​Four days after my daughter began her freshman year in college, she called me to share both the good and the not-so-good.

“I love my roommate and we’re having fun setting up our room,” she said. “My classes are going to be hard, especially Arabic. The lakefront is beautiful. It’s sort of exhausting meeting so many new people and finding my way around. Today I cried for ten minutes and then felt better.”

Absent from her description was any mention of classes being held on a computer screen instead of a lecture hall, trying to remember names when the associated faces are half-covered by masks, or the mandatory bi-weekly appointment to have the inside of her nose swabbed. She wasn’t concerned with starting college during a pandemic. She was just airing the usual tensions of a new college freshman, far from home, excited and anxious and exhausted by the novelty of it all.

I told her about the 21-day rule, which stipulates that habits set in after three weeks of repetition. “By mid-September, it will start to seem normal. Everything that’s strange and new now will be a regular part of your life.”

And to some extent, I was right. Two weeks after arriving at school, she told me she was getting to know her way around the campus and had even explored the surrounding city a little bit. She’d started a job at a coffee shop on campus and met with the professor of her most challenging class to talk about study strategies. She and her roommate had hosted a movie night for the girls in the adjacent dorm rooms.

But on the three-week anniversary of her arrival at college, the date I told her it would all begin to feel familiar, I got a different kind of phone call: the one in which she told me that her roommate had tested positive for COVID-19 and my daughter, as a result, was being quarantined.

Just when I envisioned Holly starting to see college life as her new normal, she boarded a van which drove her to a hotel twenty minutes away from campus. There she’d stay, alone and not allowed to leave her room, for two weeks.

“Two weeks alone in a hotel room with someone delivering meals every day,” sighed my sister when I told her of Holly’s plight. “Is it awful that I’m a tiny bit envious?”

I understood. For busy parents overwhelmed by the pressures of balancing their own jobs with their kids’ virtual learning, two weeks of solitude in clean, comfortable, well-maintained surroundings with food delivery does sound somewhat irresistible.

But not for an eighteen-year-old who was just starting to get acclimated to her new environment. Abruptly, rather than counseling my daughter through mild and typical college homesickness, I was trying to help her navigate the incomprehensible territory of two weeks of solitary confinement.

Because that’s what it is, except admittedly different from the solitary confinement imposed upon actual prisoners. “It’s a really nice room,” my daughter reported the day she moved into the hotel. “I have two big beds and a desk. And a bathroom all to myself, after sharing one with five other girls for the past three weeks. And the food is way better than at school.”

But she was all alone. And of course, for prisoners put in solitary confinement, that’s the point. The worst punishment that can be inflicted upon them is to be isolated. Yet isolation was to be my daughter’s fate for the next two weeks. She had every possible creature comfort she might need – not only a comfortable bed, hot water for showers, good food, but also movies, TV shows, and constant access to her friends via all the forms of technology that kids her age use – but zero contact with other humans.

For as long as I’d been a parent – maybe even ever since my own days as a homesick college freshman – I’d anticipated the extra support she might need when she first went away to school, and I was ready with good advice. Seek out new friends. Join clubs. Attend events. Participate in activities. I thought I had all the solutions for any problems she might face this fall.

But I never envisioned the challenge of being locked in a highway hotel for two weeks.

Still, solace appeared in unexpected places. A box of chocolate-covered strawberries sent by her grandmother; a coloring book from an aunt – Holly announced that she would tape each picture to the hotel room wall as she finished it to personalize her space – groceries delivered to the front desk by her roommate’s thoughtful parents; phone calls from relatives and high school friends. 

I find myself wondering how she will look back on this. It’s easy to imagine, as my sister implied, that someday maybe she’ll be an exhausted young mother juggling work and home life and dreaming of the time she had two uninterrupted weeks in a hotel room with room service.

But it’s also possible that she’s more like a prisoner than we realize, and she’ll struggle with the memory of this total seclusion, and the overwhelming loneliness that periodically overtakes her despite the Facetime chats and online class meetings that populate her day.

Over the summer, I told Holly that going off to a college she’d never visited a thousand miles from home might be one of the biggest challenges she would ever face, but in retrospect, it seems like a challenge the same way a ropes course does: difficult and scary, but ultimately exciting and exhilarating. Her time in isolation will probably never seem exciting or exhilarating, even when it’s over.
​
Nonetheless, as with any challenge successfully met, emerging from it will give her a sense of triumph. Adjusting to campus life should be a breeze after this. And maybe once she finally gets back to her dorm, despite having spent only twenty-one nights there so far, it will feel like home.
 
 

The outreach manager of our local Council on Aging called me a few months ago to tell me about a grant being offered by a regional consortium. The purpose of the grant was to fund creative approaches to addressing seniors’ loneliness and potential depression during the period of isolation brought on by the pandemic.

