Encore Episode: Breaking the Silence with Melanie Brooks

In this encore conversation, author and teacher Melanie Brooks and I explore the lifelong impact of silence—within our families, our communities, and our writing lives. Drawing from her memoir, A Hard Silence, Melanie shares how unspoken truths shaped her understanding of grief, identity, and faith, and what it took to finally claim her voice on the page. Together, we discuss how silence keeps writers stuck, the power of finishing the stories that haunt us, and how narrative medicine helped her weave two complex narratives into one.

Episode Highlights

• 2:55: The pain of living with secrets
• 5:54: Navigating anticipatory grief
• 15:45: The transformative power of finishing your story
• 20:00 The magic of timing and the stories we tell ourselves
• 26:00 The influence of narrative medicine on Melanie’s story
• 30:00 Marrying two stories into one
• 37:00 Melanie’s best writing advice

Resources for this Episode: 

• My Family Kept My Dad's Secret For Years. I Wasn't Prepared For What Telling The Truth Would Mean.
• Interrogating the Cost of Silence and Finding My Voice
• Ditch Your Inner Critic Now 

Melanie’s Bio: Melanie Brooks is the author of A Hard Silence: One Daughter Remaps Family, Grief, and Faith When HIV/AIDS Changes It All (Vine Leaves Press, September 2023) and Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon Press, 2017). She teaches professional writing at Northeastern University and creative nonfiction in the MFA program at Bay Path University in Massachusetts. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast writing program. She recently completed a Certificate of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Psychology Today, the HuffPost, Yankee Magazine, the Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and other notable publications. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two children (when they are home from college), and two Labs.

Connect with Melanie:

Website: melaniebrooks.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/melanie.brooks.1690

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melaniejmbrookswriter

X: https://twitter.com/MelanieJMBrooks

LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/melanie-brooks-504826121

Book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-hard-silence-one-daughte

Sign up for Revise Your Memoir series: https://bit.ly/4ooLTDi

Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/
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Produced by Espresso Podcast Production

Chapters

• 0:00 Writing Your Resilience Podcast_Melanie Brooks Inteview Video
• 16:42 Marker
• 21:25 Marker
• 26:49 Marker
• 27:20 Marker
• 32:30 Marker
• 32:46 Marker
• 40:55 Marker

Transcript

Transcript for Writing Your Resilience Podcast Episode 105

Encore Episode: Breaking the Silence with Melanie Brooks

[02:09] Before we get to this conversation, I have a few questions for you. What role has silence played in your writing and in your life? Has it ever been helpful? Has it ever held you back? If you could learn one thing about it, what would that be? How could learning this help you become more resilient? I hope you ponder these questions as you listen to today’s episode. Now, I give you my conversation with Melanie Brooks.

[02:56] Lisa: Well, hello there, Melanie Brooks. I am so glad that you’re here with me today.

[03:01] Melanie: Hi, Lisa. It’s great to see you.

[03:03] Lisa: I know the last time we saw each other, we were at AWP, was that in March? I can’t believe it was that long ago.

[03:09] Melanie: I know. It doesn’t feel like it. But yeah, it was March. Yeah. Thank you so much for inviting me to be on.

[03:16] Lisa: Well, I am delighted because I absolutely adore your book. Could you hold it up for us? I know that those of you who are listening can’t see the beautiful cover for “A Hard Silence.” You must go out and buy this book if you haven’t already. It is amazing. Melanie, would you tell us a little bit about the book? I’m going to ask you about your publishing journey in a second but tell us what you would like us to know about the book.

[03:41] Melanie: In 1985, my father was infected with HIV through a blood transfusion after undergoing open-heart surgery. At the time, we were living in Canada, and the same stigma, isolation and ignorance that surrounded the disease for those people who lived through the epidemic here in the United States was happening in Canada as well. My father was a surgeon. He was at the height of his medical career, and he anticipated that he would be dead within months. He decided because of the stigma associated, because he didn’t want there to be any ill effects for him or for our family, that he would keep it a secret—that we would all keep it a secret. But he ended up living for 10 more years. So, from the time I was 13 until I was 23, I carried the secret of my father’s illness. So, the hard silence is that there wasn’t any kind of conversation surrounding this catastrophe. So, the book is about me,  later looking back at that experience 20 years later and interrogating the consequences of living in silence and secrecy. It asks the following question: How do you learn to step out of that silence and voice your experience in an authentic way?

