Memoir and Family - Writing About "Those People"
In which I discuss how I write about my family in memoir, with Mary Karr's help
At one time, my family was large. I was the 8th person under the roof in the house I was born into. Count extended family - cousins, aunts and uncles, family friends who counted as “aunts” and would-be god-parents, or any friend—family-du-jour—in need of a home-cooked meal - and a Thanksgiving could easily swell to 25 people.
Almost 60 years later, we are few. I am the last male with my last name, and of the 9 immediate family members I know of, I’m in touch with only 2 of them, and I’ve only seen 1 in the past 13 years.
My memoir is in part about family dysfunction and mental illness. The breakdown of my family intersected with my own experiences with a spouse and polyamorous partner with serious personality disorder problems. The challenge has been - how do you write truthfully about family without access to them? How do you write about the ones who remain from whom I am estranged?
In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes in Chapter 12 - Dealing with Beloveds (On and Off the Page): “On one end sit memoirists—mostly women—who interview and almost collaborate. . . . On the other sit those with enough moxie not to give a rat’s ass—all men, in my experience.”
She says that gender divide seems appropriate. Men steal cars to stand up their fathers while it would seem unseemly for a woman to kick her mother’s ass. She cites Lucy Grealy who says, “‘Women are repositories of clan lore, and our femininity is gauged by the security of family relationships. To drag out the dirty laundry almost masculinizes a woman.’” The women gossip in ways that “would horrify many of our male kinfolk. But publishing such gossip, Lucy suggested, was something much worse.”
I’ve seen something similar in my own family. My mother was western Pennsylvania hick, polished at the Andrews school, a boarding school for young women in Willoughby, Ohio, sent by a single mother who doted on her. I never knew my grandfather on my mother’s side. She mentioned seeing him only a couple of times. To my grandmother, he was “that son of a bitch.” After my grandmother died, and I had started thinking about my own family lineage, I did the math and figured out that my mom and grandmother were not that far apart in age. It was widely known that my grandmother was a party girl and she spent her birthday traveling across the nearby state line to New York for a wild party. In fact, my mother’s birthday corresponds quite closely to her being conceived on my grandmother’s birthday.
I had the opportunity to talk with my grandmother’s oldest sister, Alice, the oldest child in her family, when Alice was in her 80s. I had come to believe that my mother was the child of an assault. When I asked Alice about what happened with grandmother and mom’s birth, Alice clammed up. I was in the backseat of the car and Alice was in the front. I could see her face in the rear view mirror and see her mouth pucker like she’d just eaten a sour lemon. Alice wouldn’t answer my question. She said, “We don’t talk of such things.”
Later, when my brother was stricken by major depressive disorder, and my 2nd cousin James (2 years younger than me) with schizophrenia, and my 2nd cousin Jeff (several years older than me) with some kind of self-destructive mania — all on my mother’s side of the family — we didn’t talk about such things either. It was gossiped about around the kitchen table, in whispers. But as the baby of the family, I was often presented with a family that was intact. My parents didn’t want me to worry about such things, and I never got any kind of satisfying details. “Go live your life. Everything’s fine. We love you.”
So many family members are dead that I don’t have any qualms writing about them. The challenge becomes the telling. I want to be factual - accurate to events. But that becomes “accurate to events as I know them to be,” which may not be accurate at all. Of course, what I’m really after is the truth. And truth and fact can often be at odds.
The fact is, I was separated from my family long before, following my mother’s death, the estrangement from my surviving family happened. Moving from Southern California to Albuquerque, NM, and then onto Lawrence, Kansas physically separated me for 20 years. During that time, my grandparents died, my brother committed suicide, my nieces grew up and moved out and onto college. I got pictures of the grandchildren’s visits to my parents through the years for their trips to the beach and to Disneyland. My parents tried to keep me in the loop to a degree. But they didn’t share as openly as I would have wanted. I knew, of course, that my brother was ill for 13 years, but I didn’t have any details, only broad outlines - in and out of hospitals, bankruptcies, parental rights taken away in caring for youngest daughter. I have no insight into those 13 years. When my grandmother died, the grandmother who was my caregiver from birth to age 7, I found out by calling home, as an almost off-hand comment - “oh by the way, your grandmother died three days ago.” When I told my father I would catch the next flight home, he said, “No. We don’t want you to come home. You’re mother is having a tough time with this, and we’re not going to have any service.”
I don’t blame my parents for encouraging me to go and live my life. It’s something one of my siblings resented, sticking around home to care for my parents as they got older even though she wanted to move away for 20 years and said so over and over again, almost blaming my parents. My parents told me it was important for me to go live my life. In doing so, though, despite the trips home for holidays and special events, I lost the thread of the family. We had been close. By the time my parents died, the cracks were there. The family cracked, like an over-heated votive candle holder, exploding from the inside.
So, I don’t ask permission to tell my stories. I know my stories about my family and my sister’s stories differ significantly. But my experience of family is quite different than her own. (I’m still waiting for you to write our family history, sister o’ mine!) And it’s my experience of family that I write about in my memoir - an experience that is in some sense blunted by exclusion. Like when my parents didn’t want me to come home following my grandmother’s death, it felt like I was robbed of an emotional experience. I didn’t feel it quite that way at the time. But later, in writing my story, I found that my family had been protecting me from a lot of life’s unpleasantnesses - sheltering me from emotional experiences, which made it difficult to deal with emotional experiences as they arose in my life - deaths, divorces, the inevitable changes in life.
Once, when the siblings and I were together, alive and talking, it became quite clear that I had different parents than they had. I was the youngest. There is 6 1/2 years between me and the next, and 9 and 10 years between me and the oldest two. My parents were very permissive with me. Rarely did my parents say “no” to any request - going to the movies, sleepovers at home and away. Part of that reason was that my mom went to work full-time when I was born, and she had the more lucrative job that required bringing work home. While she still took care of the house when I was young, she had help from Gramie and my father, who was a modern man. But the strict schedule that my siblings had to follow was not part of my life at all.
All this is to say - despite my sensitivities to language , emotion, and nuance, I fall on the masculine side of things a la Karr - not giving a rat’s ass what others think as I tell my unvarnished truths.
As I work to make sense of the lived life in some kind of conceptual metaphorical framework, I’m less concerned with how some distant family member will react and more concerned with the artistry involved in telling my story. Most importantly, I’m interested in telling the truth with an authenticity of my interior life that does justice to the outer facts, whatever broad strokes I happened to have.
So what do you think? Do you think memoirists should clear their writing with surviving family before publishing by sending them versions or drafts? Or do you think they should write their story without the outside influences of family?
You who are reading - if you write memoir, how do you deal with writing about family?
That’s it for now. The holiday season is here and cold has descended on the Pacific Northwest. We may see some snow tomorrow, though it’ll be light. Keep warm, and have a great week.
As for me, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!
Fascinating. It was good to get your perspective and experiences on writing memoir. It's something I've began to work on, so I found this article useful.