[QCrit] Memoir - ALL MY BIRDS LOOK TO THE LEFT (68K, First Attempt)
have had a few personal rejections on this query. have been posting to qtCritique, which has been super helpful. looking for a little more help :)
Dear AGENT,
After I turned sixteen, the strands of my life began to braid into one another, portrayed as a ginormous rat’s nest. It took a sexual assault by a classmate for the strands to interlace. I learned that I had accepted this path for myself long before I was born. I agreed to it.
This is a lyrical coming-of-age memoir about a highly perceptive girl in which childhood gifts for seeing beauty, danger, and patterns in the natural world become both refuge and burden after sexual trauma, forcing herself to reckon with memory, faith, the body, and the long path toward naming what happened.
In my completed 68,000-word memoir ALL MY BIRDS LOOK TO THE LEFT, the narrative focuses on the theft of innocence that persists long after the sexual assault. When I think I have come to terms with my lived experience, I start having seizures and am diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy at age twenty-one.
This memoir is comparable to themes in Chanel Miller’s gritty and beautifully raw Know My Name: A Memoir met with Michelle McNamara’s investigative and obsessive, yet irresistible writing style of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer. It is driven by an angry and answer-seeking voice. The very same emotion is buttered thick around survival of the wound, and aches in every word several young men and women can recognize.
I was born and raised in a small town in Indiana without so much as a traffic light. I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in aeronautical engineering and earned my certification in the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts Writing Program at Purdue University. I now work as an engineer at an aerospace company in Ohio that specializes in production of turboprop engines.
I look forward to connecting with you.
Sincerely,