Three Marriages

A long time ago, I set out to tell my story and make a book. The result was Three Marriages: lies I’ve lived by and it was self-published July 2014.

The story begins with my experience of being widowed, which led me to college as a single mother where I met and married a man who took me overseas to begin a new life. However, it didn't turn out the way I expected. I divorced my second husband in an Abu Dhabi Sharia court when the Emirati man who would become my third husband rescued me -- I'd been falsely accused and was at risk of being jailed. I fled that third marriage ten years later. Three Marriages was my investigation into what had been lived through me. The story ended with my burning question: Was it true love?

Between 2017 - 2024, when I freed myself from the relationship that began as balm, but quickly turned irritant, six years after my Arabian escape, I wrote The Writer's Vow: A Thread of Instinct Through Marrying Others to Marry Myself in the hope I'd answer that question. It was an arduous journey and the answer turned out to be so much more complex than I ever anticipated. I think of it now as my Seven Year Persephone Period during which time I set out to write a sequel but it turned into a prequel when I then wrote a third book. It seemed I had a trilogy until the two books became one!

The Writer's Vow has been sent out to literary agents. Will it become a book for readers? All I know is that I've had the great good fortune of working with Victoria Nelson as mentor and editor, which has earned me my writerly stripes. What I can say is that I honour the process I continue to engage as a writer, I'm devoted to the creative practice I've established, and I welcome the next literary adventure.

My autoethnographic journey has produced two memoirs on a mission to bring the science of selfhood into mainstream awareness through the art of storytelling. I have investigated my lived experience to tell story that is relevant for any woman seeking to understand the relational dynamics in her psyche. For the primal ground upon which all women stand is giving us a great task today — we must find the way to redeem feminine wisdom from within.

I’m currently working on a novel and it is a great relief to be playing in imagination rather than memory. The writing journey is a mysterious endeavour! But I believe it is also noble work for the love of humanity and I'm a writer who can't not write!

“ The day a person finds out he's a writer is usually not the day he finishes his first story or poem or the day he is first published, but much, much farther down the road. It is the day he realizes he possesses a certain cluster of psychological traits that forms the writing obsession. Far from feeling crowned with laurel, this person is likely to experience a reaction akin to hearing on his 21st birthday, that he is descended from a venerable line of Transylvanian vampires and he is one, too; there is no escape!  For by this time he has probably had ample opportunity to observe, in himself and in other writers, some of the psychological stigmata of the creative person: hypersensitivity, self-absorption, compulsive behavior, ungenerous ambition, and all those related traits that tend to cancel out the romantic aura the profession holds in the eyes of the uninitiated.”

~ Victoria Nelson, On Writer's Block

 

This is storytelling to investigate and heal through experiential encounter by reckoning with what's been made in order to resurrect and recreate what is possible.

For in the end, life is just a story.