Two Sisters. One Memoir.
We began simply enough. We tried to write everything we could remember. But the more we wrote, the larger and more monstrous our childhood seemed to become.
We thought the act of writing would be like chiseling away at the past until the true form of it became clear. Instead, the act of writing felt like feeding some ravenous organism of memory. The more we wrote, the more there was to write.
And then we wanted it to be a film.
And then our dad nearly died.
And then the filming and writing gained an air of desperation. We were greedy for all forms of proof, all records.
And then we did a live reading in which we dressed like our dad and also read excerpts. We did this so we would finally have a reason to edit after years of writing with no editing at all.
And then everyone said of course this should be staged because we grew up on the stage.
And then we went back to writing, having fully given up the idea that we could somehow make a feature length film about any of this.
And then I decided to give the memoir material to my alter ego characters because I didn’t know what else to do with it.
And then the archival footage surfaced.
And then two people decided they wanted to make a documentary about it all: the parents, the theater, and us the children and our art making. Two generations of artists in one family with the life and the art constantly feeding each other.
And who knows what will happen next.