[05:00] Lisa: One of the things I really love about the book is the structure, which we’re going to talk about in a few minutes. What stuck with me when I was reading the book, and just hearing you talk about it now, is the power and the pain of living with a secret. It wasn’t just a secret wasn’t a secret to the outside world. It was a secret that existed within your family because no one was talking about it, right? What was that like for you to hold that secret? What story did that create for you as you were living it?

[05:31] Melanie: So, I have three brothers, and my youngest brother was only eight at the time of my father’s infection. My parents decided not to tell him, and because of that, for 7 of the 10 years, it was a secret we had to keep within our family as well. It couldn’t be a conversation around the dinner table. It’s interesting because I always think about the fact that when you’re living something, you’re not fully aware of what you’re living. I don’t think at that age I would have been able to articulate fully what that silence and secrecy was like. But it’s when you look back, and you peel back those layers, that you begin to understand how damaging that is. For me, it became like a habit of silence around the big things in my life, around the things that were too hard to talk about. We just always pushed them aside, put them away. When you carry too much of that, it simmers to the top eventually, and you can’t keep going unless you face those things.

[06:36] Lisa: And as Bessel van der Kolk says, “The Body Keeps the Score,” and boy does it. As I was listening to you embodying this sense of what is it like to hold a secret, which is something that resonates with me. It’s an experience I’ve had in my own life. It’s just, the tension of every muscle in that holding of every breath. When you live in secrets, you don’t breathe.

[07:00] Melanie: We were holding our breath for different reasons, too, right? We couldn’t breathe out the secret. For every single day of those 10 years, I anticipated my dad was going to get sick and die. It was this constant period of waiting too. So that was another factor of holding your breath. That anticipatory grief. You know what’s coming, because back then, in 1985, there was no cocktail. There were no medications that were helping people live with HIV. It was 100% a death sentence. It was just a matter of when. It was just a period of holding onto that knowledge, you know, through that period and just waiting for the eventual outcome.

[07:42] Lisa: There are so many layers of fear, and then just the agony, the pain of it again, and again, and again. There was so much terror during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. This is going to sound like a silly story, but, to me, it was big. It gave me a tiny taste of what it must have been like for you and your family. When I first started hearing about AIDS and HIV, I think I was seven or eight years old. At the time, there were these candies, these diet aids, they were called AIDS, these little chocolates at the store. I remember looking at those and thinking, oh my gosh, people are eating those candies and dying. Why are these still on the market? It’s a silly thing. But it just points out how misunderstood this was, and how many stories people were building, and how not only was it a horrific disease that was killing so many people in so many awful ways. But then there were so many of us who had these rash little stories around it. So, all the responses that people had to the epidemic just compounded what your family was going through.

[08:53] Melanie: Because we weren’t talking about it in my family, my knowledge of the disease came from the same place as everybody else’s did, right? The media, the scary tabloid headlines, the way television was embodying the epidemic in various things. It was kind of like I was gaining my knowledge and understanding in very incremental phases. I’d learn a piece, but then I couldn’t talk about it. I always want to qualify when I say that, because I think if I had wanted to talk about it, I don’t think my parents would have said no. But I very quickly understood, well, I talked about this in the book, that my parents never sat me down and told me. I think that at the time when they told my two older brothers, they thought, we won’t tell Melanie and David, but somehow, like right at the beginning, and I think in the book I call it a baffling hole, that I found out. I don’t know whether I overheard something, but I knew very early on. Eventually, I think my parents understood that I knew, but there was never a moment where we sat down and talked about it. They never said to me, you know, if you have any questions, feel free to ask us. You can always come and talk to us, right? That invitation wasn’t extended. I internalized that, as this is a secret I’m not supposed to know, and something I’m really not supposed to talk about. I didn’t reach out with those kinds of questions, and I didn’t approach them. I’m sure if I had, they most certainly would have talked to me about it.

