An Incredible Talent for Existing: A Writer’s Story
An Incredible Talent for Existing (my primary talent growing up!) is the story of a young woman who dreams of becoming a children’s author but finds herself seriously derailed by radical politics in the 1960s. A personal, psychological, and political adventure.
About Pamela Jane’s Memoir
From her vividly evoked existential childhood (“the only way I would know for sure that I existed was if others–lots of others–acknowledged it”) to writing her first children’s book on a sugar high during a glucose tolerance test, Pamela Jane takes the reader along on a highly entertaining personal, political, and psychological adventure.
The heart of the story takes place in 1965, the era of love, light–and revolution. While the romantic narrator imagines a bucolic future in an old country house with children running through the dappled sunlight, her husband plots to organize a revolution and fight a guerrilla war in the Catskills.
Their fantasies are on a collision course.
The clash of visions turns into an inner war of identities when the author embraces radical feminism; she and her husband are comrades in revolution but combatants in marriage; she is a woman warrior who spends her days sewing long silk dresses reminiscent of a Henry James novel. One half of her isn’t speaking to the other half.
And then, just when it seems that things cannot possibly get more explosive, her wilderness cabin burns down and Pamela finds herself left with only the clothes on her back.
Book Details
An Incredible Talent for Existing: A Writer’s Story
A memoir by Pamela Jane
Open Books Press
978-1-941799-21-5 paperback
Read the First Chapter of My Memoir
In 1965, when I was eighteen, I ran away to Portland, Oregon. Running away was an act of rebellion, but also of faith. In one beautiful leap I would escape my family, my past, and the insufferable person I’d been living with for the past few years—my teenage self. This person was quite obviously screwed up. She had way too many problems. No one wanted any part of them, especially me. In Portland I could reinvent myself and leave the past behind.
My brother, Phil, agreed to drive me to the airport on the condition that I stop to say goodbye to my parents. So on a gray November morning, I found myself driving down the flat Midwestern streets where the silent, respectable houses stared impassively out of the dawn. We turned a corner, and my brother slowed down. There it was—the familiar red brick bungalow with my writing alcove overlooking the maple tree.
Phil pulled over and turned off the engine.
“Do I have to go through with this?” I asked. My heart was thudding heavily and my mouth was dry. I had called my parents only that morning to tell them I was leaving.
“You know the deal,” my brother said. He grinned and tilted his Che Guevara beret rakishly over one eye. “Come on, let’s go.”
I followed him slowly up the front steps into the house. Inside, my parents were sitting at the kitchen table, breakfast dishes scattered around them.
Please mom, don’t make a scene, I prayed. Just let me go.
When she saw me, my mother’s face cracked open like the eggshell on her plate, and she started sobbing. My father watched in silence. I suspected that he was secretly relieved to be getting rid of his expensive troublesome daughter with her therapy bills and college tuition.
“Why does she have to go?” my mother cried, as though she were appealing to an invisible jury who would render a verdict on the crazy actions of her daughter.
How could I explain what I didn’t understand myself, that it wasn’t only what I was running away to that mattered, but what I was running from?
To my mother I said only, “My boyfriend and I want to be together, Mom.” (“Boyfriend” was an overstatement; I had spent one weekend with him the summer before.)
“Can’t you just get married?” my mother asked.
“We’ll get married—later.”
I was putting up a smooth front, but inwardly I felt guilty and callous. How could I cause my mother so much pain just when my dad was divorcing her? She may have been a disaster as a mom, but at least she had tried, and in her own inscrutable way she cared. Now I was walking out on her when she needed me most.
My mother started crying harder. “But you’re going so far!”
“I’ll write every week, I promise, Mom.”
I’d hoped for a clean silent break. This break was anything but clean and silent; it was noisy, messy and painful. But it was, finally, over.
Almost. As I was walking out the door, my mother gave one last anguished cry. “She doesn’t even have money for an emergency phone call!”
Emergency telephone calls were sacred in our household. My mother was always giving my brother and me money for them that we promptly spent, knowing she would replace it.
