Justice Notes: Origins of A Memoir
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
I recently came across this outline for White Collar Elegy, one of the earliest versions of what eventually became A Prison of My Own. Reading it now, I’m struck by how much I still misunderstood about the story I was trying to tell.
I was writing about myself in the third person, almost as if I were describing someone else. And I was still thinking of the memoir largely as a story about what had happened to me: the rise, the collapse, the humiliation, prison.
The outline is revealing now because somewhere inside it was the story I would eventually try to tell.
OUTLINE—WHITE COLLAR ELEGY (Original memoir title)
Back Story
After years of business failures, John DiMenna launched a remarkable business comeback, becoming one of the region’s most successful commercial real estate developers. But several ill-conceived acquisitions threatened the company’s future. Desperate to preserve the confidence of investors, business colleagues, and family, he began manipulating the company’s financial reports—marginally at first, then fraudulently. Eventually the scheme collapsed, resulting in public humiliation, prosecution, and an 85-month federal prison sentence at age seventy-six.
Story
The memoir will focus on his new life as an inmate: adjusting to his new brotherhood, the daily regimens, protocols, conflicts and turmoil of prison life, while he pursues a challenging appeal and painful introspection.
The memoir follows the Narrator through his transition from white-collar “star” to inmate: orientation, adjustment, interactions with the inmate population and staff, daily routines, prison life, epiphanies and eventual release. He concludes that his downfall was primarily a flaw of character—something intrinsic in him, a lifelong pattern of confrontations avoided and bad choices made, resulting in terrible consequences for himself and everyone around him.
Reading this years later, what strikes me most is the distance I had created between myself and the story. Even the use of the third person seems telling. “John” was the protagonist. “The Narrator” was someone I could observe and explain.
I thought I was writing about a successful businessman who committed a crime, lost everything, and went to prison. The prison characters, the daily routines, the appeal and the possibility that I might die there provided the narrative.
But buried in these early drafts was another story, one I had not yet learned how to tell. It wasn’t simply about what had happened to me. It was about why it had happened, the choices I had made, the character flaws I had avoided confronting, and the consequences for everyone around me. It would take several manuscripts, and a great deal of discarded writing, before I understood that, and the final manuscript, A Prison of My Own, evolved.
A "falling from grace" story must include the moral reckoning that underlies it for the story to resonate and make the telling of it worthwhile.
Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.
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