Collecting Stories, Starting With Mine

For months, I've been talking about a project that asks women a simple question: Would you share a story from your life?

Not your entire life. Not your résumé. Just one story.

A memory that still catches in your throat. A moment that quietly changed you. An ordinary afternoon that, years later, you realized had become part of who you are.

I want to gather these stories from women of every age and background into a single collection. Not because I think there is one universal experience of womanhood, but because there isn't. Our lives are impossibly varied, and yet the smallest moments often reveal something profoundly human.

As I began inviting other women to participate, I realized something. Before asking anyone else to be vulnerable, I needed to be willing to do the same. The first story I collected had to be my own.

Richard and I

My husband, Richard, died several years ago. I wrote about his loss in my book written with Tesha McCord Poe, Beyond Widow. But grief has a strange way of continuing its work long after everyone assumes it has quieted. Sometimes it appears in obvious places—a birthday, a familiar song—but sometimes it arrives years later, through something entirely unexpected.

For me, it came after knee surgery.

Recovery was slower than I anticipated. Standing up hurt. Walking hurt. Even turning over in bed became something I had to think about before I did it. One afternoon, somewhere in the middle of that recovery, I found myself thinking about my husband. He had been through surgeries, and lived through pain. And suddenly I wondered how often I had underestimated it. Not because I didn't love him, but because it is almost impossible to fully understand another person's pain while standing outside of it.

Lying there with my own aching knee, I felt a wave of compassion—not only for what he had endured, but for the ways I had failed to recognize it while he was here. I wished I had asked more questions. I wished I had offered more patience. I wished I had understood more, and sooner. I wrote the story down, and with my collaborators, shaped it into a brief vignette written in graphic novel form. You can see an excerpt on our process page.

This is exactly the kind of story I hope to gather. Not because it contains a dramatic ending or an extraordinary event. It was just a small moment, the kind of story that disappears if we don't tell it. Not the headline of my life, but a moment between headlines.

Every woman carries hundreds of these moments. Many have never been spoken aloud. Some have only surfaced in the privacy of their own thoughts.

I believe those stories matter.

They remind us that no life can be summarized by dates or accomplishments. Most of all, they remind us that our lives are made not only from what happened to us, but from how we came to understand it.

So before I asked anyone else to trust me with their story, I offered one of my own. It felt like the only honest place to begin.

And now, I hope other women will join me and write the rest. Will you?

by Patty McGuigan

We are excited to share the process of making this book, so every journal post will end with a sketch of the story we’re discussing. To see all of the final stories in print, follow along!