Memoir
Date Published: July 5, 2023
We all have two lives. We only get to experience living in the second after we realize we only have just one.
Simon Yeats had his first real scare in life when he was attacked by a kangaroo when he was seven years old. His first brush with the cliff-face edge of death came when he was 12. His father drove his family down the dangerous, 4WD only Skipper's Canyon dirt road in New Zealand in a rented minivan.
Including the occasions he was almost involved in two different plane flight crashes, in the same night, there have been at least a half dozen more times when the author has come within a moment's inattention of being killed.
However, none of those frightening incidents compare to what he experiences after his son is abducted to South America.
This memoir is the story of how Simon used the traumatic experiences of his life to give him strength to forge on during an incomprehensible 13 year fight to be a father to his son.
What did it take for him to get to his second life?
It took him to truly understand what fear is.
Interview with Simon Yeats
Does writing energize or exhaust you?
It can do both depending on which of my books I am working on. When I am working on my travel memoir series, it absolutely energizes me. I can seemingly ignore the world for days when I am working on it. I can be at the gym and suddenly think of a word change or a line to add to a chapter and I am chomping at the bit to get it down before I forget it. My workouts then become a furious need to finish and get home and write. I wake up every morning and cannot wait to get back from walking the dogs to reread over the last few pages to get myself in the flow to carry on with the story. The writing pushes the boundaries of being a healthy addiction on most days. However, the time I spent working and doing extra edits on my tragic memoir, is the opposite. It grinds me down; it tears at my soul; it makes me want to scream in frustration. Not from the writing process, but from the shocking and disturbing elements of that story.
What is the first book that made you cry?
The Plum Rain Scroll. It was not a sad cry, it was a ‘moved’ one. One of those cries you have where you witness an act of true sportsmanship or genuine humanity. Take the 400 meter runner at the Olympics who tore his hamstring in the semi final race and was devastated, but he kept on running just to finish. Then his dad broke through security to help him cross the line and everyone in the stands and watching on TV was in tears. That was the type of cry it was reading the end of this book, because the hero of the story ended up not being who I thought it was going to be. A good cry.
How did publishing your first book change your process of writing?
It made it easier, and it made it more rewarding, because I could now see I have done it. This is still the effect. All I have to do when feeling uncertain is go to Amazon and see that I now have 4 books, 5th on the way, published. And that people are buying them and enjoying them. No one can ever take that away from me. So I do not have to be afraid and nervous with the idea that I cannot publish a book, I already have. The fact that I know in my heart that I have written 3, soon to be 4, of the funniest books I have ever read, and one of the most heart tugging books ever published can be put up for debate. But the books are there. Since the first book was published, I never again had to wade through some self doubt when sitting down at my computer. With every book I now finish, the feeling of accomplishment just builds and builds, and so the process of writing gets easier and more exciting.
What do you owe the real people upon whom you base your characters?
Nothing. Those in my travel memoir series all owe me a beer, because they are now preserved for all time in the pages of my books. They are now quasi-famous and it was all due to my hard work. The people in my tragic memoir owe me far more than they can ever repay for what they have done to me and my son.
Where did your love of books/storytelling/reading/writing/etc. come from?
Funnily enough, it all first started with the book The Plum Rain Scroll that made me cry. I was like, “how did it do that? That is incredible. How did inanimate words on a page stir up my emotions like that?” It was almost like memories of a first love. I have gone back and read the book over again, just to relive that moment where I was moved by the ending. Once I started writing seriously about 10 years ago, I wanted to have the same effect with My SECOND Life. I wanted people to feel fear the way I have been feeling it. To feel like they are unable to breathe the way I have been unable to. To experience exactly the pain I have been through, so at the moment in the story where I cried looking at my son at the beach, the reader would have tears streaming down their face just as I did. Then I also fell in love with the feeling of making myself laugh over and over with reading my enjoyable experiences where I already knew what happened, but I just loved how I framed it with my words. Getting someone to laugh out loud from reading a paragraph is one of the most rewarding things I can think of.
What do you like to read in your free time?
I only really read news stories that I see online. I have not had the time to read a book in years. As I said earlier, the writing has become almost like a healthy addiction. Reading a book would be like smoking marijuana, while writing a book is like snorting a few grams of Coke. If someone is given a choice at a party, they would take the line of Coke 100 times out of 100. I don’t do drugs because I am addicted to writing, but this is how I imagine things play out at Hollywood parties or at Mexican drug cartel end-of-year barbeques.
Can you share some stories about people you met while researching this book?
Haha, that would essentially be my books. My books are memoirs, so my research was to just live. But the story in My SECOND Life is about how people in this world exist only to deceive other people and they do not care who they hurt. Even if the people they hurt are their own offspring.
Why did you choose to write in your particular field or genre? If you write more than one, how do you balance them?
Because I did not have to lie, or fabricate, or be very imaginative to write my memoirs. I just needed to be present and pay attention to what was going on. In literally every case of a travel story involving another person, when I asked them about helping with recalling some of the finer details of the events, most have only the vaguest recollection of what happened, if they remembered at all. They lived the same experience as me, and yet they did not think it was important enough to remember. I cannot imagine anything more strange than a person having none or a poor recollection of their own life. We only get one life. Cherish every single damn moment of it. My book My SECOND Life was written from a desperate need for my son’s story to be told. There is nothing more important to me than his story.
How do you begin writing a new book? What challenges come with it?
Normally, I just start. I think, let me write a story about that time when I was nearly arrested in Peru for petting the llama on the street and go from there.
Share a place that inspires you to write.
Places that inspired me to write have been Steamboat Springs Colorado, and the top of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. Steamboat was because of the experiences not the place. I went to Steamboat as a naïve 20-year-old to work for an Australian university summer break at the ski resort. I recall all the things that happened and this amazing time to me is the essence of life. The girl I fell in love with, who I lost contact with for 25 years, then we randomly ran into each other again. The great friendships I made with people I met that I still have 37 years later. Another great mate from Australia was at Steamboat that winter that I did not know was there and I nearly ran over him the first night I arrived. Talk about coincidence. He now lives in London and we just caught up for a baseball game in Atlanta over the weekend. He has photos of the trip on his phone and his new wife and my girlfriend were astounded at my memory of all of them. I could recall what clothes I was wearing at Disneyland 37 years ago. The top of Half Dome represents the 10 years I spent dreaming of going to a place that I first saw on a poster on the back of my brother's bedroom door. It didn’t take money, or skill, to get there, it just took desire. The view at the top is awe-inspiring. It makes anyone feel like they are the most important person in the world to witness it firsthand. Those types of places embolden a person to feel like their voice matters enough to write a book.
About the Author
Simon Yeats has lived nine lives, and by all estimations, is fast running out of the number he has left. His life of globetrotting the globe was not the one he expected to lead. He grew up a quiet, shy boy teased by other kids on the playgrounds for his red hair. But he developed a keen wit and sense of humor to always see the funnier side of life.
With an overwhelming love of travel, a propensity to find trouble where there was none, and being a passionate advocate of mental health, Simon’s stories will leave a reader either rolling on the floor in tears of laughter, or breathing deeply that the adventures he has led were survived.
No author has laughed longer or cried with less restraint at the travails of life.
Contact Links
Instagram: @authoryeats
TikTok: @authoryeats
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1 comments:
Thank your featuring my memoir of my son's kidnapping. He has now been held captive 14 years.
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