Turning point

            I was born 21 years ago, third and unexpected child of a happy marriage.  Always hyperactive and problematic, smiling and smart. A great student but mischievous all the way to college. Not caring what others think, living in a bubble thinking nothing bad could happen that would destroy this marvelous place I’ve created for myself. “While I have my family and friends, nothing can affect me” I thought.

            As a tradition, me and my family have a family reunion every Thursday at my grandma house, Abuela chispa. It was the longest living family tradition I can remember, turned my Thursdays in these family time that we, not caring what could be happening in the world, would see each other and catch up on everything. As a child I thought of it as a time for me and my cousins to get together and play, but later on it became the center of communication. Abuela chispa would make a whole caldero de arroz con salchichas y chuletas (rice with sausages and pork chops) and turned the radio oro radio station on so we could hear music she grew up with as Titi Evelyn, the crazy aunt and Mami danced with her and told us the daily stories. Everyone would laugh and have a good time for a couple of hours.

            Everything seemed nice, ups and downs but life seemed great. My perspective about life changed the day I was told that my grandmother had Alzheimer’s disease, one dark, cloudy day, to complement the cliché of the sad news. I never thought something like that could happen to my family. “What would that mean for my family? what’s happening to abuela?” I started asking to myself as I neglected that my world was being affected.

            Abuela started to change and our family Thursdays were changing to. She started to forget people, songs, locations, family, starting from the most distant related ones. Soon enough Abuelo Chispo took over cooking and sooner than one could think Abuela Chispa would start segregating from us, getting distant, hallucinating, in short she was getting much worse.  Some Thursdays we wouldn’t meet because she had an appointment. Another cloudy Thursday, as if my life was a continuous cliché, we gathered as usual. “Did you eat already?” she asked for the millionth time as she sat and mumbled while I opened the windows she closed for no reason. “I’m going to eat now” I said while we gathered in the dining room with mami and titi Evelyn. “What a pretty boy isn’t he?” said Titi Evelyn, just like her mother” said Mami, “do you know her?” Abuela Chispa glanced and laugh, meaning she didn’t have answer. I sat and eat the day Abuela stop recognizing me.

Naipaul's Reading and Writing: Novelisation of an autobiography

Source

An autobiography has more of fictional nature than one might believe. As we try to remember what happened twenty years ago our mind gets blurry and the feelings we have now of that moment may incorporate some aspects that may not be completely true. Naipaul in his Reading and Writing is a good example of it. Not only this but the novelisation of the story in order to make it attractive or more appealing to the reader situation is seen at this text. Naipaul uses his dad as a critical character for his story and describes in detail the situations that happens to him, which help us readers to overcome the reader-writer barrier that can be very hard because of the time in which it was written, the writers background and the historic context in which it was written, an aspect most people fail to remember when reading, and especially important when it is an autobiography you are reading.

            Naipaul is not the only one that uses this technique when writing an autobiographical text. We might want to add Esmeralda Santiago in, as she works a novelistic autobiography in When I was Puertorrican, Almost a Woman and The Turkish Lover. In these text we can see aspects very similar to what Naipaul uses, the characterization of, in this case, the mother and a very good description of places and situations for us to picture.

            It is crucial to remember that, even when we use novelistic techniques to make an autobiography more appealing and interesting, it has to stay an autobiography. When using these techniques there is a very fine line between a novel and an autobiography that if one is not careful enough, you might end up with a totally fictional text.

Journal Reflection

After writing for forty days everyday I could see that more than writing about the journey I was planning on having, and that is the purpose of the life, I was writing about the things that appeared in that journey that affected the everyday journey more than the big picture journey. This was reflected on the stress situations which I ended up writing about on the everyday basis that in one way or another changed the attitude towards the journey I wanted to develop.  Of course this is consequence of the frequency of the writing, being everyday one could not draw a bigger picture of what was happening, but in the same way I could let out lots of things that are not part of the big picture of the journey. For example, sometimes I ended up writing about topics that really bothered me and that were even affecting my compasses, but more on that later. I guess that’s what going for the jugular is, but it took me some time to really feel comfortable writing about things even though I was sure no one would ever read it. I guess even I wasn’t comfortable with the thing I wrote about and that’s why it was so hard, which made me realize there were a lot more things I wasn’t comfortable with than I thought. This got a lot better with time and I ended up being able to write about almost anything without being embarrassed or not feeling good with it. Another thing that changed from day one to now is the blank spaces in my mind when I tried to write, those times when you got nothing and you hover the pen on the page. Well those got better since, and I believe it goes hand to hand with the being comfortable, now I go for the jugular with no hovering and thinking spaces in between that made my writing a lot harder when I started.