In 1971, Maura Casey, SOC/MA ’83, opened a blank composition book and heeded her eighth grade English teacher’s instruction to “just write.”

For Casey, the youngest of six children in a working-class Irish family, journaling was part ritual, part therapy, and part confessional. It was also the beginnings of a book.

Saving Ellen: A Memoir of Hope and Recovery, which hit shelves in April, chronicles Casey’s older sister’s yearslong battle with kidney disease—the dark star around which her loving but dysfunctional family revolved. The book is based largely on the boxes of childhood diaries that Casey kept—unopened for years—in the attic of the Connecticut barn where she writes.

“When I began to read them, I was drowning in words—thousands and thousands of words,” says Casey, a longtime newspaper columnist and former member of the New York Times editorial board. “When I was done, I concluded that I went into the right profession. I felt lucky for having found something I loved that much so early.”

The journals weren’t “just teenage angst”—though she did dabble in bad poetry for a time. “I had written pages and pages of dialogue. I was very grateful to my teenage self for giving my [late] mother back to me, because I had forgotten how funny she was.”

Casey shared the opening chapter—in which she snatches $14 from her alcoholic father’s pants pocket to help her mother pay bills—with a writers group in early 2020. Their support and encouragement, Casey recalls, marked her transition “from writer to author.”

Just as it had when she was a girl, the prose poured out of her, and she quickly hammered out 10,000 more words on her 1915 Underwood typewriter. “I had never gone into so much detail, even in my journals,” says Casey, who wrote about her battle with alcoholism following the sexual assault she experienced as a child.

“To be authentic, a memoir has to be honest,” she says. “The act of writing it was liberating.”

Casey will give a book talk at 6 p.m. Thursday, July 17, at Busboys and Poets Takoma, 235 Carroll St. NW, Washington, DC. Registration is required.