[12:01] Lisa: That’s the complicated thing about being in families, and about our communication in general. So many meta messages happen when we exist in silence. For example, your parents would have talked to you, had you asked—you feel confident about that. Yet it was the fact that no one did that created this ambiance, or this world, where it didn’t feel like you had permission to do that. So, it’s not like anyone was trying to be harmful towards you, yet that’s just how secrets perpetuate.

[12:43] Melanie: Exactly. It’s kind of that feeling of, like, I’m carrying a secret that I’m not supposed to be carrying. I think there was also a deep understanding in me that my parents were really struggling with this tragedy and everything that it entailed. I didn’t want to add to that struggle by demonstrating that I was struggling myself.

[13:11] Lisa: You remained Melanie Joy bells.

[13:13] Melanie: I did, yes.

[13:15] Lisa: I love that line.

[13:17] Melanie: That was my dad’s nickname for me. My middle name is Joy. It was very much my personality from an early age. I was a sunshiny little baby, but I also recognize that that was a role I played in my family, too.

[13:35] Lisa: Some so many people play that role. Your story is so layered, and that’s one of the things I love about it. We first met in 2017 at the Hippocampus Literary Conference, HippoCamp—if you’ve never been, writers, you should go. I have a copy of your first book, Writing Hard Stories, which is filled with little dog-eared pages, and I have all of these tabs in there, which I use regularly with my students. So, it’s not just for me, it’s for others. What I remember from your reading during the debut author series was how that book was a way for you to gain insights into how to write this book, because you were struggling with it. So, this has been a journey, right? Can you tell us about that journey of how you got from 2017, or before really, until today?

[14:42] Melanie: So, it really started in 2013, when I began my MFA. That’s when I first started dipping my toes into the waters of writing this story. It was during that MFA that I discovered what most writers of memoir discover when you start digging into the past, and you start revisiting your hard memories. It’s a tough psychological journey. It caught me very much by surprise, because I was 20 years removed from my father’s death, I felt like, oh, I know the story. I’ve lived the story. It was 20 years ago that dad died. I wasn’t expecting the emotional toll that looking closely at my memories would take. And the subsequent grief that followed that time. I wasn’t expecting the toll. In the third semester of my MFA, we had to do this critical project work. I was working on this memoir, so I thought, well, maybe I could talk to some other writers who had written stories that were as hard as mine, or harder, and ask them what it was like for them. I really wanted to know that I wasn’t this unique person. I wanted to know that what I was feeling was normal. So, I started that process as just this little project. When I approached all these writers whose books I had been reading for my MFA, and they were all so incredibly generous with me. Not only did they say yes, they said, come to my house, and sit and have lunch with me, and we’ll talk about it, or let’s meet at this restaurant and we’ll talk about it. I started having these amazing conversations with these wonderful writers and I realized as I was gathering their insights and their wisdom, that if somebody had given me a collection of these insights when I started my MFA, it would have helped me navigate that difficult psychological territory and the challenge of unpacking traumatic memories and hard things. So that’s how that book originated. It started as a very selfish endeavor. I wanted those writers to tell me I was going to survive the process, and that I was going to feel better at the end. Every conversation gave me just a little push to get back into my memoir, a little bit more encouragement and a little more courage to dig a little deeper, to go a little more into that vulnerable territory. So, I really needed that first book to get to this work.

[17:42] Lisa: I can attest to the fact that it was both personally helpful to me, and I have many, many clients and students who are also grateful to for all the work that you put into it. There are so many gems in there. It gave me faith that when I was in the throes of working on my own book that there was light at the end of the tunnel—that not only was I going to finish this thing, but I was going to feel different. To me, that’s the important part.

[18:14] Melanie: One of the questions I asked all the writers was what did it feel like to publish this book? All of them shared some version of relief or freedom, or, you know, like a heaviness had been lifted. Since I was still in the thick of it, I would say like, oh, okay, I’ll believe you. I held onto their words; but it’s so true. When you can hold your book in your hands, it changes the way you carry that story. It changes the way you feel about it.

