Magic and irony all rolled up into one. My daughter singing a song about running from the daylight as I, her mother wrote a memoir titled 'Running Into the Night.'

This is one of the hardest truths to write: achievement doesn't heal childhood trauma. You can build a beautiful life, earn degrees, create a family, and still feel like that displaced child inside.

Certain songs, smells, places, or objects become emotional landmines. They transport you instantly back to the worst moments. In memoir, these sensory triggers are gold—they're the details that help readers feel what you felt.

You need enough separation from your story to write about it without retraumatizing yourself. If you're still in the thick of the experience, you're not ready. Memoir requires the ability to dive into painful memories and resurface intact.

Then there are times when music takes you to where you've been, kind of like on a train ride. You just watch the years that came before. Who you were, the people that came and went. How you used to wear a scarf or a hat or high-heeled shoes and now you're all about understated comfort.

You can be factually accurate and emotionally dishonest. You can also have imperfect memory and be deeply, powerfully honest.

When you write about being an "easy target," you risk becoming one again—to critics, to trolls, to people who don't understand. But that vulnerability is also what makes memoir powerful.

To be truly alive, we must mourn joyfully all things that reach an inevitable end: seconds, minutes, hours, heartbeats, embraces, kisses