“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
- Maya Angelou
The Attic of My Soul
An Essay
I have always been passionate about writing and storytelling. I describe myself as curious about
what makes us who we are.
In this memoir, short-story, I dove deeply and poignantly into a set of childhood memories and experiences that influenced the woman I have become.
In doing so, I dealt with childhood guilt and sorrow that has, in many ways, altered the relationship I've had with my mother. On a personal level, writing The Attic of my Soul helped me reconcile those feelings.
But it wasn't until I shared The Attic of My Soul with my mother that reconciliation was fully realized.
I came to understand that by the process of putting my own experiences into words, that I validated for my mother the many trials she experienced as a parent raising six children mostly alone, were real. I also validated that a special connection between us, even decades ago when I was still a child, has always existed.
In this memoir, I let my aging mother know those challenges and difficulties she experienced
had not gone unnoticed, and that even as I kid, I felt and cried from my mom.
When I shared The Attic of My Soul with my mother, she croaked out through her tears, "This is the most beautiful thing I've ever read. Thank you." Then we hugged and cried together.
It was a moment I had waited for all my life!
911: What is your emergency?
publication date: unknown
At 12:41 a.m. on October 3, 1981, twenty-two-year-old Susan called 911 after her father shot and killed a man in their home.
But it wasn’t her first emergency.
Growing up in a volatile family of six children, Susan learned early to recognize the signs of impending disaster. A shift in a parent’s body, a slammed door, a sudden human explosion of rage, the shift of air in a room when something was about to go wrong.
By five, she was already learning when to run. By nine, she understood that the parents she longed to trust were often the source of danger, not protection. And by twenty-two, when catastrophe finally arrived with a gun, a dead man, a rotary phone, and a new 911 system that failed to work, she knew what to do.
She stayed calm.
911: What Is Your Emergency? is a memoir about what happens when emergency is not an isolated event but a way of life. Moving between childhood and the violent night that fractured her family, (Hotin) Renard examines the strange competence born from chaos: the ability to read danger, take responsibility, and survive what others cannot see coming or have the power to control.
But survival has an aftermath.
With unflinching honesty and flashes of dark humor, Susan looks back at the family that taught her to live in a constant state of readiness—and at the child who discovered, long before she had words for it, that sometimes fear is not telling you to be afraid. And always, there are beautiful people there to catch you when you fall.