I ask what it was like for Jarrell to navigate the history of her parents before she was born — two people of a different generation, younger then than Jarrell and her own husband are now, and whose story Jarrell had to wind her way through before she was able to fully understand her own.
‘This is where starting out as a fiction writer really helped me,’ she says. ‘Because I began by exploring my parents’ story in fiction, I didn’t have to be so precious with them. In my fiction, they weren’t my parents; they were characters in a story. Both of them had told me so much about what they did and how they felt before I was born, so I had the reality but I also wasn’t trying to ‘remember’ what happened. I was allowing these people to exist separately from my experience of them. It was important to me that I wasn’t trying to own their story but to use it as a touch point to inform mine. Their relationship before I was born became a fable to me — a cautionary tale that informed my life and choices.’”
Read the full article HERE. (Miller, E. Ce, “Andrea Jarrell’s ‘I’m The One Who Got Away’ Is A Memoir Every Modern Love Fan Will Want To Read,” Bustle.com, Sept. 5, 2017.)