hello …. next week i’m embarking on an 8 wk mission hoping to take my coming of age memoir Dandelion to fruition with the helping hand of author and new friend, Dr Lily Dunn. I have enrolled into her creative- nonfiction: Compelling Memoir course thru the London Lit Lab where I will post my weekly outpourings no matter how rough. I reached out to Lily after reading her gripping memoir Sins of my father – a daughter, a cult, a wild unravelling, seeing as we had traversed a very similar terrain and yet wildly different events.
Dandelion will be a biographical account told thru the lens of my seventeen year old self - a coming of age tale that begins in the burbs of Geelong Australia and travels cross country to exotic India in the late 70s. Catapulted through mental asylums, ashrams, cults with well meaning madmen, this is a story of my blossoming, some would say my undoing but a definite transformation happens all within 15 months.
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‘My life was strangely mirroring my mothers. Mine was the getting of LIFE as she faced her demise. Both of us dumb to each others predicament. Whilst I lay on what I thought was deaths door in a Rajasthan Hospital dropping in and out of consciousness with sever dysentary, unknown to me she was now being a regular patient at a Melbourne hospital doing daily trips for chemo treatment. Her breast cancer was detected way too late. On the eastern side of the globe it's an easier place to accept death and dying and have no concern with notifying family or friends. As I floated above the women’s ward of that hospital I contemplated how easy it would be to let go of it all but for Prasthan's return and pulling the drip out of my vein and helping me flee down the back stairs to the train station for the long and painful 36 hour journey to Bombay then onto Poona.
I was being thrown around at my own whim from a name change to group therapy anything to break down my barriers of conditioning blindly handed on from birth. I was way too young to really grasp the word Enlightenment and what most devotees had come to India for but I had been heading this way for a lifetime it felt, beyond my knowledge.’
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As much as I loath Paywalls I have decided to place one on this page only, making it available for my paid subscribers who’d like to stay close to my test flight to witness, support and interact as I navigate my first ever long form writing of a coming of age memoir. I would love to have you with me as i weave this vulnerable story.
Your subscriptions are helping me complete this book and i am forever grateful…..thankyou xxx
So looking forward to this Gyan! Such rich and textured writing. See you on Tuesday!