Hillary Leftwich wanted her son to know what his first years on Earth were like — and she wanted him to know the whole, unvarnished truth.
A few of those key points: He had an abusive, horrific father. His mother made some big mistakes. And his terrifying epilepsy forced him into devastating treatments that affected him mentally and physically.
In her new memoir, Aura, the Denver-based writer speaks directly to her son throughout the book about this harrowing time.
“I strongly feel as a writer we have a responsibility to our audience, especially when we’re writing creative nonfiction, to be as honest as we can,” Leftwich says. “However, the more important audience is my son. That was my whole motivation behind writing as vulnerable as I can.”
That vulnerability permeates the narrative, as Leftwich crafts a story of pain and struggle that’s at times so unflinching and raw it’s hard not to imagine the toll it took to write.
During the process, she accessed her son’s medical and court records and old photos, some of which are included in the book. These bureaucratic and personal artifacts sit alongside more otherworldly elements, like spells based in folk-magic developed by Leftwich through her experience reading Wiccan texts as a kid in Colorado Springs.
But when it came to revisiting this dark material from more than 10 years ago, she sought out a pair of therapists to help her process the emotions. At the time, she says she had to disassociate or she would have lost her mind.
“To write the book almost felt like an out-of-body experience,” Leftwich says. “Sometimes I can’t believe we made it through all of that.”
The result is the story of a young woman’s life in America as she fends off a vicious man who is also the father of her child — a personal horror told with a specificity and attention to detail that in the end makes it universal.
“When we talk about domestic violence, it’s usually very similar across the board,” Leftwich says. “I wasn’t trying to step outside of that, because nobody wants to be unique in that situation. The only difference is I got out, and there are so many women who don’t.”
Survival guide
Leftwich considers herself lucky. Domestic violence tends to escalate, with sometimes deadly ends. Yet the author doesn’t make a claim to exceptional strength or any other special attribute that helped her make it out alive.
“It’s more about how women are treated differently in these situations, and how quickly we can vanish and how quickly we’re overlooked,” Leftwich says. “That’s the universal thing I wanted to speak on.”
Normally a fiction writer, Leftwich says she found the memoir form freeing when it came to unpacking the trauma of Aura. It allowed her to be honest with herself and her audience about a painful and poignant slice of her life.
“If we step into the realm of memoir, we have the same responsibility [as writing fiction],” she says. “We have to write about the world around us, our reaction to it, and how we survived it. I would do it again, even though it was terrifying.”
Leftwich credits her Future Tense publisher Kevin Sampsell with helping her navigate the terror of the writing process. Sampsell is well-known in the indie-lit world for championing authors and helping lesser-known writers find an audience.
“I call him my book doula,” Leftwich says. “He was so crucial. He saw the potential. He had me write about childhood. There was so much more I had to write to make the memoir feel complete.”
On the other side of the process, when she thought about how this book would land, Leftwich ultimately only had one reader in mind.
“It’s about holding myself accountable to my son, and making damn sure he had a good, honest account of what happened to him,” she says. “[I wanted to be] as real as I could for him, because really, it’s just all about him.”
ON THE PAGE: FRAME Literary Salon featuring Jay Halsey, Hillary Leftwich, Claire Corina Stevens and Heather Goodrich. 7-9 p.m. Friday, May 5, East Window Gallery, 4550 Broadway, Suite C-3B2, Boulder. Free
