You guys,
Kylie and I met in 1991. One morning in second grade we were playing girls chase boys on the blacktop outside of school at recess. It had rained earlier that day and the ground was slick. I slipped and fell on a broken green glass bottle. Blood soaked through at the knee of my white pants. Kylie scooped me into her arms and carried me inside the school all the way to the nurse’s office, blood trailing in the hallway as we went.
There’s a little white scar just below my left knee that my 3-year-old always notices and asks about, so I tell him the story of the moment his Aunt Kylie and I became best friends. We never recall any teachers on the playground, or how Kylie managed to open the heavy door to the school with me in her arms, but that’s how the story goes.
When I moved from New Jersey to California we became even closer and talked on the phone every week, sometimes every day. But in 2016, the year I dated John, the year I did lots of drugs, we talked less.
I remembered a phone call with her so clearly, so vividly, but I wanted to get her perspective. How did she remember it? Could she add any color to the story?
I called Kylie and fumbled through my recollection of our 2016 phone call, laughing, slightly embarrassed to bring up an argument between us where I had confessed as lightheartedly as I could that I had been doing a little coke and a little molly. Just a little, here and there.
I will never forget how Kylie reacted back then. She did not laugh or make a joke or make me feel better like she always did. “That is not cool, Charlie,” she said, in an unfamiliar tone. “It’s dangerous and stupid.”
I wondered if she would have anything to add, anything she said or I said. I did not anticipate that she would have a confession of her own.
“Well I never told you this, ” she started. I pressed the phone closer to my ear. “But I already knew before you told me that you were doing drugs.”
“How?” I asked.
“Tara reached out to me,” Kylie said. “She was worried about you after the breakup. She made me swear not to tell you but she didn’t know what else to do.”
Tara was a friend of mine who lived in Topanga. She was married and had two beautiful baby boys and she let me crash with them whenever I needed. She also graduated from the same high school as me and Kylie.
I never knew she reached out to Kylie. I had no idea she was ever worried about me.
“I cried every night for weeks,” Kylie went on. “You were so far away and I didn’t know what to do. I almost called your mom.”
I had always looked back on this time in my life as a dark moment, my rock bottom, but I never thought it was that bad. I saw it with rose-colored glasses, almost with nostalgia. Remember when I was 31 and I did stupid things? But there were people in my life who were not just worried about me, they were concerned for my life.
In today’s podcast episode I talk about three sobriety memoirs. The first is The Night Of The Gun by David Carr, who recalled events from his life by reaching out to the people from his past and interviewing them. This technique was also used in Life On Delay by John Hendrickson, and more informally in The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr.
I thought it was a novel idea to reach out to the people from my past whenever I’ve written a story that includes them. Now I believe it’s necessary. Collecting the perspectives of others involved will bring a richness and truth to my story that I wouldn’t be able to accomplish on my own.
Before I called Kylie I viewed my 2016 moment as a time when no one knew or understood what was going on for me. Now I can see that Kylie and Tara were there, and they knew more than I did how much trouble I was in, and I was too focused on myself to notice.
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Until next week,
Charlie
P.S. Kylie came on the podcast two years ago and had a conversation with me and Sam. Here’s the episode if you want to get to know my awesome best friend. :)
This is amazing Charlie. It brings so much more depth and dimension to understanding what the art of memoir is about—relationships, closure, healing, communication, perception, self-awareness. It sounds like for you memoir is almost a way of living life that honors your past and helps you integrate it into the present, along with those who have been and continue to be important to you in your life. Memoir is like the intentional making sense of oneself here and now by taking charge of your own stories. Do you relate to it this way, with all these personal development and relationship implications, or is the focus more on the craft of writing that surrounds great memoir?
so brave