44 Days
The number of days until we’re on the road (again) for a cross-country move. Closer to the water, back to the West but into a wetter and colder clime than I’m used to. I welcome the rain but I’m unsure of the cold and unrelenting gray. But I have so much more to write and do that I’ll be occupied and busy, so I’ll be fine.
Memoir and Family
In 2004, my family took a photograph at a family reunion - my parents, my aunt, four children, my then-wife, 4 (or 5?) nieces - 12 or 13 of us. There were 3 or 4 family members missing (sister-in-law, eldest niece, nephew, maybe another niece) plus my niece’s two boys. It would be the last time we were altogether as my brother, after 13 years of major depressive disorder and multiple suicide attempts, committed suicide the following month, jumping from the Fremont Bridge in Portland, Oregon.
In addition, family friends were numerous, mostly old family friends, my parents’ best friends and people I had known my entire life — if I start counting, I get to 25 friends that we would call family quite quickly, and there were more friends of my parents who came around less often but were what we would call “close.”
After my divorce in 2011, there were only 6 of us remaining from that picture of 12 or 13. Three had (or would soon thereafter) commit/ted suicide, four no longer spoke with me. Even many of the old family friends were turned against me. I’m in touch with only one person from that photo, and that only occassionally and superficially.
The effective was tramautic, devastating. People who I thought I could turn to throughout my life now shut their doors in my face or hung up the phone without speaking to me.
But the question becomes - how do I deal with this material in my memoir? Do I name names? Do I change names and attributes?
My intention is not to seek vengeance or retribution. But I do want to tell my story. The fact that so many people turned against me because they either diagreed with me or tried to tell me what to do and I sought another way, or because they were downright mean or abusive so I chose to distance myself from that bullying behavior - it all adds up to the same thing. I lost people from my life in ways that I thought were mean and unfair.
My life is better without the meanness in it. But there is still something traumatic about those you trust turning against you. It’s almost as if when my mother died, others felt they could now act differently toward me, as if they merely tolerated me while my mother was alive, and afterwards, they could let their true feelings be known.
Naming Names
If any of these stories matter and I’ve decided to include them in my memoir, I’ve had to wrestle with whether or not to use real names or to hide them behind changed physical description and pseudonyms.
I spent hours worring over that issue, wringing my hands, seething at some incidents with unresolved anger, trying not to write from a position of seeking revenge.
I don’t necessarily agree that every negative action in one’s life must needs be forgiven. I don’t necessarily agree that all broken relationships must be mended. My attempt is to write about difficult relationships with honesty - assessing my own responsibility to the break and reconciling myself to the fact that others didn’t treat me fairly - even going so far as to give them the benefit of the doubt as far as I could until I just could not do that anymore, until I had to say, “No! you don’t get to tell me what to do with my life.”
Once I recognized that others didn’t respect my position about choices I made in my life, then I started to see them as bullies. Because really that’s what it is - a form of bullying, for others to get their way at your expense.
I know a lot of this is cryptic. I will illustrate the situation on Friday during my next newsletter with a portion from my memoir. I’m excited to share this story. It’s sad and infuriating and marked the end of a lifelong friendship, but it’s not one I should have been surprised at. Still, it was a shock and stung more than some bigger slights from family. The story is a good illustration of the kind of treatment that I received from “friends.”
But What About Naming Names?
For the memoirists out there, just write your story and write your truths. I suggest keeping the names intact while you are writing. If that seems inappropriate, use initials. You can always go back and revise the names out and change the surface descriptions of a character.
The struggle to determine the legalities of keeping the names in your book or changing them is not your struggle, really. If your book will be published, there’s a legal department and an editor who will help you sort through whether the names need to be changed or not.
Your task as memoirist is to get to your truth. Minimize the distraction of worrying about the names until later during the revision.
In Friday’s newsletter, I’ll also provide an overview of what other memoir craft writers say about using real names vs fake next time.
What do you think about using real names of people in your life in your writing? Yea? Nay? Let me know in the comments below. I’d love to know how others tackle that issue.
Stay safe out there. Until next time, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!