[19:01] Lisa: Absolutely. I’m not quite where you are yet—and I’m saying yet because I will get there—but I already feel that. So that was your first book. One of the things I want to let everyone know is that if you aren’t following Melanie on Instagram or some other form of social media, she has these amazing posts that are a full-circle experience. So many prominent authors are writing these beautiful blurbs for her book. Richard Hoffman. Abigail Thomas. Andre Dubus III. Michael Patrick. Alex Marzano-Lesnevich. I mean, you’ve got like this celebrity A-list of people who are giving you glowing praise, which is very deserved, but it took a while to get there. You wrote the first book. You had this great success. You had this huge contribution to the literary community. That was 2017 and now it’s now 2023. You and I were in this group back in 2017 where we were talking about it, and you were beginning to send out submissions. Can you talk about that part of the process?

[20:07)] Melanie: The publication journey for this book has been very difficult. Maybe I should say it’s been a rutted, rocky road. As you said, in 2017, when I first published Writing Hard Stories, I had a proposal for this book. I had an agent who was gung-ho, and so sure we were going to find a publisher. He started submitting it, and it kept getting rejected without any big explanation, which would’ve been so helpful. So, there was no clear reason why. Over time, what I started to understand was that it was never about the quality of the writing, which was encouraging. When I would receive these rejections, especially when I parted ways with my agent, and I started submitting on my own, I would receive these rejections that if it didn’t have the word no in it, I would have used them as beautiful reviews of my book. So, it was encouraging to know that it wasn’t the writing. I think that’s what every writer fears. What if they hate my writing? What if I’m not a good writer. I think on many levels, this was a hard story to sell, because HIV/AIDS is no longer at the center of our public conversation. Lots of publishers felt like there wasn’t a market for a story like this. I think that was part of it. You and I have talked about the fact that books about grief are not always welcomed in the publishing world. It matches the way grief is looked at in our society. It’s something that we don’t talk about a lot. I think the feeling in publishing was that we’ve done enough with grief. We don’t want to hear anymore. So, there were several reasons, but all of that is to say that it was a four-year process to find a publisher for this book. I wasn’t submitting 100 submissions every day. There were moments where I basically put it away and decided to work on other things. At one point, when my agent and I decided to part ways, I decided that because he had been submitting a proposal, I decided to take time to finish the manuscript. So, I took a full year to finish the manuscript, and then started submitting myself. So, it took time, but, you know, it’s interesting. When I think about it, it feels like right now is the right time. I mean, I could never have imagined in 2017 that a worldwide pandemic would make the AIDS epidemic, more relevant, and make people reflect on what we did back then and what we got wrong and how can we do things differently now. I think that it resonates in this post-COVID time. I also think I’m at a place where I feel confident about this story and ready to talk about it.

[23:37] Lisa: I think your book needed a pandemic. There’s a way that it speaks to the pandemic. As I was reading it, I was thinking about my experience of going through the AIDS epidemic and all the things I didn’t know that your book showed me. I was also thinking about what my experience was like during COVID, and how we were doing a lot of the same things and spinning our wheels in many of the same ways, and the irrational fears that come about when you don’t know, and you are dealing with something deadly. That’s part of the magic about when things get published. And yet, highly talented people like yourself, and I’m going to say myself, too—when things don’t go well, we can start to tell ourselves a story that isn’t so great. How did you keep the faith that this book was worth selling, that it was going to be a great contribution when you were parting with your agent, and you were sending things out, and you are navigating all these rejections?

