Editor's Note: With , author Kate Nason revisits the turmoil that upended her life when her husband's secret affair—with a woman at the center of a presidential scandal—was exposed to the world. Here, she explores how writing her memoir helped her chart an arc of her life that begged to be deciphered.
Sometimes the story chooses you.
Call it a haunting.
And by haunting, I mean the memory-ghosts of events in our lives that we turn over in our hearts and minds for years. The patterns that repeat and hound us. The arc of a life that begs to be deciphered.
For years, the decade of my 30s—bracketed by huge personal loss—played through my mind like a mythical journey, complete with heroes and villains. Trials, tests, and triumphs. I lived with these memories, turning them round and round, in an attempt to make meaning from my trajectory.
I knew someday I’d have to write it.
When my marriage blew up in the wake of my husband’s betrayals and infidelity and the national scandal that engulfed us, I collected all the newspaper and magazine articles from those days: The Oregonian, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, People. Articles sent to me by friends in Tokyo, England, and Germany, containing pictures of me they’d clipped from the pages of their hometown papers. I gathered them along with my journals and scraps of paper scrawled with my musings, and stuffed them all into a bulging banker’s box labeled “The Bomb.” A time capsule I banished to the attic.
