Having completed my memoir, Her Blue Eye, Mine, I have been sending sections off to magazines and have had good success in getting short excerpts published. I was delighted when the Memoirist published a chapter (short excerpt below)
"In a photograph from this time they are seated together, my father with his legs crossed and his head turned coyly towards the camera. He wears blue knee-length socks that match the blue polka dots on my mother’s dress. She stares out of the frame, unsmiling, her face half in shadow. In a trick of the light, it looks as though one side of her face is lifted in a smile, while the other is in shadow, sombre and inscrutable. My father’s arm, slung along the back of the couch, doesn’t touch her shoulders. I am on her lap dressed in frothy white, still too small to hold my head up so that it lolls to one side – a doll, dressed up for play. Although I am sitting on her, she is not holding me, and her arms are firmly tucked in at her sides; I am balanced only by the precarious tilt of her knees. In this photo, as in life, this baby that doesn’t really belong to her has landed in her lap, and she has not yet learned how to hold on to it. He is there but looking towards the camera, not touching her. In the corner of the frame, a mother-in-law’s tongue twists upwards, the leaves sharp and prehistoric."
