Answers to Your Questions > Writing the Book > How did you remember so much?
I’m happy to answer questions about An Unquenchable Thirst. Submit your questions and read my answers below.
Early on I received some very good advice from one of my MFA advisors, Sarah Schulman. Until then, I'd been writing very polished little pieces for my MFA thesis. Sarah told me, "Okay, we see that you can write. The best thing you can do now for the book you will eventually have is to just write down everything you can before you forget it. I don't care about form or style. Just write it down." That was in 2001. I produced 900 pages of free-form memories, a lot of it dialogue, which was always the first thing to come back to me. I'm sure I had the stylistically one of the worst MFA theses every written, but I had all the raw material I needed to spend the next eight years (it took a total of ten to write the book) reshaping those memories into something people might actually want to read.
Right now, if you asked me to write about the last three years of my life, I wouldn't be able to come close to the detail I was able to recall from my twenty years in the convent. My memory doesn't work as well now as it used to, and I have many more distractions than I did then--in the convent we had no access to media and little intellectual stimulation. Life in the convent had a simple, dependable structre, so when something happened out of the ordinary it stood out. We also had built-in life reviews: twice each day, at noon and before going to bed, we reveiwed our day, examining our consciences for any way in which we might have failed; each week we reviewed the week in preparation for confession; during annual silent retreats we reveiwed the entire year.
When writing, I also had many ways to fact-check my memories. While helping my parents pack before they moved houses, I discovered that they had kept nearly every monthly letter I'd written them during the twenty years I'd been in the convent; I found letters stufed in shoe boxes at the back of closets, in filing cabinets, between pages of photo albums. I also had copies of the general letters Mother Teresa wrote the sisters, whcih helped confirm what I remembered about her activities at the time. I also found numerous photos and a few journals in which I had kept notes.