How Embracing Life’s Cringiest Moments Birthed An Honest Memoir 

At its heart, my new book, Have You Seen My Soulmate?: A Globe-Trotter’s Bumbling Search For True Love is an absurd love story that spans three-decades and many far-flung international locales. There’s plenty of travel misadventures, lust, love, loss, regret, parenthood, senile cats–the arc of my adult life. I’d spent the bulk of my twenties, thirties, and even a chunk of my forties leaping blindly into the unknown, buying one-way tickets with the ingenious plan of “Figure it out when I get there.” Or, as I was prone to do, fall madly in love with exactly the wrong person and refuse to learn from my mistakes, allowing that fun moment when everything comes crashing down upon my head to repeat itself about once every three years.  

Because I’d lived with such reckless abandon, I did have a story to tell, or at least I thought I did, but my initial drafts just weren’t working. I scribbled out a select few stories in essay form and had my writing friends look them over, but their reactions were mostly something along the lines of, “meh.” It wasn’t until my friend and mentor, David Wolman, pointed out the fact that, “Even though what’s happening in some of these stories are remarkable, your writing, the way you're describing it feels, I don’t know, a little safe maybe?” David is a lot smarter than me. He also happens to be an award-winning journalist and author, so I figured I’d give his theory a shot. After meditating on this notion of “safe” for a few weeks, I appreciated that I had left out, from each of the six essays, some of the more cringe-worthy and mortifying events of my life. It wasn’t done conscientiously, but maybe deep-down I was overly concerned with what people in my immediate family and some of my co-workers and students would think of me? Maybe I let my ego take the wheel and steer me away from the more sensitive and self-deprecating scenes? Which, of course, in a travel/humour memoir is where all the treasure lay buried. 

This was my turning point. When I re-wrote the essays, I made sure to showcase my acute selfishness when depicting the time I left my perfectly magnificent fiancée in Seattle while shamefully chasing another “soulmate” into the jungles of Guatemala. I needed to stop pretending I wasn’t the villain, and own it. In depicting the moment when I surfaced in the Rio Dulce river and came face-to-face with a ten-foot-long python, I highlighted every idiotic mistake I’d made and how it had all led to this, the most terrifyingly helpless encounter of my life. Later, in an essay that depicted my sudden divorce and ensuing move to Italy, I made sure to include the fact that my wife did not merely drop me with no warning, but that she left me for her spiritual guru, a 55-year-old woman. Emasculating, sure, but true, and I needed to include every mortifying morsel for the story to truly resonate with me, and thus my readers. When I re-worked the essay about my father’s terminal brain disease, this time describing on a visceral level what it’s like helping your dad wipe his ass after he’d shat himself, I didn’t hold back. My dad was my hero. How could I go there? Because it’s true, and with any genre of writing, especially memoir, it’s not just the generic truth, it’s the heart and guts of the thing where you’ll find gold. And speaking of shitting oneself, in an essay set in Laos, why not include the fact that I not only left my second wife and nine-month-old daughter behind in the name of book research, but how karma quickly corrected this and had me spraying diarrhoea onto the dry earth of a Hmong village where two giant pot-bellied pigs tackled me violently to the ground so they could lick up every ounce of my doo doo while an entire tribe, it seemed, was doubled over in laughter, at me, the idiot foreigner now covered in stinky brown spots?

Details matter, especially if they are honest and showcase your deepest flaws and vulnerabilities. Embarrassing? Yes. Will my poor mom cringe every couple of pages, imagining her bible study group reading these stories? Yes. And now that it’s published, out in the world, exposed in all of its naked truth, where anyone can appreciate the very best and worst of me, the most me of me, do I have any regrets? Absolutely not. 

Jeffrey has an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University. He’s written for Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living magazine and was a contributing editor for A River and Sound Review. Essays from his current collection were first published in Straylight Literary Magazine and T.H.R.O.B. (The Hawaii Review of Books). Through National Geographic Student Expeditions, he has led student journalism trips across Italy and Greece. Jeffrey currently teaches English and Creative Writing at Hawaii Preparatory Academy, and during the summer months, he teaches Creative Writing in Siena, Italy for Oxford/Siena Academia. With Italy being a focal point for Have You Seen My Soulmate?, Jeffrey just returned from a month in Tuscany where he teamed up with the renowned Italian author, Pietro Grossi, for author readings and literary events. You can check out Jeffrey's website.