I have been avidly reading Jenny D.'s posts about swimming and running and biking over the past year or so even though I don't excel at any of those sports and I doubt ever will. (I can certainly do all of those things but never beyond the recreational level, I'm sure.) My interest in the posts is not as an athlete but as a writer - I'm intrigued by how Jenny has managed to consistently write about a subject that on the surface should not appeal to me (beyond a friendly interest in Jenny's life of course) and yet I am fascinated by this world she is revealing. Most importantly though, as she writes about her attention to all of these sports (and her related goals) she writes more about the things she has learned and the people she has met while engaged in these pursuits then she writes about herself.

Her current post is a very poignant example of just how well she does this.

As I've been reading and thinking "yes this is all very interesting and yes, I want to read a book of essays written by her on these very topics", I've also been surprised by how effectively she has written about her life while keeping herself as only a small player in the larger story of sport. Jenny is running and swimming and biking but it is the sports themselves, the pursuit of excellence, the tools and mechanics of training and the instructors she has met along the way, which make up the bulk of these narratives.

Somehow Jenny is only part of this story about her life. This technique - this ability to reduce her own importance while still really writing about herself fascinates me to no end and, I think, is very important when it comes to gaining the attention of readers.

Of course all of this is really about me (always about me!) as I am oddly and bizarrely writing a memoir at the age of 38. The only way I can justify this weirdness is that it is a book about a certain period of my life (when I worked for the Company in AK) and because my job was so strange and alien to most people, there is obviously some curiosity about it. But still. Have you ever written about yourself? About how you decided to move or why you went to school where you did or - even worse - what you were like as a child? Here's a bit on my parents to give you an idea as to how unsteady these waters can be:

Just like everybody else my parents didn’t get along but they decided to go the radical step and actually get divorced which was something new in my elementary school. We moved into a schedule of different parents at school events, of planning so they were never anywhere together; of figuring out who we wanted to see the big moments as they happened, and who we wanted to tell them about afterwards.

I didn’t realize in 1977 that I would spend the next twenty years having those same split conversations or that it would never get easier for any of us until my father died. And then that was a whole other kind of impossible difficulty; that made everything that came before it seem like foolish pride.

I only devote two short chapters to life before AK but clearly I had to show where I came from, how I ended up with a degree in aviation and how I got north before I could focus entirely on the job. But how do you write about your life without making it all "me me me me"? I am not that interesting - and especially not the me who lived in FL in 1977. But you need to know her to understand who she was in AK and thus trust me as a narrator as I tell all the other stories from up there that are so interesting. And there is also that problem of honesty. How well do you think a passage like this will be received:

At my graduation I am framed in two sets of pictures, my brother and I smiling with our father first, and then with my mother and stepfather. Everyone holds a corner of my oversized diploma, giving it a reverence it did not deserve. I never told them that college is what taught me to be such a consummate liar; that it was the only valuable lesson I took away from those four years. This was in fact the skill I would end up using again and again in Alaska, where I found out, finally, what aviation was really all about.

You can see me there, in those photos, but hopefully you can also see the disillusionment and disappointment of many college graduates. Maybe you can see why Alaska seemed so appealing then; why anything at all that offered something different from what I knew seemed like a dream.

But still. I don't think my college would be thrilled to know how I felt about those 4 years.

The most important parts aren't in those chapters though - those necessary evils that must be written and rewritten until the narrator is present but not dominant; until readers can understand without getting bored by who I was. The important parts are in AK; the most important parts are like this:

How do you fly into a mountain on perfectly clear day? You don’t see it, that’s how. You look everywhere but where you should be looking, you see everything but what you should be seeing, you do everything but what you should be doing.

And within a week, your company hires someone else to take your place and he doesn’t know a damn thing about mountains either.

I'm not in that part of my story; just an old friend is - an old friend frozen at forever less than 30, forever laughing in the hallway at the Company as I yelled good-bye, forever on the side of a mountain that no one even thought to name.

You don't see me in that part of the story, do you? I hope not; because I really don't want to be there this time.

Some parts of our lives should only be lived through once; some parts just don't need me to visit them again.