When I was writing my young-adult short-story collection, Killing Miss Kitty and Other Sins, I couldn’t quite decide whether I was writing memoir or fiction. Sometimes what I wrote was authentically memoir, but the longer, more shaped pieces tended toward fiction. Because I had to decide to go one way or the other, I chose to present the longer short stories as fiction and to take the authentically memoir pieces out for another collection.

I have several other projects I need to complete before I can return to the memoir pieces to decide exactly what to do with them, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share them. So I’m putting them in here, one at a time.

1. That's It!

On November 20, 1938, I was born at home in a tiny four-room house. By 1938 most births happened in the hospital, but not mine. When my mother’s time approached, my father wrote a letter to the hospital asking how, if he allowed his child to be born within their walls, he could be certain that the baby he brought home would surely be his own. The hospital did not bother to reply. (I was a teenager when I heard this story, and I burned with embarrassment, knowing the hospital must have dismissed the letter as coming from a kook.) Dad took their silence as acknowledgement that they could offer no guarantees, that babies probably got mixed up all the time and went home with the wrong parents, and the decision was made. I was born at home.