learning to let go

Carrie's story is about an experience she had before college, where she decided against her instinct to just on a tire rope swing and seized up, sending her to the hospital. As most personally stories do, this memoir requires a certain amount of knowledge of Carrie's life to understand the significance of it. After reading the ending, I realized that her relationship with her mother is strong and her going on the swing was almost a symbolic flying out of her mother's nest for the first time.

I didn't realize that Carrie had had a seizure. With her recollection of the few memories she has after her jump, it was hard to tell what had happened to her. I really liked that she emphasized her inability to recall most of tose memories, as that was quite realistic, and the sentence "I’m still, to this day, hearing about things that happened that I don’t remember." which reinforced the memory for me. I think the dialogue was near perfect in every place; there was humor where there needed to be and the dialogue really did something for the story, rather than just filler. We got a better look at her companions and her relationship with her mother.

On that subject, I might suggest fleshing out the last paragraph a bit more. You set up a meeting with your mother and, with a bit of foreshadowing in the middle, about how upset she would be with you. But, upon the actual first conversation post-seizure, I found it a bit lackluster that the scene was basically summarized to wrap up the memoir. I wish that the whole last page was just dialogue, about the worries you had about going to college and your mother's responses to that. I'm sure it's hard to remember exact words of course because memories are hazy like that but "I talked to her about some of my worries about college and how much I was going to miss her" just seemed too curt if you're trying to show the relationship you had with your mom and what changed after the incident.

I really like that we get into your mind during the moments before the jump. I think that it's essential for a reader to be in the narrator's shoes and I really think you captured those feelings right before you jumped perfectly. I wish there had been a little bit more setting? I'm not sure if it's necessary, but maybe just putting the reader in a place that's familiar: describing some of the lake, maybe someone fell off the dock and is splashing a friend, laughter tinkling in the wind (please don't use that line, it's so corny). Just little details to bring the reader to the setting to fully set the scene we're about to experience.

Other than that, I think you did a great job!