Can Your Life Story Become a Novel? By Judith Laura
More than 20 years ago I started writing what later became my novel, Three Part Invention, published just last year. That first draft was written in the first person, beginning when the main character, my alter ego Beth, was five years old. Though the novel changed greatly from that first draft, it has preserved for me experiences and emotions I’m sure I would have forgotten by now: details — even minutia — about growing up female in the 1950s, participating in the very early civil rights movement, and the flush of first love…