Fear of Offending

I have a dilemma common to most writers: I'm afraid to write freely for fear that I'll upset someone I care about. I thought that once my parents died, this would no longer be an issue. But I forgot that there are plenty of other people I could offend, including my children and husband. For instance, I have four children: how do I write about parental favoritism without making it sound like I do have favorites? Or, when writing about my marriages, how do I write frankly about my marital satisfaction without upsetting the one(s) who come across unfavorably?

I realize that the chances of ex-husbands or lovers reading my work is not high (unless my work becomes well-known--which of course is something I want, but am afraid to expect). But my family is very interested in my writing--at least my husband is--and wants to read what I write. I also want to share it with them. But how do I do that and be completely honest about certain things? It's no good to try to cloak what I have to say in fiction--in fact, that's almost even worse: I might want to embellish something that happened to me in real life and the embellishment might be interpreted as something that's real. If I write about a married woman who has taken a lover, or wants to, will my husband think that's what I've really done or thought?

This reminds me of the joke about the one-hundred-year old couple who go to a lawyer for a divorce. The lawyer asks, "Why did you wait so long?" And they reply, "We wanted to wait until the children were dead." Do I have to wait until every one is dead before I can write exactly what I want to write? Chances are I won't make it.

One alternative is to write under a pseudonym. Donald Westlake writes about doing that in his essay "Pen Names Galore," but he never says that he did it to protect the feelings of people he was writing about. His reasons were mainly so that he could write prolifically, or change his style, without spreading his own name too thin. He doesn't address whether or not pen names are a good idea to protect the reader.

Some writers protect their loved ones and even acquaintances by disguising who they're writing about. But how does that help when you're writing about your husband and you only have one?
Or one of your children? (As if they couldn't tell which one you're writing about.) Or the person you've been friends with since the sixth grade? Some people might not know who you're writing about, but those you're writing about will?

I guess the only answer is to write freely and the consequences be damned. I'm just not sure that I'm ready to do that. The problem is, until I am, I probably won't be the writer I long to be. Because writing requires honesty. I can't cheat by pretending to feel differently than I really do. The result will ring false. Writing also requires "opening a vein"--letting it all hang out. Not every little detail, but the deepest meaning of the details you do include. Otherwise your writing will be flat. Mine often is, and I've diagnosed my problem as fear of offending. I need to get off this fence, jump in the mud and get dirty. Worrying about what others think of me is only going to give me writer's block. And it has.

Writing Memoirs

"I can't stress enough how different it is to write about the real and the unreal. When I started writing my memoir my whole metabolism changed. I'd just turned 50 and I assumed it was just age, but I didn't want to get out of bed in the morning and I had the most delicious lie-ins of my life! It was just sheer emotional exhaustion, I now realise. Communing with your significant dead is what it amounts to, and that is an exhausting thing. Not unpleasant, but still hard work."
Martin Amis

"For me, the memoir is not autobiography. It's very, very distant from that. There's no attempt to give a chronological rendition of one's life. I was looking at the traces of the legacies. I used the novelist's skills of going into the minds of the people you know least - namely my parents before I was born! These are totally mysterious others. You also need to be able to set scenes and to be able create movement in the text and create characters the way a novelist would."
Lisa Appignanesi

"Lisa Appignanesi and I may have had peculiar lives but they're also fundamentally universal. The only things that really matter are births and deaths and separations and unions - and we all have them. This is the advice I'd give a prospective memoir writer: the critic leads the reader from quote to quote, but that's also what the memoir writer does - you're quoting from memory, and what stays in your memory is the interesting stuff and that's the stuff you should quote. And if these things hang together at all, you're on to something."
Martin Amis

"I think the first thing to do is to select out. Otherwise you'll have no time to live as you recollect the past - there is a great deal of it! So select out for the moments that have a particular resonance for you. Play with those and see where they take you. They may take you into interesting places and not necessarily the places where you thought you might visit."
Lisa Appignanesi

Suggested Memoirs

I just finished and am still mulling over the book The Memoir and the Memoirist, by Thomas Larson. It gave me a lot to think about. It also made me want to start reading memoirs and personal essays like crazy, to see if I can apply the observations he made to each work. Here is a list of the books he discusses throughout the text:

