MEMOIR | Allison C. Steines

I am currently seeking agent representation for my memoir, DROWNING IN FLOWERS, a coming-of-age meets medical memoir that bends the boundaries between prose and poetry and centers around memory, paradox, grief, and healing. Complete at 96,000 words, the story follows a family grappling with the effects of multiple rare and complex medical conditions. Comps include LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS by T Kira Madden, THE SOUND OF A WILD SNAIL EATING by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, and BRAIN ON FIRE: MY MONTH OF MADNESS by Susannah Cahalan.

At six years old, my world began to unravel. My younger sister contracted an unknown illness that caused her to have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of seizures per day. For years, her health continued to decline. She stopped walking, talking, and eating on her own. All the progress she made in the first two years of life, she lost and regressed rapidly from there. Then my brother got sick too, with a rare and debilitating autoimmune condition. I began to wonder if the size and shape of chaos would ever stop widening— it festered around my family like a wound.

To cope, I developed a hairpulling condition, spurred on by obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression, and I scribbled in my diary as if it were a salve. When that wasn’t enough, I lost myself amidst anything I could—sex, drinking, self-harm, drugs— attempting to obliterate myself along with pain. When my brother almost died, when my sister actually died, when I wanted to die, my family turned again and again toward hope. Like a current, we learned to let hope carry us forward, toward each other. DROWNING IN FLOWERS seeks to answer the question: how can humans hold multiple things at once? And the story reveals paradox to be at the epicenter of everything that matters most. Love and loss. Light and darkness. Growth and decay.

DROWNING IN FLOWERS is a story for the hundreds of millions of individuals with chronic physical and mental health conditions. It is for their families, who are sucked into orbit along with their loved one’s diagnosis (or lack of). And it is for those without a voice, for those finding their voice; and for anyone who has ever held hands with grief and found their palm warmed instead by the touch of tenderness.