Q&A with Marty Ross-Dolen

 

Photo by Kimarie Martin Photography

 

 

Marty Ross-Dolen is the author of the new memoir Always There, Always Gone: A Daughter's Search for Truth. She is a retired child and adolescent psychiatrist, and she lives in Columbus, Ohio.

 

Q: What inspired you to write this memoir?

 

A: On December 16, 2010, I attended a 50th anniversary memorial event at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn to remember the victims of the aircraft collision that had taken the lives of my maternal grandparents 50 years prior when my mother was 14 years old.

 

This event capped a period of a few years when I had been researching the airplane accident privately on my own, since the topic had been a mostly forbidden one as I was growing up. It also became a touchpoint for my mother and me, the moment when we were finally able to talk about the tragedy that upended her life.

 

Several months later, I wrote a long essay about my experience at the memorial and all that had led up to it, inspired by a desire to make sense of my journey and better understand my family history.

 

I shared this with other writers in a graduate-level workshop at The Ohio State University, and included in my professor’s feedback was his suspicion that I might be writing a book. This surprised me, because my hope was that I had written all I needed to about this painful part of my life.

 

I promptly put the essay in a cabinet and didn’t revisit it until I enrolled in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts nine years later.

 

In the meantime, my mother was uncovering my grandmother’s personal letters and photos in the family archives and, at my request, began sending them to me. With this new treasure trove of material suddenly available, and with a lifetime desire to know more about my grandmother, I developed a desire to tell her story.

 

Yet I also knew that in order to tell her story, I would need to tell my mother’s story and my story too, because ultimately they were always intertwined. Thus began the book I had long ago hesitated to write.

 

Q: The writer Abigail Thomas said of the book, “If ever there was a book written from and for love, with a hunger to know, to understand, and to heal, this is it.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m so grateful to Abigail for her words, and I believe they serve as the perfect distillation of my book.

 

Early in the writing process, I made the conscious decision that love was going to be my guide. I recognized that I could write primarily from a place of deep sadness or even from a place of anger, but these emotions weren’t the ones that felt most authentic to my story.

 

Instead I found that when I wrote from a place of love, from a fully open heart, then all the knowing and understanding and healing followed suit.

 

This isn’t to say that I didn’t experience deep sadness and anger while moving through my story, and it isn’t to say that I didn’t write into those moments too, but at the end, this is a book about love, and it is that love that guided me and led to all the rest.

 

Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: My book had many titles over the course of its creation, but they always felt like placeholders.

 

When I struggled to make a final choice, I decided to engage the expertise of writer Kristen Paulson-Nguyen, who has a special talent for finding the right titles for books. Kristen helped me define what I wanted to communicate through my book’s title, and we searched for words within the book that spoke to those themes.

 

Always There, Always Gone is a phrase taken from a short chapter entitled “Lungs of the Earth,” found in Part One of the book.

 

In this chapter, I liken memories to ocean waves: “Impossible to catch and hold, filtering through the spaces between my fingers like water thickened with sand, equal parts solid and liquid, always there, always gone, all at once.”

 

When we found those words, “always there, always gone,” and studied them on their own, it became clear that they were the perfect way to think about not just water and sand or about memories but about so many other universal aspects of life.

 

They signal the continuous presence of grief and the continuous absence of those who are grieved. They encompass the multigenerational effects of trauma from tragedies and the permanence of loss that results from those tragedies. And specific to my story, they hint to my newfound connection to my grandmother, despite her having passed long ago.

Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

A: Writing my book was a transformational experience. I think about my family history differently, now defined much more by the lives my grandparents lived rather than their tragic deaths. I have a deeper understanding of my mother’s childhood, and in turn my own journey makes much more sense to me.

 

Writing my book while I was learning about my grandmother through her letters allowed for a sense of connection that I don’t believe I would have found had I been reading the letters alone.

 

I consider these gifts—a change in my overall mentality, a deeper understanding of my story, and the discovery of new connections—to be direct results of the power of reflective writing in memoir and the importance of keeping an open mind to the process and wherever it might lead.

 

I hope readers see their own family stories in my book and can discover how generational trauma, loss, and grief can have impact over generations. Perhaps readers might see a way towards their own familial healing or might consider their own stories in a different light.

 

I would also love for readers to explore their own troves of family artifacts—letters, photos, keepsakes—and uncover the hidden gems that might help them find new connections to their beloved ancestors.

 

We are all the products of those who came before us, and when we allow ourselves to open our hearts and listen, we can reframe how we think about our own lives within the context of an ongoing continuum.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Since completing my book, I have been focusing on the essay form and have a handful of personal essays that are in varying stages of revision and submission. I also have been working on a few craft essays focused on experimental memoir.

 

I would love to help people think about creative ways to tell their own stories, and so I enrolled in a rigorous certification training program to become a book coach for memoir. I look forward to developing these new skills and making good use of them.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I am so grateful to have the opportunity to share my memoir with the world. I think often about how much I resisted writing this book at the beginning and how long it took me to move forward.

 

For anyone who knows they need to tackle a creative project that won’t leave them alone, an undone lifework that visits them in their dreams and takes residence in their daily thoughts, I encourage them to take the plunge and commit to making it happen. There’s a reason it's there waiting. It’s meant to become its own piece of standalone art.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb