This post is the next in the ‘All the King’s Editors’ series, the brainchild of WU contributor Dave King. In this series, WU contributors edit manuscript pages submitted by members of the larger WU community, and discuss the proposed changes.

This is intended to be an educational format, and we hope this exercise will generate useful comments about the proposed changes–why the editorial suggestions do or don’t work. 

Interested in submitting a sample for consideration? Click HERE for instructions.

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Hi friends. I am happy to share this submission today as it gives us the opportunity to examine memoir, an oft-misunderstood genre. I oft-misunderstood it myself until I began working with two critique partners, both of them memoirists. As it turns out, memoir and fiction are as similar as (fraternal) twins!

First let’s look at the submission from chapter nine of OUTLASTING ANGIE, the moment during which the narrator receives a terrifying diagnosis.

Notes of clarification from the writer:

1. Sean is my brother.

2. There are three surgeons (introduced earlier in the MS) mentioned in this excerpt: Dr. G, a brain surgeon; Dr. L, another brain surgeon I saw 11 years earlier; and Dr. T, my primary care physician.

The Submission from Chapter Nine:

“You have a cavernous angioma. It’s on your brain stem.”

Dr. G rolled his chair back and angled his computer monitor toward me and Sean. He pointed to a series of images—my skull, in two-dimensional slices. The local hospital had emailed my latest MRI scans several days prior. I looked at my left and right brain lobes. Saw my eye sockets. Nasal cavity. He held a pen to the screen, hovering over layers of gray, and traced the single black mass in each, just right of center. The part that shouldn’t be there. The part they said had grown by nearly two centimeters.

“You have a cavernous angioma,” he said. “It’s on your brain stem.”

A … what? I thought. What’s he talking about? I have a calcification. A calcium deposit.

Dr. G rolled his chair back and angled his computer monitor toward me and Sean. He pointed to a series of images—my skull, in two-dimensional slices. The local hospital had emailed my latest MRI scans several days prior. I looked at my left and right brain lobes. Saw my eye sockets. Nasal cavity. He held a pen to the screen, hovering over layers of gray, and traced the single black mass in each, just right of center. The part that shouldn’t be there. The part they said had grown by nearly two centimeters.

He spoke to me and Sean in a windowless exam room, telling us what I had and what it could, and already was, doing to me. Yet, he called it something else. Not a calcification. A neurovascular disease. A cavernous angioma. 

“Pathological yawning,” the doctor continued, “can be a clinical sign of a disorder affecting the brain stem,” Dr. G explained. You’re also presenting with persistent hiccups—chronic for days, you said, yes?”

“Yes,” I confirmed.

“Persistent hiccups, those lasting at least forty-eight hours without stopping, can lead to what is called intractable hiccups, those. Much more serious. Intractable hiccups are those that last a month or more without stopping. Clearly, we don’t want to wait for it to get to that point.”

“How do we know it will? Maybe it won’t?”

“No,” Dr. G interjected. “It will.” [Read more…]