Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@kathypooler with Eleanor Vincent/@eleanor_vincent
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”
I am very pleased to feature Eleanor Vincent in Part One of this guest post interview about her memoir, Swimming with Maya. Eleanor and I met online in the NAMW Facebook forum. I was so impressed with her memoir of loving and letting go of her beloved daughter, Maya, I asked to interview her in a guest post.
Swimming with Maya demonstrates the remarkable process of healing after the traumatic death of a loved one. My book reviews can be found on Amazon and Goodreads.
This is Part One of the interview where Eleanor explores the themes in her memoir and shares the valuable lessons she learned from writing through her pain.
Welcome , Eleanor!
KP: You’ve written an honest and heart wrenching account of loving and letting go of your high-spirited daughter, Maya, in Swimming with Maya. When did you decide to share your story through a memoir? What is the main message you hope to convey to your readers?
EV: My message is simple: celebrate life. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Let the people you love know how much you love them. Life can be over in a moment. This is a truth we all try to defend against, but Maya’s sudden death at age 19 showed me that life could veer off in directions I had never imagined. When the unimaginable happens, how do we go on? This is the question Swimming with Maya attempts to answer. How do we get back up after life knocks us down? As a memoir, my book is a very personal account of one woman’s journey. It is not a self-help book, but it is inspirational and motivational because it shows how I became more resilient than I ever thought I could be. I decided to write about Maya’s death just days after she died. I instinctively knew her death would completely reshape my life and that I had to write about it.
That said, I should note that I had been writing professionally for more than two decades when she died. In addition, I was working on my MFA in creative writing at Mills College at the time. I was well equipped to take on what turned into a ten-year effort.
KP: I was able to relate to your memoir on several levels—as a mother, as a single parent and as a health care provider. Your intimate portrayal of your decision to donate Maya’s organs seems to be a central theme. But you also weave in several other layers to the narrative, including your past relationships, your current relationship with your surviving daughter, the special bond you and Maya shared. How did you decide on what to include in this narrative?
EV: That was a gradual process. At first, I just wanted to tell the story of Maya’s death and my decision to donate her organs and tissues. I never intended to go so deeply into my own past, my family, or my marriages and relationships. But readers in my workshops at Mills and then in my writing group kept asking hard questions about why the narrator made the choices she did as a parent. I quickly realized I would need to divulge much more personal material in order to write a believable narrative and create myself as a character in that narrative – one of the hardest tasks facing the memoirist.
Everyone’s life has a level of complexity. Because of my family background and my own subsequent attempts to cope with the dysfunction I observed as a child through therapy and spiritual work, my life has been extra complex. To understand the character of the mother/narrator in Swimming with Maya, the reader needs this information. I think our stories often ask more of us than we originally intend to divulge. In the end, I gave my all to the story, including creating a portrait of my own flaws and strengths as a human being.
KP: It seemed that Maya’s death prompted you to reexamine your role as a mother. What lessons have you learned in writing your memoir that you would like to share with your readers?
EV: I learned a lot about what it means to be a mother – and a lot more about how to write a compelling narrative. On the mother front, I always knew that being the mother of two daughters, Maya and Meghan, had been the most important shaping force in my life. Being motivated to be a good mother, a loving mother, caused me to reexamine and change many things about myself, including the painful process of going back and looking at the gaps in the mothering I had received.
But when Maya died, my heart and my ego shattered. Then I understood viscerally how very attached I was to my daughter – how fundamental she had become to my sense of self. I think most parents project their dreams and aspirations onto their children. Until you lose one, you do not realize the extent of this. Losing Maya forced me to grow into the person I wanted to be all along – a more loving, more compassionate, more resilient, and more trusting (paradoxically!) person. And it made me a far better writer. It also made me a much better mother to my surviving child, Meghan.
Even now, 21 years after her death, Maya continues to influence me. I am a better grandmother because of her. I enjoy my 3-year-old granddaughter Lucia more, and I’m motivated to spend more quality time with her, to be deeply involved in her life day to day, because I know what it means to lose a child. And honestly, Lucia reminds me of Maya. She has a lot of her spunk and creativity. I would not miss a minute of this!
To be continued…
Thank you , Eleanor, for sharing how your devastating loss helped you reshape your life and go on. You show us what resilience and courage look like.
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Author Bio and contact information:
Eleanor Vincent is an award-winning writer whose debut memoir, Swimming with Maya: A Mother’s Story was nominated for the Independent Publisher Book Award and was reissued by Dream of Things press early in 2013. She writes about love, loss, and grief recovery with a special focus on the challenges and joys of raising children at any age.
Called “engaging” by Booklist, Swimming with Maya chronicles the life and death of Eleanor’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Maya, who was thrown from a horse and pronounced brain-dead at the hospital. Eleanor donated her daughter’s organs to critically ill patients and poignantly describes her friendship with a middle-aged man who was the recipient of Maya’s heart.
Her essays appear in the anthologies At the End of Life: True Stories about How we Die (edited by Lee Gutkind); This I Believe: On Motherhood; and Impact: An Anthology of Short Memoirs. They celebrate the unique and complicated bonds between mothers and daughters, making hard decisions as a parent – whether your child is 14 or 40 – and navigating midlife transitions with grace and authenticity.
Eleanor was born in Cleveland, Ohio and attended the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, where she occasionally teaches writing workshops on creative nonfiction and memoir.
She lives in Oakland, California. Visit her website at www.eleanorvincent.com or connect with her author page on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/eleanorvincentauthor
Amazon link for ordering.
How about you? Has writing through grief helped you learn more about yourself?
Eleanor has agreed to give away a copy of her memoir, Swimming with Maya, to a commenter whose name will be selected in a random drawing.
We’d love to hear from you. Please leave your comments below~
Announcement: Congratulations, Carol Bodensteiner! Your name was selected in a random drawing of commenters to receive a copy of Grace Peterson’s memoir, Reaching.
Thursday, 8/1: From Grief to Healing, Part Two. Eleanor will explore how writing her memoir helped her to heal.