Testing, 1, 2 3

This is an experiment relating to a book I tried to write: Ruminations from the Minivan: Musings from a World Grown Large, then Small.

Part chronicle of new motherhood, part travelogue and part food memoir (what isn't these days) the manuscript showed early promise -- excerpts were published in literary journals, it won an award at a writer's conference and even attracted the attention of a couple of agents.

But for some reason I couldn't finish it.

The same things that make me uncomfortable about blogging or participating in Facebook made me reluctant to finish the book, even though it was originally written as a series of messages to my daughters and wasn't intended for publication at all.

We live in an era that is saturated with personal revelations, some true, some embellished. In memoir writing classes they teach you that they key to a successful memoir is finding the big, universal truth that makes your story relevant to others.

So even though I have enjoyed the memoirs of others, I've avoided finishing my own memoir because I wasn't convinced that my take on things is so special that I need to share it with the world. This despite the fact that a few of the pieces I've published, most notably an account of the death of a young mother, have touched people and I've been proud to have told those stories.

Instead I turned toward impersonal (and more lucrative) article writing.

But last night at my daughter's basketball game (the new baby I started writing for is now 10), several women were raving about a food memoir written by a woman in our neighborhood. It's called "A Homemade Life" and it started as the blog Orangette. I immediately ordered the book from Amazon (because our neighborhood book store is already sold out of copies) and checked out Orangette's blog entry tonight -- a lovely ditty about tomato sauce.

I was inspired to write in part because of New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, who, one reviewer said "is able to see the entire world through a single grain of sand."

One small blog entry about tomato sauce affected me the way the first taste of a pungent tomato sauce does -- it was a wake-up call. Orangette advises you add butter to the sauce to take the flavors to a whole new level.

So this blog is the butter in my sauce, as it were. Maybe writing it will be the kick in the pants I need to finish the book. Maybe it will be just be the daily writing practice I've been avoiding. Or maybe it will enrich my life by providing creative outlet I've been avoiding.

And maybe, just maybe, because blogs can be the equivalent of the Schwab's drug store soda fountain in Hollywood (where Lana Turner and a bunch of other "starlets" were discovered), some hotshot literary agent will pluck me from obscurity, sell my finished manuscript, send me on a book tour, then option the screenplay and sign Meryl Streep to be in the movie (hmmm, I'll have to write a role for her).

On verra.