I asked some published memoirists for their survival strategies, hoping to pre-arm myself.  I realized that one of my best strategies for making it through rough writing terrain was to switch gears to lighter topics as necessary.  It seems obvious, but for me anyway, it's sometimes hard to remember that I have these simple options.

And indeed, I forgot.

I was struggling with this one nuisance of a chapter for several weeks.  It was about my five-year-old self, and how I was separated from my grandmother, whom I adored.  I'd written the most heartbreaking scene months ago, and it was fairly painless.  I wrote it at work, back when I was working at a law firm by day.  I got through it with little more than a two-minute cry in the private handicap bathroom – no sobbing, no swollen eyelids.  After a few quick dabs at the eyes with a paper towel that could remove paint and a New York tap water facial, I moved on.

I felt like I'd gotten away with something.  It should have been harder than that. But I reasoned that I'd hurt over this event so many times before, surely I was over it by now.

One of the longest, deepest and most sorrowful cries I ever had was over leaving my grandmother – and about 25 years after the fact.  It took me by complete surprise.

I was attending a weekend lecture and workshop led by author Geneen Roth.  I convinced Jim, my boyfriend at the time, to come along to the suburban hotel and enjoy the indoor pool, while I sat in a banquet hall with 500 other women who'd also known the agony and ecstasy of eating 16 Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls in quick succession.

After a full day of listening and digesting, turning to meet my neighbors, and visualization exercises that inevitably led to en masse weeping, I retired to my room.  Jim was splayed out like a Ripper victim on the king-size bed with the cable remote in his hand.

"Hey," he said cheerfully.  "How'd it go?"

I thought I'd done all my crying for the day when I'd had to face my mother in my mind's eye and ask, "Do you love me unconditionally?" and she dropped her gaze to her feet and whispered, "No."

But there was more to come.  So, so much more.  I dropped my weight heavily onto the edge of the bed and started to shake.  A place deep in the pit of my belly swirled green and black, and it had fists, and it clenched them.  A spring of tears rushed forward from my eyes; a dam had broken.

I heard myself sputtering like a child, heaving and hiccupping, seeping something from every opening in my face.

Jim tried to console me, kept asking what was wrong.  I didn't know at first.  All I could do was cry – cry so hard I thought I'd suffocate, or my chest would crack open, or my forehead might burst, or I'd vomit, or split my face open at the strained corners of my gaping mouth.

Finally, I said something – choked it out in gasps and wails, one syllable at a time.

"Please – don't – take – me…"

"Kim…" Jim said in an urgent hush, "…where? Take you where? What's happened?"

My face was so tight and scrunched-up I thought my eyelids would turn themselves inside-out. I squinted and spat it out:

"Gr…grrrandmom!" I didn't understand it even as it was happening, but I'd traveled backwards in time, emotionally, to the little girl whose heart was crumbling, ashes falling away from a hissing red-black core, barked at from the driver's seat to shut the fuck up already, enough is enough, you'll see Grandmom at Christmas. There in that innocuous hotel room, I pleaded to people not present, "Don't make me go with you! Please, let me stay with Grandmom! I don't want to go to Michigan, I want to stay with her!"

It was the first time in over two decades that I'd visited that pain.

I thought my major outbursts over Grandmom were behind me.  I thought so even as I fumbled like a clod with the structure of this one pesky chapter about her.  I put it aside so many times and jumped ahead to maintain momentum, but finally, one day last week, I finished the chapter.  I was so happy to be done with it.

And that's when I stopped writing. Cold.

I wasn't working that week, except for a one-day temp stint typing e-mails for the Duchess of York.  (That was good for novel dinner conversation and $170.)  But otherwise, I was wildly free – with no excuses why I couldn't report daily to The Writer's Room and continue my memoir's progress.

But for a week, I didn't go near the place.  I've only ever had pleasant associations with The Writer's Room, and nothing bad had happened there to scare me away.  Why, then, did I suddenly feel a knee-jerk, let's-change-the-subject aversion to it?

