Just One Thing with Sabrina Hicks

Sabrina Hicks’ June issue memoir “Walking Contradictions” is a road trip from the past into present, memory into imagination. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“As I drove home, Thelma and Louise style, with my prickly pear strapped in next to me, passing large swathes of grass and pretty flowers that would soon burn up in the heat, my observations felt more like metaphors than a cohesive story. After living away from the desert for so long and coming back to see it altered, trying to make it something it’s not—me, that prickly pear, my old friend from eighth grade—we all felt connected. A lot of memoir is connecting the dots in your life and seeing a larger narrative. By the time I got home, all those tiny moments added up, and I wanted to make it as breathless and urgent as when you’re a kid trying to tell a story, worried you’ll be interrupted before you get to the larger point because deep down it defines your world, however large or small, and you want to capture it so one day you can look back and say, yes, I remember the small steps it took to become me.”