The Nancy Who Drew is a memoir that solved a mystery.
Did the events occur in order that she would remember a previous life? What did she know and when did she know it? This is a story of remembrance. Because sometimes, in order to make sense of this life, you have to remember the one that came before.
A shy, dreamy girl grows up in New York City in the 50s and 60s. Betrayed by her mother, Nancy flees to London to realize her dream of studying at RADA and becoming an actress in England. Upon her return home seven years later, disillusioned with acting and eager to start a new life as a painter, her mother confesses that she conceived Nancy “in revenge for World War II.” This resonates with Nancy, as if she has known it all along. She becomes an artist, exploring her subconscious through drawing and painting. But it isn’t until decades later when she begins to write her story that she discovers the meaning of the images.
Did her dreams of death and her childhood drawings of a dead girl, have something to do with a girl who was killed by the Nazis exactly six years and six months before the day she was born? Is this the girl who haunted Nancy’s dreams in childhood? The girl she painted at the bottom of the sea? If it is, then Nancy’s own life begins to make sense as she comes to a new understanding of why she might have “created her reality.”
It wasn’t until I was well into the process of writing down my life that I became aware that there was a force working through me. I felt this force as an energy, as a spirit of soul consciousness. This was because of the depths I traversed. Not all memoirists wish to turn their lives inside out to find hidden meanings or through lines or plumb lines to the depths of their subconscious, nor is it required. Yet if we do choose this kind of delving, the benefits are immeasurable. For we are doing nothing less than putting our lives in order—our psyches, really. In the myth of Psyche and Eros, Psyche’s first task was to make order out of the pile of seeds and sort them all out. Sorting out our experience is soul work. It means taking the time to step out of the hurly-burly and look back at where we have been. I can’t think of a better way to know the way forward than to step back and look at where I have been. The writing creates a map of sorts. Where was I and when was I there? Why was I there? The way forward then is in the looking back. The stepping back. The reader may find my story interesting or not, but for me it is fascinating. For I have unearthed stories that I may have hidden from myself until now. And aside from sorting out “what happened when,” I may have found the underlying reasoning. I may have made connections, this feeling to that event. Truth is always interesting. We first write for ourselves, and then we write for others to read, and with each revision the story becomes richer and more vibrant and more real. And so we become more real as we become more aware of who we truly are inside. Yet it is in the sharing of our stories that we really take off. In making them public, in reading them aloud, we are honoring our experience. We are also empowering others to take that leap of faith into their own lives. We don’t know what we might touch off in another, what trigger or spark we might ignite in another. And it may only be on a subconscious level. But truth is catching. When one can open up, another sees that it is possible. And so we all move forward. We all grow.
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