“The more you stall, the more it shows how important it is for you write this.”

adapted from Kelsey Review Fall 2024

How I finally gave in to write A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption

***

I screwed up.

When I told a story, maybe several stories—I was on a roll—about my younger years, longtime Princeton resident Mimi Schwartz said, “You have to write a memoir.” This was in 2010 at a writing retreat I hosted for friends in Sea Isle City.

“I do?” I said.

“Yes, you do,” Mimi said. “No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do!”

This went on until I gave up and said, “All right, but stop nagging.”

I was a poet. I had no business writing stories, especially my story. At the time I knew nothing about writing memoir except that the idea of it was terrifying. In poetry I could disguise myself using metaphor, myth, fairy tales, and downright lies. But if I were to write memoir I must tell the truth. It felt like I would be changing my underwear in public. I didn’t want other people to see what I got. I didn’t want to see what I got either.

“So how’s the memoir going?” Mimi asked a few months later.

“Good,” I said. “I’m making progress.” She knew I was lying.

“I’d like to see it.” Crap!

“It’s not quite ready,” I said, which was true. “I’ll let you know.”

“Okay,” she said, “I look forward to it.”

In addition to her own memoirs, Mimi wrote the book on writing memoir. Literally. She coauthored Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction with Sondra Perl. I figured a good way to delay writing was to read her book which is wonderfully useful…if you want to write a memoir. However, despite myself I learned a lot. Among the many take aways was to write scenes about the stuff that happened using sensory description, summaries to get to the next scene and then reflect on what you wrote to try to figure out what the heck it all means.

Lots happened in my early life so scenes shouldn’t be a problem…if I wanted to write them. Maybe I could write summaries to skim over the hard stuff. And reflection…I’ve done a lot of thinking about my life and still can’t figure it out. How should I know what it means? In poetry, it’s the reader’s problem. The universe can be nasty and cruel. What else do you want to know?

“Well?” Mimi asked.

I realized that I wasn’t going to get out of it, so I pushed away my pile of unfinished poems and got to work. I decided to write about the people who spawned me, my parents. I mean, my childhood was their fault, not mine. Right? Besides, they’re dead, so they won’t complain. I hope.

My father, Eddie Murphy, grew up on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. When his mother caught his old man screwing the teenage babysitter, she threw him out of their cramped apartment. Eddie, now the breadwinner, was dragged out of his childhood at age fourteen to haul tons of bananas on his skinny shoulders from the holds of cargo ships. He quickly turned from being a kid to being a longshoreman. Have you seen On the Waterfront? It was like that. When WWII happened, he figured fighting Nazis couldn’t be worse than what he had to face every day, so he enlisted and found himself stationed near the small city of Newport, Wales. Until then, I don’t think he’d ever heard of Wales.

Thelma Elias Samuel, my mother, my sweet, beautiful, sad mother was born in Nantybwch on the outskirts of Tredegar in one of the mining valleys of South Wales. When she was fourteen, she went to work at the pub her family ran in, you guessed it, Newport. When WWII happened to her, she found herself pulling pint after pint of bitter ale for the invading Americans, who, it was said at the time, were “Overpaid, oversexed and over here.” The GIs retorted that the British were "Underpaid, undersexed and under Eisenhower.” Clever.

When Thelma served Eddie his first beer she was smitten. He was smitten. He played debonaire and goofy. She played hard to get. It was magic. Fairy tale magic. Without the happy ending. Sniff.

They got engaged right before he left to storm Omaha Beach on D-Day. Boom! He survived that horror but was wounded six months later in Antwerp. He loved Antwerp. He was having the best time of his life. When he wasn’t on duty, he told me, he went out drinking and whoring. Not long before he died, he confessed that he should written to Thelma to break it off. He was probably right.

This was December 1944, just days before the Battle of the Bulge. Eddie and a buddy were out late carousing. It was snowing. They “borrowed” a jeep to drive back to the base, a jeep that happened to be filled with cases of liquor which they also “borrowed.” Of course they crashed the jeep on the icy road. Eddie wound up in a hospital with a concussion and kidney damage. The docs sent him home where he went back to work on the docks. After the war, Eddie returned to Wales to marry Thelma, thus beginning WWIII.

“So how’s it going?” Mimi asked.

“Great, great,” I said. “I’m making progress.” “Good,” she said. “What’s the title?”

“D-Day, A Love Story,” I said.