The Kiss and The Mother Knot: A Memoir, by Kathryn Harrison
Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt (Also 'Tis and Teacher Man)
The Liars' Club, by Mary Karr
The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, by James McBride
Fierce Attachments: A Memoir, by Vivian Gornick
This Boy's Life: A Memoir, by Tobias Wolff
A Hole In The World: An American Boyhood, by Richard Rhodes
The unexpurgated edition of The Diary of Anne Frank, by Anne Frank
Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy
Prozac Diary and Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, by Lauren Slater
Light Years, by Le Anne Schreiber
Anna: A Daughter's Life, byWilliam Loizeaux
Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
Moments of Being, by Virginia Woolf
Lost In Place, by Mark Salzman
My Father's House: A Memoir of Incest and Healing, by Sylvia Fraser
Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lessons, by Mitch Alborn
An American Childhood and For the Time Being, by Annie Dillard
Firebird and Still Life With Oysters and Lemons, by Mark Doty
Fault Line, by Laurie Alberts
Fat Girl: A True Story, by Judith Moore
Intoxicated By My Illness, by Anatole Broyard
This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death, by Harold Brodkey
Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir, by Beverly Lowry
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers
Breakup: The End of a Love Story, by Catherine Texier
Fugitive Spring: Coming of Age in the '50s and '60s, by Deborah Digges
Paradise: Piece By Piece, by Molly Peacock
Fear of Fifty, by Erica Jong
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston
Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, by Nuala O'Faolain
A Walker in the City, by Alfred Kazin
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, by Mary McCarthy
All Over But the Shoutin', by Rick Bragg
Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, by Elizabeth Wurzel
Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop, by Joseph Lelyveld
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, by Kay Redfield Jamison
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, by William Styron
Lucky, by Alice Sebold
My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale, by James Atlas
Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris
Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, by Barbara Brown Taylor

The author of The Memoir and the Memoirist does not so much review these books as dissect them and that alone would make reading them along with his book worthwhile.

A Writer Reads

Bill Roorbach, in his book Writing Life Stories, insists that writers must do two things in order to become good at their art: 1) write, and 2) read. The first is self-evident, although I'm sure the author meant that we should write a lot. But what about reading? Is it really necessary to be a reader to be a writer?

I would guess that it's the rare writer who doesn't read. Most people fall in love with the written word when they're first learning to decipher it. Not everyone who reads will be a writer, but the two go together like torturing animals goes with being a sociopath. (The association between reading and writing is more benign, though, needless to say.)

I read for many reasons. It used to be that I read almost exclusively for entertainment and escape. I still read for that reason (usually to mask a bad period of depression or anxiety), but I also read for information and inspiration. I have several non-fiction books going at the same time. I read a little in one, until it gives me an idea that I find I want to write about and then I pick up another and read it until it does the same. Rarely do I read a non-fiction book straight through. I have fifty-some books out of the library right now. I'm not reading them all at one time; I tend to shift around to three or four and then switch to another group. Sometimes I don't read more than a couple of chapters before deciding I don't need that book anymore. Sometimes I find that a certain book just isn't that interesting. But I like to have this many on hand--just in case.

In case I can't think of anything to write about. In case I get bored. In case I feel curious about something. In case I want to expand my mind. Right now I have several books about feminism and about writing. I have a book about Catholicism and one about the black experience in America. I have a couple about personal finance. I have two autobiographies set in Berlin during the war years. I have three or four recently released novels. And these are just my library books. My personal library is all over the place: history (German, Islamic, Indian, World War I and II), religious books, collections of essays, poetry and literature, books on ADD, German language textbooks and tapes, gardening books, reference books, memoirs and biographies, social commentary, literary criticism, children's books and feminist writings. And of course that's not including all my writing books, which I will go into in another post.

I hold onto my books forever. A few years ago when I was really broke, I sold quite a few of my books on half.com. But most of the ones I sold were "new" books that I picked up at garage sales and discount bookstores. I still have all my textbooks from any class I've ever taken. All the books I've received through introductory offers from book clubs. And of course the ones I've been given. I keep them all.

Just in case.

The Angelic Spy

Jayne Anne Phillips, in her essay in The Washington Post Book World's collection, The Writing Life (2003), calls the writer an "angelic spy." Writers are entrusted with the secrets we spend our lives discerning and attempting to reveal as truth on paper. The tricky thing is to do so without betraying the trust of those whose secrets we carry.

I once wrote an essay about my then step-daughter and it was published before she even knew that I had written it. I didn't reveal a big secret; it was about a gift she gave me. But even so, she was upset that I had written and submitted it without telling her first. I contended that it happened to me, so it was fair game (although I said it a bit more diplomatically). I defended myself more vigorously when my sister-in-law criticized me for using someone else's life to further my craft. But if we don't write about others--or what happens to us in our relationships to others--what do we have to write about? Every encounter has an element of secrecy to it. Everyone assumes that what they say and do is going to be kept sacrosanct by any witness. That's not realistic. We talk--and write--about each other as a way of telling stories. Call it gossip if you will. It sounds better to call writers angelic spies, but it amounts to the same thing.

But there is a difference. Gossip implies a certain maliciousness. Most (but not all) writers carry no malice when they write. We are attempting to tease the truth out of what happens in life and reveal that truth through our use of language. But others may see us as outlaws, living outside the boundaries of accepted behavior: we tell on people. We spy on them and then reveal what we discover to the world.

Our defense is that we do it for "angelic" reasons. We do not seek to hurt, but to heal. Secrets can be poisonous, festering in the minds and souls of those who keep them. The sensitive writer is not trying to "out" her subjects. She just wants to help the reader make sense of his behavior. Perhaps the reader has had the same thing happen to him. Perhaps he has done the same thing to others. