Reading my grandmother’s story changed my life.
She would be the first person to say that she wasn’t anyone special. That she didn’t live an extraordinary life. But for me, her story was a page-turner.
She wrote about her parents – about her abusive father and saintly mother. About her first kiss – with a boy named Gene who taught her how to fish and row a boat, and who went into the Navy after Pearl Harbor. She wrote about how her father lied to send her away to nursing school at age 16, and about how she left school at 17 to marry my grandfather.
From there, the stories were familiar, but the surprises continued. It wasn’t that that I hadn’t heard the stories before. I knew that my uncle’s accidental death at age 17 devastated the family, and that my grandfather’s mental illness eventually tore my grandparents apart, but I had never heard these stories from her perspective. It made me see that family stories are like stones you can turn around in your hands to see a completely different side of them.
My grandmother’s memoir was only 74 pages long. When I finished, I wanted to read 74 pages from my Aunt Mary Ellen’s perspective, and then 74 pages from my Aunt Bobbie’s. But Mary Ellen died in 2021 and Bobbie died in 2022. I’ve already heard all of the stories they’ll ever tell me.
I was sitting with my grandmother’s pages still on my lap as I let that grief wash over me. It is truly something to live so long that you run out of fingers to count the people that you miss. (And I’m only 45!) But it made me want to start something.
People have often asked me to help them write their stories. I always demure. I truly believe that stories are personal. And that the act of writing is healing. To put it another way, I believe you should write your own story. And I want to help you. That’s why I started 88 Pages.
In the months that follow, I will launch a series of workshops and on-demand courses designed to help you mine your past and get your life story down on paper. You can do it for yourself or leave it as a legacy gift for your loved ones. I hope you’ll consider joining me.
Who am I Anyway?
I’m one of those writers who loves to write. Which is good, because I’ve been doing it a long time. I walked around with a little notebook when I was a teenager, recording the things that I saw. In college, I “published” a little collection of poetry. It is called The Body, and you can still find it at the Towson University library.
In grad school, I wrote a novel called Florida Pure. I never published it or even tried. I was diagnosed with cancer when I was revising it. Cancer changed my trajectory.
My cancer treatment was successful, but it left me infertile and in menopause at age 29. I used every coping mechanism I had available, which wasn’t much – I drank too much, and I wrote. I ended up writing a novel about people who underwent similar cataclysmic events, and who, like me, self-isolated – until tragedy struck and brought them closer together. This novel is called The Other Side of Everything. It was published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster.
Since then, I’ve written widely. Some things, like this viral essay in The New York Times, have been published, but most haven’t. For me, it’s not really about being published (although that would be nice). It’s about doing the work, and letting the work change me. Because writing will change you. I have never met anyone say it changed them for the worst.
Oh, and I should say that my name is Lauren Doyle Owens. You can google me to your heart’s content. You can also follow me on Twitter, and Instagram and Facebook and Bluesky. This enterprise will have its own social pages soon.
