Oh… It’s a memoir?

When I started this blog, I was 24. I felt that my primary duty was to relay the stories from the letters, with a tidbit of commentary. My role, was transcriber and granddaughter. I wish I’d told myself it would be okay to allow more of myself, of my own story, my jobs, my failed romantic endeavors, my dreams, to land on the page alongside the letters. But I didn’t know where I fit yet — in the story, in the world — and writing about yourself when you’re lost (even if you don’t know that you are) is uncomfortable. There were times I was writing my blog and I couldn’t subdue the heartbreak or turmoil I was experiencing and I’d let my feelings leak obliquely into the blog post.

One particular blog post from 2010 encapsulates this best. I wrote it while going through a break up with a long-term boyfriend, but I didn’t say that explicitly and I instead tried to couch my heartache in the context of the letters:

“My mood today may be melancholy but I try to find comfort, as they did, in the fact that they so often wrote to each other on the same date, overlapping, thinking of each other and doing their best to comfort one another. To state the obvious: Relationships take many turns. Some last forever, some end too soon, and then there is the infinite gradient in between. The war temporarily challenged this relationship and simultaneously fortified it. Right now, I can’t be with someone who I love anymore. And while I could, technically, pick up a phone and call this person, sometimes I guess it is better not to allow yourself access to instant communication. These letters are a testament to the strength of the bonds between people. So right now, I’m simply trying to find a way to draw strength from Alex and Sylvia.”

I remember promptly feeling nervous and embarrassed that I’d shared even a bit of my personal turmoil. Reading it now, I see a young woman straining to find herself in her grandparents’ story, using their bond as a buoy.

I have the advantage of hindsight now – I’m about to turn 40 and I’m still here grappling with the letters while I grapple with my own busy life. I’ve been working on making this blog, and the letters, into a book for years. But for so long I couldn’t figure out where I fit. I’d written proposals, analyses of the letters, done historical research about WWII, and Brooklyn, and anything that didn’t include me. I finally forced myself in winter of 2025 to sit down and put words about myself on a page. I wrote and wrote until I had what I could call a VERY messy first draft of a memoir that included my own memories… even if it meant feeling slightly megalomoniacle, egocentric, or just boring along the way.

As I accepted that my voice would be a part of my book, I had to accept that what I was writing would qualify as memoir – not as an academic analysis or historical retelling of the drama of WWII and illness. So I began reading memoir, not a genre I’d actually spent much time with. I found that the stories I felt most moved by did not involve dramatic narratives and adventures, but the relatable, touching interiority of someone going through their life. This checks out since I also don’t have a strong interest in the battles and chronology of WWII so much as the progression of my grandparents’ relationship in their daily correspondence.

Ever since seeing Julia and Julie in theaters, I’ve kept it in mind as a model for a dual timeline memoir. I hoped that my blog would create the meaning I needed, like the late Julie Powell’s did. But my project didn’t have a strict deadline, or even a clear end point so my interpretations have changed over time – primarily outside of the blog. I have found meaning in the letters that simply weren’t there in my twenties. I didn’t know what it meant to be a mom, or what is lost and gained in that identity. I didn’t even know I had the same heart condition as Sylvia yet. I didn’t know that some days I’d miss and grieve Sylvia as though I’d grown up with her as my grandmother. I didn’t know that she would at times feel like a peer, I’d recognize her as a dreamer like me. It’s taken dozens of re-readings for me to see just how tenacious and talented she was – and how much she hoped to showcase that during her life.

As things feel more and more bleak in our political climate, I also see how radical and resilient her loving and creative nature was. Her creative whims and brash jokes were just as important as the political organizing that she and Alex both cared deeply about. She imbued her motherhood, sisterhood, neighborliness, and letters with eloquence, care, activism, and camaraderie.

Thus, in these letters I’ve found an unexpected lesson that the mundane, the quotidian, the minutia of our lives are where meaning comes from. I want to amplify Sylvia’s voice, beliefs, and the stories she didn’t get a chance to share. And to do that, she’s forcing me to amplify my own.

Sylvia wrote this to an editor who had reviewed a manuscript she wrote for a children’s book in 1949. It’s a project she never got to see through to fruition but we glimpse her ambition here, her oh-so-relatable attempt to balance her ideas and goals with motherhood: It’s been so long since I’ve attempted to do any writing. Raising two children isn’t easy to do. Finding time to write is difficult… When evening comes, I’m pooped… but really pooped! But still, the urge is there. The worm is eating away again. My mind is rusty. My fingers are rusty. My ideas are gone. I’ve reread some of the things I wrote many years ago. A lot of it is absolutely horrible, but at least I made an attempt to write every night. Now, months go by before I touch a typewriter. However, some of the stuff I wrote years ago was very good…bright, bright… dammit, there was nobody to encourage or point the way out to me. Nobody to make it clear enough!