Diane Schoemperlen on falling in love with a prison inmate, and then writing a book about it

Diane Schoemperlen won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction for her 1998 book Forms of Devotion, a collection of illustrated stories. Her latest book, a memoir titled This Is Not My Life, takes a candid look at her tumultuous, six-year relationship with a federal inmate serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. Below, Schoemperlen tells The Next Chapter how, and why, she wrote This Is Not My Life.

I actually started writing This Is Not My Life after the relationship that it's about ended. I had not kept a journal or made notes or anything while the entire thing was going on, but I'm a writer after all. So probably about six months later, I thought, I probably would like to write a book about this. I did know, very early on, that I wanted it to be a memoir as opposed to another fiction book. A lot of my fiction has autobiographical elements in it, but I've always sort of had that "fiction" word to hide behind. So I knew that in some ways this was going to be much harder. 

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I definitely went through a process of how to deal with his crime. Because you can't avoid it — yes, he did kill someone. There were a lot of questions that I asked myself: If he had committed this murder only two or three years ago as opposed to 30 years ago, would I get involved with him? No. If he had killed a woman? No. If he was a child molester or a rapist or a sex offender? No. In the end, after I spent a lot of nights tossing and turning, I decided that yes, I did love him and I wanted to try having a relationship.

Diane Schoemperlen's comments have been edited and condensed.