Before Sunrise

If you’re a NetGalley reviewer, librarian, bookseller, educator, or book blogger, I’d be honored if you’d consider requesting a review copy of my memoir, Held in the Vanishing.

As my memoir begins making its way into the world, I’ve found myself reflecting on what writing itself has meant to me. The book grew out of years of early-morning journal entries like the one below. If these reflections resonate with you, I hope the memoir will as well.

Request a review copy on NetGalley

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Most of my journal entries are written in the quiet hours before sunrise, when sleep has given up on me and the world has not yet begun asking anything of me.

It is there, in the stillness, that my head and my heart begin encountering the previous day’s events with an undistracted kind of attention. What felt ordinary a few hours earlier suddenly asks to be seen again.

The words come like the current of a river.

Sometimes they know exactly where they are going.

Sometimes they circle the same bend again and again, as if unwilling to leave until something hidden finally comes into view.

When I’m writing, I am at my most vulnerable.

There is no audience in mind.

No performance.

No careful editing of who I wish I were.

Only the page and whatever insists on finding its way there.

People sometimes ask whether journaling is cathartic.

For me, it is more than that.

Writing doesn’t simply help me express what I already know.

It helps me discover what I couldn’t yet see.

Language has a remarkable way of bringing the world into view. Experiences I thought I understood while living them often reveal an entirely different meaning once they find their way into words. It’s almost as though language is using me as much as I am using language—allowing something that was quietly present all along to finally reveal itself.

That is why I return to the page.

Not because I have something to say.

But because I have something to understand.

And then something unexpected happens.

Once the words are there, I can see them.

Because I can see them, I can sit with them.

Question them.

Rearrange them.

Sometimes changing a single word changes the way I understand an entire experience. Not because the past itself has changed, but because a different truth has come into focus.

Perhaps that is the real gift of writing.

Not that it captures life.

But that it keeps revealing it.

Long before the sun rises, when the world is still quiet enough for me to hear it speak.