I’m One Of Those

New song by Billy Strings connects me to why I have become a memoir writer

I’m One of Those

VERSE

I’m looking for the place I used to live

I’ve been driving up and down this road

Trying to bring back old memories, for one reason or another I let go

I’m one of those, I’m looking for the turn where the river used to make a bend

But it’s been too long and I’m a fool to try to find that place again

CHORUS

I’m one of those

Guess I had too much time on my hands

I’m one of those

Could not find a place that I could land, I hope you don’t

But if you do you’ll probably understand that’s how it goes

I’m one of those

VERSE

I got a thing for shuffling the deck

Leaving town in the cover of the night

Cut the ties that bind me if I don’t I know I’ll end up in a fight

Could I go back to the place I loved to dwell?

Where we sing our song and pass the jug around

Or will I wait to warn the ghost that wandered back across this road I’m strolling down?

VERSE

It’s hard for folks to see through my disguise

I’m not home but I could still pretend

If I went and left you crying I might have to circle back this way again

CHORUS

I’m one of those

Guess I had too much time on my hands

I’m one of those

Could not find a place that I could land, I hope you don’t

But if you do you’ll probably understand that’s how it goes

I’m one of those

2025 Copyright William Apostol

This is a photograph taken of me at Mud Pond and Hyde Park digitally converted to a painting. My wife and I and our dogs spent many happy hours paddling here far from the madding crowd., fully enjoying the solitude of nature. One of my many happy places.

Why I Write Memoir at 73

People have told me my memoir writing is too personal. They’re shocked by what I’m willing to reveal—the suicides, the alleged abuse, the psychiatric hospitalizations, my father’s cruelty, the family dysfunction laid bare. They expect the soft-focus lens, the sanitized family history.

But I’m not writing for comfort. I’m writing because at 73, I’ve discovered one of the sweetest privileges of a reflective old age: the chance to preserve what would otherwise dissolve like snowflakes.

There’s a saying about dying three times. First, physically. Second, the last time someone speaks your name. Third, the last time someone thinks of you. After that third death, you’re truly gone—your essence absorbed and forgotten, almost as if you never existed. But of course you did exist. And memoir writing is my refusal of that third death.

The Complicated Truth of Love

What draws me back to these memories isn’t bitterness or revenge. It’s love. Even love for those who hemmed me in or abused me.

This is what makes memoir work so complicated, so uncomfortable for readers expecting simple narratives. My father administered ritualized punishments with a belt on bare skin, withheld the promised signet ring, eventually left nothing to his six children when he died. He was also the man who cut my essays apart with scissors and rearranged paragraphs on shirt cardboard, teaching me structure. Those were the same hands.

My grandmother Nana brought pranks and irreverence, hiding us kids in the toy closet, teaching us silly songs. She also retreated to her room with bottles and wielded the silent treatment as a weapon. Both things were true. Both were her.

My grandfather Grandpop was connected to Dr. Feelgood’s amphetamine injections and the family’s evangelical fervor. He also took his eleven-year-old grandson to Washington to witness President Kennedy’s funeral procession—shared that profound moment of history and grief.

The love I felt wasn’t despite the damage. It was woven through it, inseparable from it. Most memoirs avoid this truth because it’s too messy. It’s easier to write hagiography or condemnation. I’m doing neither.

Moments That Shine

Beyond the complicated family love, what glows in my memory are those moments of pure connection—with other human beings, with nature, with life itself.

These moments are sprinkled throughout my memoir work. Some are strictly personal and universal: family dinners, my mother’s poolside drinks with the neighbor, Nana’s pranks. Others are sublime: carving down a mountain while skiing, the wind filling my windsurfer’s sail, the exact quality of light on water.

And then there are the unlikely intersections that a wandering life brings: meeting Jerry Garcia one-on-one. Teaching Vanessa Redgrave to windsurf in rough conditions she had no business attempting—watching her top come off in the surf and her spirit shine because she refused to be deterred. Shaking hands with BB King.

I took both my inheritances—the Saint Phalle proximity to power and culture, the Furlong resilience and irreverence—and I used them to stay open. To keep moving, keep connecting, keep experiencing. I lived like a surfer, swimming out past the break, waiting for the best wave.

The Work of Preservation

At 21, I stood on the side of an interstate with my backpack and guitar—literally leaving town, shuffling the deck, unable to find a place to land. I was one of those who kept moving, who cut ties rather than end up in fights, who couldn’t settle.

Now, at 73, I’m doing the opposite of leaving. I’m going back. Not to find the places (Ledge Acres is sold, the river bends have changed, the farmhouse belongs to someone else), but to find the moments. To capture not just what happened, but the feeling of those moments before they dissolve completely.

This is urgent work, but it also takes time to gestate. My first book took two years, with most progress coming at the end. I’ve already done the legwork for book two—the Antigua years with Thea, my soulmate, the peak years of adventure and fun. We always joked: “There’s one for the book.” We were already living with memoir consciousness, collecting those moments even as they happened.

And book three waits beyond that: over 25 years with my wife Veronica, a deeper, longer, more challenging and ultimately more rewarding and life-defining experience.

Right now, I’m in a transitional phase. I’ve just finished recording myself reading book one aloud—its own kind of reckoning with the material. I’m shifting from one form of memory-capture to another. I’m preparing for the onslaught of winter, clearing the deck, letting book two ripen.

Why the Personal Matters

So is my memoir writing too personal? Perhaps. But the question isn’t whether it makes readers comfortable. The question is whether it’s true and purposeful.

Every detail I include—the belt on bare skin, the withheld signet ring, Nana hiding us in the closet, my mother’s afternoon drinks, Vanessa’s laughter in the surf—serves a larger understanding. I’m examining how two family lineages, each with their own survival strategies and damage, converged to shape me. I’m preserving the texture of being alive and connected, even within constraint.

I’m saying to those people and those moments: “You existed. I was there. It mattered.”

Here I am, hard at work in my Tall Boy La-Z-y Boy recliner with my iPad Pro Air Desk which floats above my lap and swings away as needed. I don’t miss sitting at a desk with a desktop computer, something I did for over twenty years.

This is the work of memoir at 73. Not nostalgia in the hokey, kitschy sense, but nostalgia as a tear in the eye and an overwhelmed feeling in the heart. The privilege of remembering, of keeping people alive by thinking of them, of refusing to let the snowflake melt without witness.

The people who are shocked by my honesty might be more accustomed to sanitized family stories, or they might have known my family and feel uncomfortable seeing the private made public. But my job as a memoirist isn’t to make people comfortable. It’s to tell my truth as clearly as I can, to preserve what would otherwise be lost, to honor both the damage and the love.

Because once I stop thinking about these moments—once no one remembers the texture of that particular afternoon, that specific connection, that quality of light—they’re gone. And I’m not ready to let them go.

Not yet.

This is a photograph converted to a painting digitally. I love the way the branch in the upper right corner casts its shadow on the pine needles below. The quality of light; the object and its reflection; the sweetness of the fading heat of a glorious summer day— all captured in a frame. But still only an echo.