This time, however, I was prepared.
“Yes, I do,” I said, digging into my pocket and producing the nest egg I had put aside for my future. I had exactly one dime.
The era of love, light–and revolution.
The romantic narrator imagined a bucolic future in an old country house.
Running away was an act of rebellion, but also of faith.
Praise for this Book
“A five-star read!”
Story Circle Reviews
“An Incredible Talent for Existing [is] both social commentary and entertainment. You’ll get the “entertainment” part when you see that this excerpt: There’s A Peanut In My Ear!”
Boomer Cafe
“[This book] takes us masterfully through this story of a lifelong writer struggling to emerge.”
Deborah Heiligman, author, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith, a National Book Award Finalist
“…a harrowing story that invites the reader to experience the thrill and danger of the Sixties from a place of safety and acceptance. It’s the story of hundreds of thousands of women; our lives were huge experiments.”
Tristine Rainer, Director, Center for Autobiographic Studies, author, The New Diary and Your Life as Story
“Pamela has a way of describing things that I never knew existed, with eloquence that I had never read before. Pamela’s story is inducement to all writers who aren’t afraid to take their past experiences and use them towards the future of her dreams…her memoir is a lovely, simple, straightforward story that will touch the heart…”
a comfychair
“…incisive, funny, and touchingly candid evidence of the power of the stories we tell ourselves.”
Howard Rheingold, author, The Virtual Community and Net Smart
“Of all the hundreds of memoirs I’ve read this is the first one I’ve found that takes us behind the flashy images of Woodstock and hippies of the Sixties”
Jerry Waxler, The Memoir Revolution
“This coming of age story is both heartbreaking and heartwarming. Pamela’s writing lulls the reader into her life . . . almost like sitting down to tea with someone very wise and well traveled to garner their wisdom.”
Allie’s Opinions
“With an inquiring mind that always seems to race through time and space, Pamela Jane’s story unfolds and folds back upon itself…what distinguishes a mediocre or even good story-teller from a great one, is when we find ourselves unable to put a book down.”
Linda Appleton Shapiro, author She’s Not Herself
“As soon as I saw the title, An Incredible Talent for Existing, I knew I was in for something special. And I was. This book has more motivational potential than quite a few self-help books. The author recounts how their life derailed, and how they got it back on track. Except (because, you know, life) things don’t go as planned. The author’s writing style complimented the story. It felt nostalgic, light, and airy…sometimes real life makes a much better story than things contrived.”
bookreviewsanon.com
“…I started and finished the book in an entire sitting, due entirely to the magical way Pamela Jane weaves her story…this is a book not to miss.”
Karen Jones Gowen, author of Farm Girl and Lighting Candles in the Snow
“Jane has given us a book that will touch the life of every woman who has ever questioned who she is, where she is going, and what the future holds.”
Matilda Butler, Rosie’s Daughters: The “First Woman To” Generation Tells Its Story and Writing Alchemy: How to Write Fast and Deep
“…a gem, a well-written and powerful memoir. I highly recommend it.”
Sherry Meyer, author
“[Pamela Jane] describes her life with an effortless narration…the writing is excellent… it reads as something of an autobiography of an everyman (or everywoman) from the 1960s and beyond”
Inside the Inkwell
“Her prose reads like poetry and her imagination is like magic!”
Jacopo della Quercia, author, The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy and License to Quill.
Book Excerpt
“Just Wait! A Short Story Rejected in Grade School Becomes a Cause of Action”
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE THE WRITER
In elementary school, back in the 1950s, we were never given writing assignments, and I never imagined there were any living authors. I pictured a cemetery filled with tombstones of my favorite writers with their last names first, like card catalogs in the library: Baum, L. Frank 1856-1919.
Writing – the pleasure of articulating interior worlds sensed but not seen – was something I did on my own. I was in eighth grade before I got a chance to write a story for school.
