The One-sentence Memoir Challenge

This challenge is open until February 1.

I challenge you to write as many one-sentence memoirs as you can in 15 minutes, and then share them with us in the comments below.

Here are mine:

My 4-year-older sister says that she can’t remember ever thinking of me as a baby but always thought of me as an equal.

It was a year after my husband’s death that I found the pictures he had taken of me looking at his sculptures at that art show I had gone to before we ever met.

When he said that he only drank on vacation, I didn’t realize that he meant he ONLY drank on vacation.

My youngest stepson called me his wicker stepmother, which might or might not have been due to my basket collection.

“There’s a big black scorpion on the wall beside the toilet in my bathroom and it’s wagging it’s tail at me!”

My parents’ bedroom contained many secrets, including my father’s gallstones in a small pink cardboard box and a mysterious cap-shaped rubber object in a white plastic case that smelled of talcum and sometimes changed positions in my mother’s bottom drawer, otherwise used for mainly incidental or forgotten items.

I was 13 on that summer that I decided my father was planning on murdering us all. 

When I asked it to prove that it was really a flying saucer, it suddenly lifted into the air and zigzagged from barrow pit to barrow pit in the road behind me.

My sister told her children not to believe anything I ever told them.

My mother is a bottom drawer. In her I keep my past down low, disorganized, how I can stand it.

One by one, they climbed over the wall and ascended the steps up to the upper story of my house, swarming up over its high dome, where they danced.

When I asked her if she’d like to hear the real story of my 15 months in Africa, my mother said, “I never told my mother anything that would make her feel bad!’

I look forward to your sharing your one-sentence memoirs!!! (If you want to cheat and take longer, go ahead. Just try to be spontaneous and not to mull too long over each one. Let the thoughts come freely.) This was an exercise that Judy Reeves had us do in our Wild Woman Retreat. Please link your answers to this site: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2020/01/01/one-sentence-memoirs-for-the-new-year/