“That sounds interesting. Let me see it.” I gave her the bits and pieces I had.

“This seems to be about your parents,” she said.

“Uh huh,” I mumbled, hoping that would be the end of it.

“So where are you in this story?” “I’m not…I don’t want to be in it.”

“But it’s your story. You have to be in it,” she insisted. “No, I don’t,” I whined.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Stop fooling around. You need to write this.”

Aaaaagh!

It’s nonfiction, right? I decided I needed to do research.

And research, I discovered, is a wonderful way to put off writing. A friend told me she found the passenger list of the ship her grandfather took to cross the Atlantic.

“How did you find the passenger list?” I asked “Ancestry dot Com,” she said. “You should look into it.”

I signed up for Ancestry, took out a second mortgage to pay for the upgraded World Explorer package, and spent hours searching through the archives looking for…I wasn’t sure until I found it, the record of my sailing from Wales to the United States. I was surprised to learn that I crossed the Atlantic not once, but three times. After sailing from the UK to New York City at seven months old, I sailed back the following year, this time without Eddie, who knows why? I left Wales again and returned to New York for the last time in 1953 when I was three years old. I also learned that in the years 1947 to 1953 Thelma sailed between Britain and the US seven times. What was that about? What was it that made her so restless? I began to have a lot of questions and no answers. And there was nobody left to ask. I decided to do research about Wales, the country of my birth.

When Mimi checked in again, I was ready. I was feeling smart. I had facts. “Did you know,” I told her, “that in 1850 Wales was considered to be the first industrialized nation in the world because more people went to work in factories and mines than in agriculture?”

“Fascinating,” she said. “What does that have to do with your memoir? Was your mother a miner?

“Well, no, but her family were miners.”

I continued, “Women working side by side with men in the hot mines were prohibited from removing their shirts because it distracted the men who of course, could remove their shirts.”

“Uh huh.”

“Look,” I said, “this stuff is important. I bet you didn’t know that in 70 A.D., the Romans had gold mines in Wales. Gold mines!”

“Was your mother a Roman gold miner?” she asked. “No, but…”

“You’re stalling.”

“I’m not,” I protested, thinking I should visit a Roman gold mine on my next trip to Wales.

“You know,” Mimi said. Her voice was deliberate, tender. “The more you stall, the more it shows how important it is for you write this.”

Damn! I didn’t love hearing this. I didn’t love the idea of telling my story, but I love Mimi, so I finally got serious and went to work. Here goes.

I thought I had a normal childhood and adolescence even though I was stopped living with my family, who knows why? when I was six and was shuffled around New York City for the next four years. Some homes were kind, some not. None of the neighborhoods were kind. I was kidnapped and tortured by one gang at age seven and held at gunpoint by another at age eleven. A priest developed a crush on me and kept me as his boytoy for a year. After breaking a collar bone and six ribs, I developed a crush on the Codeine pills that sweetened the pain, and when they ran out, I asked alcohol to go steady with me. “Yes!” it said. “Yes!”

Mimi was right. I did have a story to tell, and the more I resisted it, the more obvious it was to her, and eventually to me, that I needed to write it. Thank you, Mimi. I couldn’t have done it without you.

As I started to write, I realized my life was perhaps, not as normal as I thought. I began to think of my high school years as Early-Derelict Period. Mid-Derelict Period began when I flunked out of several colleges and went to work at a bar, and Late-Derelict Period when I woke up in the gutter outside the flophouse where I was crashing in Wales. Writing my story helped me understand my younger years and my addiction to alcohol. As a bonus, I began to forgive my mother and my father, and eventually to forgive myself.

Eleven years, hundreds of titles, and thousands of words later, I finally had a Mimi-worthy manuscript. She read it and offered useful revisions, most of which I adopted. And when the manuscript was accepted by a publisher, she wrote the following blurb to support the book.

“How does a boy going nowhere on alcoholism, a self- described ‘screw up,’ become a young man full of poetry and promise? In Peter Murphy’s coming-of-age memoir, we travel with him on his remarkable journey from New York City to his birthplace in Wales, to Ireland and Limerick (looking for limericks) to Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and back to New York. In his search for identity, told with a special mix of wit and poignancy, Murphy shows us how all who feel lost can be found, or rather, find themselves. A book that inspires, whatever our age and circumstance.”

Thank you Mimi, for helping me bring A Tipsy Fairy Tale into the world.