More Ghosts

working on my memoir

I've decided to do something a little unconventional. I wanted to make my memoir more complete. I wanted to make it authentic. My younger brother had written about his life and left the manuscript unpublished, so I'm going to include excerpts of his story in mine. It was Russell’s sudden death in 2018 that motivated me to start exploring my own version of family history and how I dealt with the trauma. Russell had his own perspective which was quite different, as he was younger when he witnessed the violence and experienced the disturbing chaos, and the instability of our home growing up. Russ and I were very different. Though we both were traumatized by our childhoods we had our own unique responses. He freely wrote of his diagnosis and hoped that others would read his story someday and glean some value. I'm going to clearly delineate his voice from mine because they are unique, and I don't want to confuse readers. He also speaks mostly positively about our relationship as brothers w…