Pia de Jong
I began writing in the middle of a single sweltering midsummer night in the year 2004 and have not stopped writing since. I had spent the previous years in fear for our newborn daughter Charlotte, who had been diagnosed with a severe leukemia. But to our amazement and delight Charlotte went into spontaneous remission. It felt as if we had been struck by lightning twice – first by her disease, then by her recovery.
My rational self did not know how to deal with all of this, but I discovered that my writer’s mind, which came from a different place altogether, did know.
With words I wove a protective coat. The words also became the building blocks to shore up my new, much more fragile existence. They also freed the stories I had kept inside, they unlocked my narrative. I found a rampart from which I could unfurl my flag. Eventually I found renewal in the richness of ideas hiding in me.
I still remember that night that I discovered writing, shivering in the middle of summer, writing my name on the back of an unopened envelope with the tip of a dried-up fountain pen.
That was the night I became a writer.
Pia de Jong’s memoir, Saving Charlotte: A Mother and the Power of Intuition, was published in July by W.W. Norton.