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You've opened the Velvet Diary.
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Foreword by Frank Gaard
Foreword
I've often wondered how subjective our memories are, and Lynn's book The Velvet Diary brings this question back to the forefront of my thoughts. Recently a friend wrote me saying she was fortunate in only remembering the really good things in her life and had forgotten the bad things. Geez - I thought. Like the creator of this book, one must remember tears and loss and pain. Elsewise what are we to think, that suffering is only to be forgotten whilst joy is what we remember? No. The night and day of our emotions, the swings we experience as we move through the garden of our season's feeling, no, if anything - remembering the storms in our life gives us a measure of our strength and our past successes at surviving our own personal bad weather.
The innocence I've seen in this book is the innocence that each of us can experience when we spill the beans; that is tell the tale that is our own. If one only relates the happy things the story will drip with insincerity, whereas here we have so much innocence restored that it's as if the child inside the author tells the tale - and the silence of the tale - the peculiar magic of excluding words does create a strange tone, a music almost of the way truth-telling liberates us from the thousand woes of carrying our truth about each time we move.
The best thing as here is to sing the song of one's life and let it fly into the world because all we really possess that is truly ours, our most personal possession is our story of our own life and we reward others by passing it along in whatever form we can give it. The grace and beauty herein is from the heart, from the center of the author to the reader to receive like a letter that tells us the whole truth, albeit in a way both sublime and dreamlike, as if what we remember is the dream of waking life.
- Frank Gaard