My friend and commentator Marla suggested the title for my new book: ENDINGS. Maybe it will become a bookend for my first book, BEGINNINGS. I took the clue from these gerunds to create the table of contents, also gerunds. I’ll show you, but with an ulterior purpose.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCING: This Old Woman

Counting
Needing
Downsizing
Hitting the Road
Aging
Moving On
Searching for Self
Remembering
Forgetting
Caregiving
Tasking Comfort
Choosing
Going Solo
Finding Self
Discovering
Being Nice
Leaving
EPILOGUE: This Woman, Older

Remember I said I’d copy one chapter into a blog? So now you have the table of contents. I want you to choose which chapter (or introduction or epilogue) you’d like to read. I’ll give you a week.

Anon, anon.

More on my Marketing Questionnaire: What is the book’s genre? Answer: Non-fiction Memoir.

Oops.

And what you may well ask, is a memoir? Well, I can tell you what it is not. It is not a blow-by-blow account of one’s life. It is not self-aggrandisement. It is not self-analysis. I used to call my diary my paper shrink. A memoir is neither diary nor shrink. It’s not a self-help book, though I can tell you it’s hard to avoid giving a little advice (not do-as-I-do but do-as-I-say?). It could be a guide to life but it is not a GPS. It’s one person’s life, incomplete and subject to change—perhaps to learn something from but not to copy. So maybe it offers a little instruction (advice) with maybe a little wisdom—if the memoirist has lived long enough to have accumulated any.

For heaven’s or someone’s sake, do not read a memoir, especially mine, as a Guide to Life. Read it for pleasure, for entertainment, for the fun of it.

I think my memoir is really a collection of blogs. You can dip into it or not, take or leave—of course leave.

So soon?