Manzanar, repressed in Jeanne's memory, resurfaced in 1971 when one of her nephews, her oldest sister Eleanor's son Gary Nishikawa, asked her to share her memories, since other clan members hedged on details. Gary had been born in Manzanar, and his insistence on full disclosure brought Jeanne to the brink of hysteria. Her subsequent attempts to compose a memoir forced a confession of her longing to relieve traumatic childhood insecurity through writing. James, who had known her for twenty years, had no idea of her secret shame. He proposed that she write "a story everyone in America should read."
The next year, while James enjoyed a University of California faculty research grant, the Houston family traveled to Manzanar, where Jeanne confronted the persistent memories that plagued her subconscious. As her children frolicked on the desert, she strolled through decaying relics of the abandoned windswept internment camp. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, she admitted feeling "sullied, like when you are a rape victim. . . . You feel you must have done something. You feel you are a part of the act." The return to Manzanar prompted a catharsis as she extracted herself from internment and viewed it objectively as a moment in history.
From Jeanne's confrontation of this undeserved humiliation grew Farewell to Manzanar, a husband-and-wife collaboration recreating Jeanne's childhood memories and adult acceptance of one of democracy's most blatant injustices. The Houstons' working method blended Jeanne's tape recorded dialogue with library research, three field excursions to Manzanar, and interviews with family and other internees. The outcome, more than a publishable manuscript, brought Jeanne a combination of becalmed spirit and will to write. She described her emergent self this way: "I realized I could no longer hide in the country of my husband's shadow."
