Pictures of You: Deborah Jiang-Stein

“The Fuel of Rejection,” by Deborah Jiang-Stein

I love to roller-skate. It’s one of my favorite things to do, a place where risk is safe, most of the time, and where the smooth surface in the roller rink and good wheels and bearings make all the difference in the ride. A few derby leagues have invited me to guest skate, that’s how much I love it.

Skating feeds my appetite for risk, especially since I’ve removed the rubber toe stops. I skate without brakes because it’s also how I’ve lived in most ways. I’m still learning how to “brake” in life.

Writing Prison Baby, took my guts as a skater and the same threshold for risk. And, I had to learn what to filter, where to “brake.”

After 10 years, 56 publisher rejections, and 3 hard-working agents with whom I parted ways on good to decent terms, my memoir sold, all on my own sans agent.

The problem in my book project wasn’t the agents or the publishers or editors.  The problem was the intersection of memory and trauma. It took 10 years to find the facts and true story, then complete the final draft, less than 200 pages.

Memoir is to remember the story, to retell history through new eyes, to re-create. But how does any of this happen when the story is founded in decades of buried facts, and as many years of going to any length to destroy the memories?

I knew only the skeleton of my story: I was born in prison, entered the foster care system, and then adopted. 900 pages of government documents and adoption records hid the facts of my fractured beginnings. The people who knew anything, who knew the true story, kept it all secret.

For my part, I was guarded from the day I learned about my prison roots. I skirted around the pain of my truths, and worked hard to annihilate them into outer space and pretend the story never happened. It scared me.

As facts trickled in over a decade, new characters joined: rage, grief, sorrow, and fear accompanied the journey. They visited me with their boxes fully packed and ready to move in as permanent roommates.

When writing about sorrow, at least we need to know what we’re mourning. I had no idea what I mourned. I only knew I grieved and ached as if I’d lost a limb. I raged inside, a bomb that would detonate for twenty years until I learned the truth. I was grieving, in full ache.

It took petitioning the government in several states — county, state, and federal offices— and filing appeals with social service agencies and courts, before I would learn more than the one fact. Up until then, I only knew I was adopted.

I was in my 20s before I learned I’d lived a year in the prison and that for 12 months I bonded with my biological mother before authorities removed me from prison, separated from my only love and source of security. No wonder I grieved. No wonder I lived with traumatic stress amnesia as an after-effect of that year. No wonder I ran as far as I could from my story. It was too painful. It terrified me.

In a time when extracts of our lives reveal in 140 characters and status updates, before I could finish writing my story, I had to stay away from the noise and sit deep inside silence, inside the sorrow and pain, the joy and curiosity.

I’m grateful for the multiple publisher rejections because they inspired me to look deeper inside and dig further into the story buried in documents and family history. The rejections empowered me to work harder and drop my guard. I turned the rejections into fuel, not failure.

It takes distance and perspective to discover the universal threads in our stories, beyond just the facts. The ride for me was never smooth but at last I succeeded in selling and then finishing the book.  Even today, a year after Prison Baby published, new facts roll in, enough that I could write Memoir #2. But this time I’m not as fear-filled and I’d skate

through the writing in under 10 years.

 

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Deborah Jiang-Stein, author of  the memoir, Prison Baby (Beacon Press) and Women Behind Bars: Collected Interviews (Shebooks) is a national speaker and consultant. She’s founder of The unPrison Project (www.unprisonproject.org) a nonprofit working to empower and inspire incarcerated women and girls with life skills and mentoring. For more than 10 years, Deborah has championed support for people in need of freedom, education, shelter, and career development. Follow her on Twitter @deborahdash and https://www.facebook.com/deborah.jiang.stein