My eighth-grade English teacher, Mr. Mortem, was a malevolent-looking man with a low brow and small beady eyes. We joked that he moonlighted as an axe murderer. But he was even scarier as an English teacher. He terrorized us with menacing-sounding exams called “evaluations,” which turned out to be ordinary multiple-choice tests. But he was the first teacher to give us an assignment to write a short story.
“Remember,” Mr. Mortem called as we filed out of class, “no stories from TV!”
I hardly heard him. I was too excited about getting started.
At home that night, I rolled a fresh piece of paper into my typewriter and began a story about a mute boy living in an 18th-century seaport. In the story, the boy discovers a crack in the mast of a great sailing ship docked in the harbor. He tries to warn the townsfolk, but they dismiss him as an idiot. In the end, he steals aboard the majestic ship before it sails, choosing to die rather than live in a world that so completely misunderstands him.
Until then, all I’d written in Mr. Mortem’s class were check-marks on multiple-choice tests. I imagined the look on his face when he discovered I was a brilliant writer.
A few weeks later, Mr. Mortem returned our stories. When he came to my desk, he stopped.
“You didn’t write this,” he said, holding up my work.
“Yes, I did,” I said. But my voice sounded very small, and Mr. Mortem looked big. He also looked like he was enjoying himself.
“I don’t believe you.” His voice was hard, accusing.
The classroom was quiet. Everyone was watching, waiting to see what would happen next. Mr. Mortem leaned over, his eyes boring into mine. “I’m going to keep this story so you won’t try to use it again in high school,” he said.
I couldn’t find the words to explain that I would never “use” a story again when there were so many new ones waiting to be written.
Mr. Mortem grudgingly gave me an “A,” although he didn’t believe I wrote the story about the boy no one believed. Inside, I was seething.
Just wait. Someday I’ll be a real writer. Then you’ll be sorry.
Four years later, on the last day of high school, my chemistry teacher stopped me in the crowded hallway. By this time, my stories, poems, and beginnings of bad novels had appeared in the school paper, but I had flunked chemistry class.
To my surprise, Mr. Welch smiled. “I’m not worried about your chemistry grade, Pamela,” he said, “because I know that someday I’m going to have your books on my shelf.”
I was stunned – 1965 had not been a good year; my parents were divorcing and selling our house, and now I had flunked out of Chem II. The fact that my dad was a renowned scientist admired by my teacher didn’t help.
“My life is a failure, as a life,” I wrote to my best friend Debbie, who was away at college, “but as a screwed-up mess, it’s a brilliant success.”
Yet here was Mr. Welch telling me he was going to have my books on his shelf one day.
Twenty-one years later, in the fall of 1986, I walked down the long dirt driveway of the farm where I lived with my husband, past glowing maple trees to the mailbox where I found a large brown envelope from my publisher. I tore it open, my heart pounding. There it was – my first book – a living, palpable object I could hold in my hands, the child of so much heartbreak, despair and love. I couldn’t wait to see it in the bookstores with the other Christmas books for children. But that would come later. At that moment, I just wanted to hug it. And after that, I wanted to call Mr. Arrick, my much-loved creative writing teacher from high school. I told him my news, and we talked for a while. Then I asked him if he remembered Mr. Mortem. The two teachers had taught together in junior high school before Mr. Arrick moved to the high school.
“Sure, I remember Chuck,” he said. “He got drunk and killed himself years ago.”
For a moment I was speechless.
“He killed himself?” I said finally.
“Yeah, he fell down his basement stairs and broke his neck. He was a closet alcoholic, you know.”
I couldn’t believe it. All those years I’d hated him and worked to get even, and he had been dead.
My chemistry teacher had given me the incalculable gift of a generous, unearned faith when he predicted that he would one day have my books on his shelf. But Mr. Mortem had given me a no less potent charm – a gritty determination to prove he was wrong.
I sent the first copy of my book to Mr. Welch, the chemistry teacher, and reminded him of what he had said in the high school hallway in 1965. He wrote back to tell me that he had read my letter in his retirement speech.
Then he went home and put my book on his shelf.