As she saw it, the obvious response to this grant opportunity might be to schedule lectures or seminars about loneliness and depression, or recruit a social worker to run a support group. But years of experience had convinced her that this probably wasn’t a fruitful approach. She had come to believe that when seniors are feeling isolated, lonely or generally unhappy, they don’t particularly want to talk about it, or even hear someone else try to offer insights into loneliness.

Instead, she wanted to use the grant money to help them transcend their loneliness. Knowing that my business is devoted to helping seniors write and self-publish their memoirs, she called me to ask how I might be able to help. The money wasn’t enough to cover my typical project fee for a book-length memoir; nor did she imagine that many seniors who hadn’t previously considered a project of that nature would feel ready to embark on a full-scale memoir. What might we be able to offer instead?

Together, she and I formulated a plan. What if we invited any interested senior to participate in just one interview of up to an hour? They could use that hour to tell whatever kind of account they wanted: they could talk about one time period or segment of their life, or offer a condensed overview of their entire life story.

I loved the simplicity of it. Usually my memoir projects involve an average of eight to twelve hours of interviews, followed by a lot of writing time and multiple rounds of revisions. According to this idea, the participant would have one hour to tell me the story; I’d write it up; and then the participant would have the opportunity for one round of revisions. They’d then receive a basic printed copy of their story: unlike my longer projects, it would include no fancy design or formatting work; no binding; no cover.

In order to complete the grant application, the outreach director had to be able to express just how this would address the question of loneliness and isolation. The seniors would get an hour-long conversation with me, of course, but that was only the beginning. Thinking over which story or segment from their lives they wanted to tell me would allow them to indulge in some introspection. We would encourage them to engage their family or longtime friends in the process, asking those closest to them what those potential readers would like to know more about. And once I’d written up the “mini-memoir,” maybe the participants would even choose to continue working on telling more of their story themselves.

It didn’t take more than a week or two after we announced the initiative to find ten eager seniors, and I started setting up the interviews. I was ready to give the participants some coaching if they weren’t sure what kind of story they wanted to tell, but most of them knew exactly what they wanted to talk about, and I soon discovered that the interviews went fast and fluently. Two of the participants were women in their eighties who have lived in our town all of their lives and wanted to talk about their childhoods, young married years, and all that has changed in the world around them. Another participant told the story of a particularly formative year he spent traveling and teaching in the Mideast and Europe. A woman in her seventies described her years as a young military wife living in Germany. A man who had moved recently to town talked about owning and running a popular restaurant in New York City and all the adventures that experience brought his way. One participant poignantly wanted her children to understand the emotional trauma she had suffered as the child of a single mother with mental illness and how it informed her choices in adulthood. Another woman told of how the activism of the 1960s, when she was a teenager, influenced her decision to become a journalist. A recently widowed man chose to tell the story of meeting his wife and the many interesting years they spent together. And a grandfather of nine told of his many years racing sailboats, followed by many more years teaching his four sons to sail and organizing family vacations around this passion.

As we anticipated, some participants told me their story, read through a draft, made a few small edits and then gratefully accepted their printed copy. Some wanted enough copies to distribute to their children and grandchildren, which was easily accommodated for a very small fee; one sent copies of her account of childhood to her sisters and first cousins.

But others asked for the electronic file instead, so they could keep working on it themselves. In some cases they had been planning to write a memoir for years but couldn’t get over the hurdle of starting it, and this small piece of writing provided them with a launch pad. One participant thought his story was done after I wrote it up, but his grandchildren read it and had a lot of follow-up questions, which inspired him to write more about his life on his own. Some participants shared their story with relatives, neighbors, community members or even their local library.

In summary, the benefits were just as the COA outreach manager anticipated. The seniors enjoyed reflecting on their lives and sharing their stories. The interest that family members and others took in the project bolstered their spirits, and especially for those who used this as a starting point to continue writing on their own, the project definitely met the grant’s original goal of alleviating some of the sadness and boredom of this current time of isolation.

For me, the approach was new and illuminating. I tell my regular memoir clients they can have as many hours of interviewing as they need; I’d never thought about trying to see what could be accomplished if we limited our discussion to just one hour. I liked the way each participant came to the interview with a different plan. It made me wonder if potential memoir clients who are apprehensive about getting started would benefit from this approach – try just an hour and see what you can get through.

The deliverable is a very small piece of writing, not comparable at all to my usual full-length memoir projects and lacking in design, layout and photos, but it’s an interesting alternative way to approach the idea of memoir. I’m grateful that I was given the opportunity to work with these seniors and get a new perspective on my work.
 
 Interested in knowing more about one-hour mini-memoirs? Contact me at NancySWest@gmail.com to discuss your options!