In her own words: Sunny Deuber
Living on the Sunny Side: A Memoir Author:
Sunny Deuber. Available for purchase on Amazon.com or search by ISBN:
978-0-9825758-0-2.
Retail: $14.95
eBook version available in the Kindle bookstore for $3.99, or for borrowing for Kindle Prime subscribers. PROMO: Download for free January 2-6, 2012.
Living on the Sunny Side earned the gold medal for Autobiographies/Memoirs in the first annual eLit competition.
The 2011 eLit Awards are an industry-wide, unaffiliated awards program open to all members of the electronic publishing industry.
The contest is presented by Jenkins Group Inc., a Michigan-based book publishing and marketing services company that has operated the popular Independent Publisher Book Awards contest since 1996.
Thanks for remembering the writers too! Visit the eLit Awards Website for the complete list of awards and/or for information on how to participate in the 2nd Annual eLit Awards competition.
Why the writer's block on The Notorious Mrs. Dauber? The notorious Mrs. Dauber happens to have been my paternal grandmother. The notes my parents wrote before my birth are really the only source of information I have. They felt the story was important family history that should be told, but their notes were more of a reminder of what they wanted to include in the book than an outline of the story. My father died before they could complete the project. And by the time I might have been interested in the story, I suspect that Mrs. Dauber was either already long-gone, or my widowed mother had made sure I never met her.
There's a lot of information in my parents' notes, but even more holes in what they left. For a while, the solution seemed to be to do a ton of research, then fictionalize the story. I did the research. Then I tried to put words, thoughts, and actions into the mouths and lives of real people I had never known. It simply didn't feel right, especially when I finally figured out that I was much more like Grandma Jenny than I ever realized.
In the course of trying to ... uh... describe some of what Mom and Dad wrote about Grandma, I did learn that I could probably be a pretty decent writer of erotica. Then I swear I started channeling Grandma Jenny... who gave me a swift hit up the side of my head and told me to not spill the family secrets so graphically. She did encourage me to find out about what may have caused her behavior and imagine myself living in the late 19th century under the same set of rules and expectations!
As part of my research, I read Chapter 6, "The Intimately Oppressed" in A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, which goes into a great deal of detail about how most women born before the mid-20th century were raised. Grandma was born about 1875. Mom was born in 1903—I was an unexpected bundle of joy and made my appearance after my father was diagnosed with a serious heart condition.
I was born in the mid-20th century, when the world experienced a huge change, thanks to WWII and the necessity for women to join the workforce en masse. But my mother raised me by the same standards she had been taught when she was growing up: those pre-20th century ideals for a proper young lady who would grow up to be a proper and obedient wife and mother.
I rebelled big time! The world was too different when I was born. I simply could not be the prissy and obedient little lady I was expected to be, though I was a good enough actress to be able to fool people when necessary! I suddenly understood that, other than a few areas where I was better able to control my behavior than Grandma had been, I was very much like the woman I initially thought was so scandalous. Maybe it was Grandpa's contribution to my genetic mix. Without the options that the 20th century offered me, I might have been exactly like my Grandma!
Putting words into her mouth and graphically describing the ways in which she "acted out" not only would be unfair to her, but would reveal far too much about the workings of my own brain (if not so much about my behaviors) as I was willing to "go public" with.
So I'm stuck. I haven't yet figured out exactly how to tell the story in a fair way, without making Grandma sound worse than her behavior caused many to believe she was. I'm still waiting for inspiration. The story needs to be told, if for no other reason than that someone, someday, might be doing research on the Lowrey-Dauber families and might want to know about Jenny Dauber, born Jeannie Lowrey. I'll keep trying!
The book is definitely on hold until my muse whispers some good suggestions in my ear and inspires me to get back to work on my father's side of the family history!
About Living on the Sunny Side: A Memoir
July 19, 2009
We have to build our futures. We can’t just get stuck in the problems of the past.
On short walk from my home office to the kitchen, I did a quick check of the TV screen and saw the above condensed version of a statement presumably by Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda, on the Fareed Zakaria GPS show. Living on the Sunny Side has nothing to do with Kagame, Zakaria, or Rwanda.
Those two short sentences, however, have a great deal to do with my book. It started out as a memoir/autobiography and evolved into something more (these things have a life of their own!), including family history, growing up with a mother I believed hated me, lots of nostalgia about the usually good old days, and lots of stories about my many adventures. It is, as the subtitle states, about History, Misery, Stories, & Smiles.
My big surprise: just the process of writing it forced me to confront and examine the past, in order to build a new and better future for myself, one without most of the ‘baggage’ I’ve carried with me for so long. Living on the Sunny Side was originally intended as my legacy to family members, who know considerably less about our branch of the family—and their Auntie Sunny—than I do. A close friend, who is also a trusted writing critic and mentor, read a few chapters. Her response surprised me: “...it should be read at women's conferences on abuse and healing!”
Living was never intended to be a self-help book, but since I was really healing myself as I wrote parts of it, readers can follow the process and hopefully be as brutally honest with themselves as I was with myself. It was the introspection and honesty that helped me most. For example, in writing about growing up in Los Angeles in the 1940s and ‘50s, I included a lot about the relationship I had (or didn’t have) with my mother, but wrote even more about how much fun we had together. Eureka! She wasn’t the Wicked Witch of the West, at least not all the time. We had many grand adventures and she provided me with many advantages that have helped me and served me well throughout my life. It only took me a few decades to figure that out and, more importantly, to acknowledge it!
And there are stories about the amazing summer I spent working at a High Sierra guest camp in Yosemite; my first trip to Europe with my gay business partner Sam; lots about my many years in the performing arts; four marriages for all the wrong reasons, and the divorce that wasn’t. Okay, it was, but not until about twenty years after we thought it was—the only time I married a man once, but had to divorce him twice!
I hope it’s a fun book with something for everyone. But based on my mentor friend’s comment, it may also be helpful to anyone who is trying to shed a lifetime of heavy baggage and move forward into a better and brighter future. It’s there for the taking!
August 4, 2009: I've posted the first of several excerpts from Living on the Sunny Side. Enjoy!