I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but during the beginning of the pandemic I thought it would be great for me and my sister to write our entire life stories and send them to each other. It was inspired by a Miranda July prompt but also a zoom show deadline and maybe our mutual sadness.

We took twenty four hours. Neither of us had ever spent so much continuous time writing. It was maddening. We both got stuck on childhood and then had to summarize our twenties in several sentences. I highly recommend it and strongly caution against it. 

After sending my life story to my sister and reading hers I felt a significant amount of empathy for myself. I thought: I’ve been through something enormous. And that enormous thing was simply life: all of it, every day of it.

I have been interested in writing in this memoir mode ever since.

When my sister Ana and I innocently began writing our memories of growing up in a theater we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. Like all great adventures, perhaps it required that level of ignorance.

Years later, the writing has morphed into a short film and a live reading and a memoir that keeps growing in size despite the fact that we are writing about the past.

It is not lost on me that the name of our parents theater is eerily perfect: Cocoon. And our process has been just as grotesque and mushy as its namesake.