[24:48] Melanie:  Having a strong writing community, having people who understand what it’s like to get those rejections that deflation you after you’ve been waiting and waiting. I have some people in my life who have been champions of this book for me, and who have believed in it when my belief was waning. I always say to people, find somebody who believes in your book more than you do. My beautiful friend, Suzanne Steinbeck—she’s going to be doing my launch with me. She was a writing mentor for me during my thesis and she has just become a dear friend. She was one of those people who never ever lost faith that this book was going to find a home. So, it feels so appropriate to have her be part of the launch with me, because she was there through the whole journey. I also think that I suddenly believes that stories like mine, stories like so many other peoples who lived through that time, they need to be out there to remind us of our history. I mean, there’s an entire generation that doesn’t know what it was like in the ‘80s and ‘90s When AIDS first arrived and how people responded. Without that knowledge, we’re destined to repeat things. We saw some of echoes of that discrimination and prejudice and the stigma that was happening and the isolation during COVID as well. I think it’s important that we continue to talk about these stories. I think that belief was a driving force, like this story is important. I know it’s important. That was the belief I held onto despite kind of the dejected feeling that you get over time when you’re getting rejected.

[26.52] Lisa: Absolutely. I always tell people you need to know who your top 10 are, right? Who are the top 10 People who are your champions who will be there for you through this process, because it is a long haul. I’m so glad that you had those people who were able to hold the faith when it was rocky for you, because we all get there. Right? That’s just part of the process. So, you had time to think about your project and to consider different ways to write this. You also recently finished a certificate program in narrative medicine through Colombia. Can you tell us about that and how your publication journey and the certificate program affected the way you wrote this book?

[27:43] Melanie: Narrative Medicine is a discipline that originated at Columbia Medical School. Dr. Rita Sharon is considered the founder of Narrative Medicine. It began with a belief that if medical practitioners employed the narrative tools that we see in the humanities, like close reading and prompted writing and, you know, creative work, that it would help bring a more humanistic approach to health. So that’s where the field originated. It’s become almost a standard in most medical schools that narrative medicine is part of the educational training of medical practitioners. It has expanded to social work to, you know, anybody who’s in a practitioner role. What has also happened is there’s been a lot of intersection because it’s a humanities-based discipline. There’s been a lot of intersection with artists and writers and musicians and filmmakers to understand how that work comes together. So as a writer entering a narrative medicine program, my goal was to think about the idea of the lived experience with illness, of caretaking, of witnessing illness. It has also grown within the discipline, to include the understanding of individual stories of navigating healthcare, dealing with trauma, of being a healthcare practitioner—that those really matter, and that they expand our perspectives of healthcare and medical practice. I focused on it from a couple of different perspectives. My father was a physician, so I understood that for him, you know, my mom and dad wrote a book about their experience and published it the year my dad died. I know for my dad that was a way of making sense of his experience, right? I think that when we look at taking a creative approach and an artistic approach to our experiences, it helps us understand them better. It also helps other people enter our experiences and recognize how they differ from our own. We create this creative affiliation. For me, the learning I was doing in narrative medicine fed my belief that individual narratives of lived experiences are vital. We need more of them in the world. It prompted me to want to teach more of that and to help bring people’s stories together. As writers, our most asset is that we create a platform for ourselves with our books that opens space for other people to talk about their stories. Nothing is more rewarding than being at a book reading and having somebody come up to you after and say, you know, I really appreciated your book, and here’s why, and let me tell you, my story. I think that that’s how narrative medicine impacted my thinking about my book.

[31:27] Lisa: That’s so beautifully said, because our stories are really who we are. When we don’t see them out in the world, it’s kind of like what happened in your family. We think that our stories don’t matter. We also don’t know what to do with them. So, I love that you’re doing that. What I noticed about your book is that there were two stories you were telling. There’s the story of reclaiming your voice, of deconstructing the silence, of understanding this thing that happened, and also that story of anticipatory grief. There are so many ways you could have put this together, and you’ve chosen this beautiful way that, in some ways, matches the true crime book structure I’ve read in books like Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body, Sarah Perry’s After the Eclipse. These are two books I read recently with alternating structures that include a before and after. Your book does that, which was surprising to me when I read it, and yet, it’s brilliant. It works so well, because one of the contracts that happens when we are reading a memoir is that we know the person survived it. We know in the first chapter that the dad dies, right? So, we’re waiting for that this whole time, and you could have included it early on. You could have told this as a chronological story where he contracts HIV, and then he’s sick, and then he dies, and then I must figure out how to heal. That’s one way to tell a story. But you, you push us into both at the same time in a way that heightens the tension and amplifies some of the experience with the secret. You get to a certain place with a story, but then it’s like, nope, let’s go in this other direction. By withholding his death, you give us a chance to love him and appreciate all of his complexities, and then to grieve right alongside you in a way that would not have happened if this was a chronological book. When in your process did you decide on this fancy pants structure that works so well?

