Sally-Jane Heit was an actor before she was even born. At least that’s how she tells it in her memoir NOT YET! But wondering whether that’s the literal truth would get in the way of understanding Heit’s deep emotional reality and the singular focus she’s had for her entire life: to be a star.
As with so many people, especially women, life got in the way of Heit’s dreams. From the start, she was one of eight children growing up during the Great Depression. She fought hard for her star to shine, performing for guests and putting on plays on the family’s porch. She attended the High School of Performing Arts in New York City with legendary filmmaker Sidney Lumet and auditioned everywhere from Broadway to charity theaters, refusing to give up on herself. But the obstacles started to pile up after she got married at 21: Health problems, having to raise her own children, and an unfaithful husband all threatened to squash her dreams.
Yet Heit, who now splits her time between Fort Lauderdale and the Berkshires, never stopped believing in herself, and never let anything get in the way of trying her best. Even lying in a hospital bed at the age of 89, after a lifetime of creative endeavors, she thought about trying to write a memoir. Would she be able to handle telling the unvarnished truth? Could she physically handle the stress of writing, editing, and publishing an entire book? Would anyone want to read it?
As she considered her potential memoir, the time came for her to go home. But when she left her bed, she noticed something on the door to her room:
I was being released from the hospital. As the nurse removed the bells and whistles of my hook-up, I looked up at the sign on the door of my hospital room:
Fall Precautions
Fluid Restriction
Heart Failure WHAT?????
I spent most of my life dining at the same table with Mel Brooks and his 2000 Year Old Man, waiting, waiting, waiting for the Angel from death. I couldn’t believe what I was reading.
While I was still alive and breathing, like a horror movie, the medical establishment was counting me out: I wasn’t even dead yet, and they were burying me.
I get it. My shelf life is unknown to me. But the world wants to count me out before I am counted out.
Like the Brooks/Reiner 2000 Year Old Man, my only protection against the Angel from death is a necklace of fresh garlic I wear every night when I go to bed. One sniff and the angel takes off like a bat out of hell.
The sign on the door was another unfortunate medical mashup. Obviously, it belonged to the guy next door.
Beyond all reason, a state I am most familiar with, I needed to stay alive.
Why? Because any minute, I am going to be discovered.
Sally-Jane! Get your ass out of this bed now!
I’m going to print a new sign for all my doors…
NOT YET!
That is not a bad title for a memoir.
Heit did write her memoir, and she did call it NOT YET!
Kirkus Reviews says that “though she never quite achieved the fame she dreamt of in childhood, Heit made it further—and did so later—than the reader might guess at the outset. Along the way, she gathered plenty of hard-won knowledge to share about marriage, motherhood, careerism, art, and how to live life on one’s own terms.”
Leading up to Heit’s hospital stay, she performed her last one-woman show at the age of 84, when she finally decided she could no longer handle the physicality. After that, she kept sharing her stories by writing and posting them to her Blah Blah Blog at the urging of a friend who convinced her that people would want to read it. That same friend encouraged Heit to write a full memoir, because again, Heit was skeptical that anyone would care about what she had to say.
Some people who pursue performance careers do so out of ego. Heit’s engine, however, is fueled not by selfishness, but by pure creative energy. “I have all these creative juices,” she says, “and they have to go somewhere! Otherwise, I’d end up doing what I did when I was a kid, which is to get into a lot of trouble. And I didn’t want to do that.”
Even so, it was seeing the fateful words “heart failure” on her hospital room door that really set off Heit’s urge to make the most out of every moment of life. Once she started writing, she realized that the skills she’d developed while writing her own one-woman show would apply to writing a memoir, too.
Heit describes the writing process for NOT YET! as “two years of the most extraordinary time in my life.” During the first few months, she says she was thinking only about writing for other people, for a finished product that someone else would want to buy. She found this version “disgusting” and deleted every word.
“Then I sat down, and I started to write again. It was painful, it was absurd. I laughed myself sick. I couldn’t believe I had done the things that I [had]. I couldn’t believe I got away with [them]; I couldn’t believe the things I didn’t get away with! And it was just wonderful. It was what you hope, like when you go to the theater to have that cathartic experience, which happens in the creative arena. It’s what feeds you.”
Once she’d finished that version of the memoir, the one she’d written to feed her creative soul and not for the approval of anyone else, she was surprised that she’d managed to finish it. But more than that, she says it made her “see life differently.”
“You need to be the essence of who you are, every second,” she says. As an actor, she’d spent a lifetime being whatever someone wanted her to be. But after finishing NOT YET!, she felt something completely different. “I looked at myself and cried, laughed, and I thought, Oh, you’re just another of the human condition who tried to have it all, didn’t make it, picked yourself up, dusted yourself off, and started all over again, four million times. And that was so freeing.”
Heit does as many in-person gatherings and readings for NOT YET! as she can, and when she does, she always asks the people who come to share their stories. “Everyone’s got a story,” she says. “I want my story to start your story. That’s my purpose.”
Heit has plans to write another memoir, because she has plenty more stories yet to share. But now that she’s experienced such a rush of human connection through NOT YET!, her focus is to use her creative projects as a vehicle to build community and encourage others to speak up and share their own stories: the good, the bad, even the embarrassing.
“I think it’s important for people to come together and share their stories. That’s what I want to do.” Given that Kirkus Reviews calls NOT YET! “a rich, funny, frequently wise memoir about getting what one wants out of life,” it makes sense that even at 92, Heit knows every moment of life is an opportunity, and that adventure awaits you if you follow your dreams.
Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn.