I sat in my apartment.  For six days.  I wanted to leave it, and yet I didn't.  I wanted to write, and yet I didn't.  I wanted to be a writer – didn't I?

Doubts began to creep up the back of my neck and clung to my cranium like lichen.  Maybe I didn't want to be a writer after all.  Did I really want to do all this work?  I probably didn't have the necessary discipline to finish a whole book anyway – who was I kidding?

Maybe, I mused, I should just marry for money and fill houses with lots of pretty things.  I'd become so aimless and bored and bitchy, I'd tear through interior decorators like Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls, raging about in a turban and overdone Estee Lauder pancake.  Maybe I'd become one of those alcoholics who only drinks wine, and I'd kill myself one night in the Jacuzzi with a bottle of Xanax, a box of truffles and a pricy little bottle of port. It all made me so very sad.

Meanwhile, another voice interjected itself from some far-flung place in my being.  It told me I wouldn't feel this way forever, so just hang in there.  Nothing stays the same.

It argued that of course I had the discipline to finish my memoir – I'd already proven it to myself.  It insisted that I knew, deep down, damn well, that I was meant to write, and told me not to bother questioning it.  The voice sounded wise when it advised that I had waaaay too much spunk and gumption to ever waste myself away.  This strange black hole of immobility I felt trapped in – it was temporary.  The voice promised me.

I was telling my girlfriend Lori all about it on Sunday night, when she announced she had to pick up the laundry.

My eyes stung.

"Sweetie, what's wrong?" she asked.

I felt like an ass. "I know this sounds completely insane, but for some weird reason, I feel like begging you not to go. I don't want you to get the laundry.  Isn't that stupid?"

The next thing I knew I was crying, and she was holding me.

"I don't understand what's wrong with me," I blubbered onto her shoulder. "I feel so lonely.  And I can't get myself to do anything.  I don't care about any of the things I usually love to do.  I'm not doing any writing.  The last thing I did was finish that pain-in-the-butt chapter over a week ago.  I feel like such a loser.  I'm so lost. And…and…"

And then, there it was, falling out of my mouth before I could think it.

"…they made me leave my Grandmom!"

Lori made a soothing, knowing sound as I collapsed into an old, familiar sorrow.  I think she knew what was bothering me all along.

When it was over, except for a head full of snot, everything seemed much clearer.

"I wasn't letting myself feel what I needed to feel.  And I've been afraid to keep going.  I realize it now," I thought aloud.  "I haven't let myself move forward because I've been scared that the whole rest of the memoir will be this hard.  But I don't have to jump right back into the hard parts. I don't.  Why didn't I recognize this earlier?"

I could've read my own blog and had the answer.  But sometimes I'm just thick.  It's not that I'm unwilling to take my own advice – it just doesn't occur to me.

"Why don't you write about Duran Duran?" Lori suggested.  "Write about how you and Charlene wrote that story when you were kids and based all the characters on Duran Duran, and wrote yourselves in as private detectives.  That would be hilarious.  You would love writing that." (Lori was right.  The Duranie Phase is my next stop.)

I guess it wasn't enough to merely decide ahead of time that when the going got tough, I'd just write about something brighter.  I had to really experience the memoirist's meltdown to understand how I need to deal with mine.  Now I know.

Next time, I'll give myself plenty of room for the ratty old feelings still in my gut.  And if I'm having trouble getting them out, I know what I can do.  I'll rent a sad movie and cry over that.  If I let myself cry long enough, the sadness will convert itself to whatever's really bugging me.  I've seen that work.

And next time, I'll have a fun story at the ready, so I can get back on the road sooner.  One of the stories I love to tell – the ones people ask to hear. Maybe I'll make a list of "happy chapters" I can turn to in a jiff – when things get serious again.

I'm writing again.  I'm working again.  Nothing stays the same.