Thank you so much for reading this, Hawkman, hillwalker and DickZ. I especially appreciate your spending the time to plow through this, since I was obsessed with it for the past month-- just ask my long-suffering fam. Every spare moment of available computer time was spent writing this thing. Yet I was was afraid that I wouldn't get any readers at all, because of the unwieldy length.
So though I'm a bit disappointed in your collective disappointment with it, I am pretty sure that I'm satisfied with the way it came out, though the process was painful to the core.
Well, this is admittedly a "rule breaking thread" and right now I'm going to break the cardinal rule that mandates that a work should stand on its own. Still, my dear readers, all three of you, brought up some points that I will address.
It wasn't my intention to make this an acutely humorous piece, even though humor (such as it is) is the usual metier for yours fooly. On the other hand, I didn't set out to write an overly serious tract, either. Adopting a ponderous tone is the kiss of death in fiction, if you ask me.
Yes, there are time lapses among the three parts. There is textual evidence of the approximate age of the speaker/protagonist in the first part in which she deems her aunt's question to be inappropriate -- "she isn't even in high school yet." One of the last paragraphs of the third part says how old she was in part one.
There is evidence (both in parts II and III) which hints at the purpose for which she wrote that personal essay, which constitutes part one. The second part takes place at least 4 years after the first part, in which the protagonist is a freshman experiencing her first couple of days at college. In the time frame of this particular story, the fall semester started in early September, not in late August as it seems to do these days. And yes, the concluding part takes place during the last days of the protagonist's life, at some kind of hospice. (I sound like a lawyer: "the party of the first part!")
To the question whether the story is "autobiographical," it is--but only in the sense of an author's personal experiences, general knowledge, and observations having become --to use a cliché --"grist for the mill." The family structure, both the one of the protagonist's childhood and that of her adulthood, are vastly different than that of the author, although some of the older relatives are composites of people I actually knew or had heard described by people I know. (There's a little bit of a weird coincidence that happened immediately after I finished this story on Weds., though, that I can't go into publicly right now.)
The second part of the novella--or whatever you want to call it -- was intentionally written in the third person, although from the protagonist's perspective. This part is "framed" by the beginning and concluding parts, the first
with the "personal essay" and the third the stream-of-consciousness/"interior monologue" reminiscences.
The two earlier memories are neither random nor arbitrary,
and there are textual allusions back and forth throughout the three parts, both in imagery, symbols, and dialogue.
The links are therefore in the structure as well as in the subject matter.
Your comment, Hawkman, as to this story's lack of relevance to a British gentleman such as yourself certainly is valid, but may I add that the works of Joseph Conrad, for instance, or Herman Melville, or Tolstoy have little correlation with the life led by an aging working class North American woman, yet I read them. (This is NOT to suggest that my writing skills, such as they are, are even on the same planet as the aforementioned writers, but if we only read books that directly conformed to our own lives, how could we grow, how could that add to our understanding of not only literature, but the world?)
I didn't intend for the thing to be interpreted particularly as a woman's or "Women's" story, but a genderless, human one, one of many responses to the human condition, i.e., how do we make sense of this life of ours, where can we find meaning? If there is a theme to this thing, it appears -- like a sledgehammer!--in the second part, where the axiom of "So-CRA-tes" appears.
Thanks again for reading this. I greatly appreciate it.
(EDITED with added material on 9/8/10 and fixed the embarrassing spelling error.)