once, I wrote this line inside one of my character’s shoes. You must act! Fullness! Big choices! Bring the energy! I was trying to remind myself what type of storyteller I wanted to be.  

Now I’ve tacked it above my writing desk. The time for hesitation is through. I can see now what intervention is required of me and where I should act. And it’s not a delicate trimming of words. It’s a mad slashing of the manuscript. I must be willing to step into a moment of change, of reckoning and attentiveness. 

In Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts, Matt Bell says, “...what your novel tells you it wants to be is ultimately more important than what you wanted it to be when you began.” I believe this is true of memoir, too. 

So this becomes the task: To bring the same fearlessness and vitality to the revision I had in the initial writing, to find some lightning in it, to wake it up again. I want this book to be sharp and bold—a reclamation, not a wandering thing. 

And I can also let it be what it is, a story with no easy answers or tidy endings, a snapshot of how we lived and who we loved, and the ways we got each other through.