TW (Toby) Neal: Q: What prompted you to write your memoir when you were doing well with fiction. A: I’m in my fifties, and midlife is a time when you evaluate the true meaning and purpose of your life and still have time to make course corrections. I love my fiction, but the story of what I overcame to get where I am needed to be told, and even though I was faced with the task of building a whole new leg of my author platform to do so, and it took ten years and thousands of dollars in editing to bring out to the world...the time had come for Freckled: a Memoir of Growing Up Wild in Hawaii. I now feel a sense of completeness and accomplishment that is purely personal, and it's those moments that give life meaning." Q: How do you know when you're in a transformational season of change in your life? A: Usually, there's some kind of trigger: a health scare, a job change, a divorce, the loss of a loved one. Those pivotal times are opportunities to step into a deeper authenticity of living according to your truth and values. I recently lost my mother in law, a woman we had moved from Hawaii to care for in her end of life. Her passing was unexpected in its timing, and now we are faced with choices: do we stay where we moved to care for her? Do we go back to Hawaii? Or do we chuck it all and take to the road in our Airstream? Mary Oliver, whose light recently passed into darkness, said it this way: "Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Minnesota’s Debra Lustig (left) reading Margaret Porter’s Beautiful Invention at the Fairmont Miramar pool in Santa Monica
(below) Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica
HOLLYWOOD WEEKLY • 51