[33:48] Melanie: Structure was the bane of my existence throughout the whole writing process. During my MFA, I think it was my second semester, a mentor—her strategy with many of her mentees was to get them to create a timeline of what you’re telling, and I get it. It seems like a straightforward approach. So being the good student that I was, I was like, alright, I’m going to do my timeline, but as I started creating it, it just became this tangled mess. I couldn’t see it in a linear fashion. I’ve always talked about the story like tangles yarn, you know, where you have to kind of find the starting thread and then you have to figure it out thread by thread. That’s what it felt like—it just felt like this giant tangled ball, and I kept pulling out these threads and one would lead to another, and then I kind of felt like there’s no way that this can be a linear story, because there was this parallel journey of me in the closer here and now and looking back, and that was such a big part of the story as well. So, I really struggled on the structure front. I tried to write it from a chronological perspective, and it was like 70 pages of my dad dying in the first part of the book. That’s going to send people over the edge, you know, and so I knew that it couldn’t be chronological. Then the question was, well, what is it, if it’s not chronological. I was fortunate to have read some really lovely memoirs that were nonlinear that demonstrated to me that there are different ways that you can structure your story. I think of my story like a mosaic that does have that back-and-forth structure, but it’s also thematically based—there are all these thematic threads, that felt important, so it’s divided, thematically as well, and that started working for me. As you know, having read it, I made a very conscious choice to include scenes from my time in therapy, because I could not have written this book without having gone through that therapeutic process. The two are happening at the same time. I started therapy at the same time I started my MFA, so I felt like it was an important part of the story. So, the one thing that does have a bit of a linear structure is my time in therapy. What I started to realize as I was writing it is that I could use those scenes as benchmark scenes that mark the forward movement around which all the other stuff threads.

[36:50] Lisa: You’ve just explained that so beautifully because structure can be so complicated. I meet a lot of writers who are interested in telling a story who want to start with structure. Of course, you do, because you have this big story with big feelings. You want to feel like you have some bumpers around the process that keep you from getting lost in the story. What’s beautiful about your book is that, even though it’s a mosaic where we’re going back and forth, and we have these different things happening, I never get lost. I always felt like the next thing logically flowed from what happened before. There was this beautiful sense of inevitability. I’ll be telling people for a long time to study your book, especially if they’re working on a nonlinear structure. This is how you do it, because it is so beautiful. I’m so glad you wrote it that way. People who are listening to this podcast might be memoirists interested in writing a story for publication or people might be interested in writing a story just to heal themselves or understand the story they’re telling themselves. What advice do you have for these writers?

[38:11] Speaker 2: I think a lot of times when people decide that you’re going to write about something, they kind of are like, I’m ready, but then they don’t know where to start. During our initial meeting, one of my first MFA mentors said to me, “Don’t think about the whole. Don’t think about this as a book. I remember him saying, “You know, five years from now, when you’re ready to call it a book…I remember at that point, I was like, there’s no way I’m going to be writing this book for five years, and here we are. It took a decade. He said, don’t think about the overview, don’t think about the big picture. Go small. He said just write where the heat is. Write what feels important to you write right now. That was such a gift to me, because it meant I didn’t have to start at the beginning, right? I just started writing about things that were resonating for me in the moment. So that was incredibly helpful. Just start writing the things that are kind of itching in your brain, you know, the things that feel like they’re pulling at you that you can’t seem to leave behind. Start writing into that. Then, pay attention to the wonderful writers and mentors who demonstrate with their books and their craft how to sink in scene. Put yourself in one particular moment in your story that feels resonant and write the hell out of that moment. Then once you feel like you’ve done that, find another moment without thinking about where this is headed. That can be really helpful. It can free you up at the beginning. Then, as you said, sometimes we’re entering into this, because we want to understand the experience. I think that’s probably the impetus for most memoirs. Start with, like, it’s not about other people. It’s about me, Andre Dubus III says in Writing Hard Stories, in my interview with him, he says, “We all know what happened. When we start writing, it’s because we want to figure out what the hell happened?” I think that that is a lot of what starts us writing. Then I think somewhere along the line for some people, for writers like you, you recognize that there might be something in your story for other people. Then we take a different approach and craft this into something that makes it accessible. If you really think about that from the very beginning, you’re probably not going to get to the truth of your experience.

