Author exorcises her demons in
memoir of life in GP and elsewhere

If things had gone as Sandy Bax planned, her book "Assorted Nuts: A Family Album" would be up in smoke. Instead, she pressed on, published, and currently sells her memoir online.
 
Bax, whose maiden name was Chapel, graduated from Grosse Pointe High School in 1963. Her family moved to Grosse Pointe when she was 12 and she remained here until age 27. She describes her book as a humorous memoir – "an everyday-train-wreck-of-a-life funny-lady story."
 
"I wasn’t planning on being an author," Bax said. "I started writing as a way to sort out my thoughts by putting them on paper. I thought, after writing a difficult chapter, I would burn it and release all that angst."
 
The memoir is January’s selection for Grosse Pointer Deane Preston’s book club. Preston and Bax were high school classmates. (Preston's maiden name was Malchie.) The six-member club will discuss "Assorted Nuts" at its January gathering and has given Bax a standing invitation to attend club meetings whenever she’s in the area.
 
Bax was a shy teenager from a dysfunctional family when she moved here as a pre-teen. She was thrust into the social whirlpool at Brownell Junior High School, a melange that was cliquish and snobby at best, mean-spirited and cruel at worst. Popularity by association was the norm, she said.
 
Preston "was the first person kind enough to let me share the sidewalk with her on the way to school." Preston ultimately rescued Bax from the dreaded state of social oblivion reserved for newcomers.
 
"I was allowed to sit at the cool table in the library and art class and (most coveted of all) the lunchroom . . . I just could not figure out how someone so natural and unassuming – who put on absolutely no airs at all -- could be so central to The Crowd," Bax said.
 
Bax and Preston became lifelong friends.
 
"Assorted Nuts" is Bax’s candid, gossipy and sometimes accusatory account of her life so far. She’s easy on Preston, but hard on her mother, one of the "assorted nuts" in the title.
 
"My mother died in 2001," Bax said. "Until her death, I never even considered publishing. At first, I was only writing for myself, which is why I didn’t try to sanitize my feelings.
 
"But I never actually burned (the chapters) and after seven years, I started looking into developing a plot." After it was complete, she had a choice – to tone it down or tell it like it was.
 
"I had been a repressed soul all my life, a do-gooder, a people pleaser. I decided for the first time to let the real me free, warts and all."
 
"Assorted Nuts" deals not only with the ins and outs of junior high school social acceptance, but also with Bax’s family, her anxious childhood, bouts of depression, several failed marriages, alcoholism, breast cancer, dead-end spiritual journeys, a temporary estrangement from her beloved only child and a joyous reconnection with her emotionally distant father.
 
She describes several mean-spirited high school pranks, which she said she now regrets. "I wish I could find those boys and apologize, but I can’t. I’ll just have to settle for atoning to the universe by realizing the wrongness of those antics and determining not to repeat them."
 
Bax recalls how, in 2001, while she was caring for her terminally ill mother, "Every day I would come home from her house a complete lunatic. My husband would meet me at the door with a glass of wine and say, ‘Sit down and write that while it’s fresh.’
 
"But, I would never have left those parts in the book if she was still alive. I have been accused of being especially hard on her, but I wrote those episodes with the feelings I had at the time. Today, I realize there were many good parts about her. I realize she did her best. I now wish I had had the tools then to deal with her in a kinder, gentler way."
 
Bax is writing another book, with the working title "Getting Old Is Not for Sissies." She doesn’t have a writing schedule and doesn’t write every day. "But I take a pad and pen or a tape recorder everywhere. I live on an island (in Florida) and especially when I walk on the beach, I think of great episodes from my past and just the right words to express them."
 
Her decision to tell it like it was without sprucing up the details has been life-altering. "For the first time in my life I get up in the morning and I’m not afraid of anyone and I can challenge anything, head-on. I’ve gotten sassy and intoxicated by the power. I can now say: ‘This is me.’"
 
Once the book was completed, Bax searched for an agent or publisher. "Most larger publishers won’t even look at" a manuscript not represented by an agent, she said. "But out of 500 inquiries to agents, I got 100 replies. Agents would say I needed a professional edit, which would have cost $6,000. I decided to look for a smaller publisher instead."
 
She found Tate Publishing, a company in Oklahoma that asks authors to contribute financially, mentally and physically to the publishing project. Bax will get her financial investment back when she sells a certain number of books.
 
"Promoting the book has been hard work," she said. "Bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble don’t buy books like mine automatically. I’ll have to convince them that it will sell." For now, a friend of Bax’s daughter is handling press releases and the details of book signings.
 
The first printing of "Assorted Nuts" was 1,000 copies. It’s available online from Amazon and from Bax’s Web site for $18.99. It’s also available as an audio book and as an e-book download. 

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