The Beans, the Memoir, and the Wild Way of Creativity

Memoir in Motion: Neurodiverse Parenting, Italian Roots, and the Untamed Path of Writing

The ancestral beans have done what beans do—they shot up like, well, like string beans! Now I know exactly where that phrase originated. I didn’t expect their speed when I planted them, nor when I vowed to finish the final chapter of my Italian-American memoir before the first harvest of these heirloom beans.

Being a novice at legume horticulture, I thought the circles of seeds would sprout, find their pole and politely maypole up to the top in an orderly fashion.I assumed my memoir would do the same—start with a trip to Italy, then unfurl neatly into a book. Turns out, both beans and memoirs have minds of their own.

After five days away, with the garden left in Mother Nature’s hands, the tendrils had elongated at an incredible rate. The beans had taken this race seriously, growing full tilt, unimpeded. But I have an impediment: the daily battle of carving out time and mind space to write. It is August. My highly spirited daughter needs camp or a play date, or something to channel her intensity so I can have a moment’s creative breath. Often, by the time I’ve arranged all that, there’s no juice left for the work. This fight for air, for life, is what moms of neurodivergent children call “summer vacation.”

The beans, meanwhile, have no distractions from their mission. They aren’t waiting for burnout to lift, for the mood to strike, or for their beanie nervous systems to settle after yet another sunblock standoff. When I left town, each seedling had two leaves near the ground. When I returned, they’d become big, bushy beings, of shoulder height. Clearly they are winning.

Big Bushy Beans Of Shoulder Height

Not only are they unexpectedly huge, but some of these beans had the audacity to ignore the poles I lovingly offered and instead reach wildly along the ground, shooting tendrils in every direction. Maybe they’re looking for more sun, more room—or maybe, like my grandmother who carried their ancestors across the Atlantic 80 years ago, they’re just seeking a better life. These Southern Italian Papaloni and I share a lot: a restless instinct to grow, to reach beyond the limits of the container we are planted in.

Seeing the plants pull so far ahead in the race, activates my competitive spirit. I’m in the first draft of this memoir, the “fun draft,” they call it—though for me, it brings up memories that require revisiting with new awareness. I began writing what I thought would be a straightforward travelogue, no embellishments needed. “Just the facts, ma’am,” was my creed, because the facts alone are moving enough. I believed that if I captured them honestly, the mystery that shaped the journey could reach the reader too—a message of depth, awe, reverence, even joy, just as it had in me. That’s the point of this whole exercise: to share the experience, strength, and hope.

But my mind is a web of connections. One thought tugs another awake and they all rush through the mind-to-pen pipeline to get on the page. The other day, I wrote about arriving in my father’s hometown half a world away and parking—oddly—in the exact same spot I had 15 years ago. At the time, I enjoyed it as a wink from the universe: This isn’t a mistake, Julianna. Keep going. Writing about that parking space felt trivial, and it lead far from what I had intended. My mind scolded me: This won’t amount to anything. You’re wandering again. Get back on track. But I kept writing, following the dendrite less traveled. An hour later, I stumbled upon a revolutionary insight I never saw coming.

The beans had escaped their containers. The writing had escaped its structure. But both are bearing fruit. I see now that the trip to Italy itself was the universe’s way of saying: Here is your story’s container, poles, and fertile soil. But the story itself is a living, breathing vine. I am not in control of it—I am shepherding it.

So I let it grow as it will. Nothing is wasted. I’ll tie it to a pole when it needs support so it can bear fruit to sustain others. But the life force moving through it is not mine. My job is simpler than I thought: show up to the desk each morning, be present, and follow where the flow takes me.