What Memoir Writing Taught Me About Myself

It's often hard to tell where and why a project starts in a writer's head, but I can pinpoint some beginnings.

My historical novel, Counting on Grace, was inspired by a Lewis Hine photograph of a little Vermont girl working in a textile mill. Although I fictionalized the child and created her life out of a combination of research and imagination, I continued to be haunted by the world-weary face in the photograph. Soon after I finished the novel, I went looking for Hine's model, a girl named Addie Card, who married and divorced a fellow mill worker and died of lung cancer at the age of 93. Once the novel was published, I realized I knew more about Addie than I did about my own mother. Even though I wasn't aware of it at the time, looking for Addie had begun to build my creative bridge from fiction to memoir.