[41:00] Lisa: Yes, absolutely. When you do that, you’re trying to please other people, rather than understanding your own experience. I love that quote from Andre Dubus III. I use it all the time because it’s true. Every book has an essential question that it’s asking and answering—like the book is the answer to that question. Marian Roach Smith often calls it the argument. The first question every book starts with, and every story, and everything we write is what happened to me. I love how you are refocusing people and getting them to look at what happened, to you bear witness to their own experience, understand their feelings around it. Now I’m going to get you to do something if you don’t mind. Melanie, will you pick up your book? Hold it to your heart and answer the following question. How does it feel, to hold this book, and to have come full circle on this experience?

[42:05] Melanie: In some ways, it feels really surreal. I can’t believe that I have this book and that I can hold it in my hands. It also feels very gratifying. I’ve done a lot of work to get to this place—not just the writerly work, but the psychological footwork of doing it. I remember Richard Hoffman talking about when he finished Half the House, and he said it felt like he had kind of entered a new place. That’s what I feel like. I’m moving into a new space with this book. It’s coming along with me, but it’s not this giant weight I’m carrying, that I’m dragging behind me anymore.

[43:02] Lisa: What is part of the new story you’re telling yourself in this new space that you are now living in?

[43:06] Melanie: I believe in my own voice. I believe that my voice matters, and that what I have to say in the greater context of HIV/AIDS matters. I think that it also puts me in a position to talk to people about what I love to talk to people. I am somebody who leans into emotionally fraught material. So, it gives me the opportunity to move further into that space. I’ve said all along that if somebody reading this book, can say it made me feel less alone, then I’ve accomplished what I want to accomplish in writing this book.

[44:01] Lisa: I am so grateful, again, that you wrote this. Y’all, if you haven’t purchased your copy, go by it. You need to read it, and you need to read it again, so you can study how masterfully this has been written, because it’s both a great story and a great tool to understand how stories can be constructed. Thank you so much, Melanie. If people were going to follow you in any one place, what is the best place for them to follow you?

[44:30] Melanie: First, let me say thank you to you, Lisa. When Lisa was talking about those 10 people that you need to have in your circle, she’s been one of my people. I’m grateful to you for your ongoing support. If you want to connect with me, you can contact me through my website, melaniebrooks.com. That’s also where you’ll find news and updates about my book tour. I’m on Facebook. You can find me on Instagram. I’m @MelanieJMBrooksWriter, and on Twitter, which is now X, you know, I’m @MelanieJMBrooks.

[45:12] Lisa: If you didn’t have time to write that down, it will appear in the show notes. This is a question I’m starting to ask writers, because sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn’t. Is there a preferred way you would like people to buy your book?

[45:30] Melanie: I always encourage buying from the independent bookseller in your area. You know, I am a huge supporter of independent bookstores. If you have an independent bookstore in your area, ask them to stock the book, ask them if you can order from them. It can also be found in some of the other standard places as well, like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

[46:36] Lisa: Yes, support your local bookstores. That’s so important for 1000 reasons we could have a whole session on it. Also, when you read her book, and you love her book, write some beautiful reviews, and put them on Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and anywhere else you can, because this is how we support and love each other. I am so grateful to have you as part of my top 10 as well. It is such a blessing to have you in my life. I’m so excited about where this is going to take you. So, thank you so much, Melanie, I am so glad you’re here.

Melanie: Thank you, Lisa.