Betsy Graziani Fasbinder
Exposed: Telling Our Deep Truths in Memoir or Fiction
April 6, 2017
4 PM PDT 5 PM MDT 6 PM CDT 7 PM EDT
We want to welcome Betsy Graziani Fasbinder to our book discussion this month. We have been in the same writing group for over fourteen years, the Bellas, and here at NAMW we are celebrating her first memoir, Filling Her Shoes, but it’s not her first book. Three years ago her novel Fire and Water was published from which she drew personal experiences to create a fictional story. The core of a story is the truth you need to tell, and today we’re going to hear from Betsy how she transitioned from fiction writer to the full out exposure in a memoir. Congratulations Betsy!
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When Betsy Graziani Fasbinder was about to marry her husband, a widowed father, she knew she’d also become her first son’s second mother. She knew that she didn’t want to become any version of a wicked stepmother common in fairytales, and she was determined not to repeat her own abusive family history.
Filling Her Shoes: A Memoir of an Inherited Family is the story of a woman who stepped into the shoes of another mother taken too soon, and learning along the way that she’d need to find her own stride in the journey her new family would walk together. This is the story of how love and loss are not opposites, but cohabitants in family life and how family is the richest inheritance of all.
Why I wrote and published this story now
I wrote these stories originally just for myself. When I was becoming Max’s mother, none of the parenting books in the bookstore offered me what I needed. Either they were about welcoming a new baby or becoming a stepparent after a divorce. Neither of these described what I faced, so I wrote my story to gain perspective in those moments. At the time, I also felt that I didn’t want to burden my son or my husband, who had suffered such a tragic loss, with the doubts and fears that I was carrying in my role. Now, my older son is an adult, 32 years old. He’s happy, thriving, and living independently. I no longer feel the need to protect anyone from my own emotional process of the events of our lives. I needed this time not only to gain perspective, but to know that the story has a happy ending.
- The vulnerability of writing yourself as a character in your story.
- The importance of making emotion sensory in scenes…the “show don’t tell”, and techniques for writing that create a vivid story.
- Finding the universality of a very personal story so readers can connect.
- Discovering that “truth” can be told in both fiction and memoir.
- The power of pacing, and using light and dark stories to give readers a chance to breathe between tough scenes.
- Discovering that even in fiction, if we’re writing emotional truth, themes of our own lives inevitably come through.
- Though the plot and circumstances between fiction and memoir are vastly different, the themes seemed to have their own gravitational pull, tugging us back to the truth that we need to tell.
Bio
Betsy Graziani Fasbinder has been a writer her entire life, and began to share her work with others in her early forties. She has been a licensed therapist for 25 years. Her debut novel, Fire & Water has been honored with an honorary mention in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York Book Festivals. An excerpted chapter of Filling Her Shoes was published in Women’s Day Magazine. Betsy lives in Marin County, California with her husband, Tom, in their intermittently empty nest. They just celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary. Their old dog, Edgar (Edgar Allan Paw) is her most faithful writing companion.
Trainer, Leadership Consultant, Marriage Family Therapist
www.betsygrazianifasbinder.com
Twitter @BetsyGFasbinder
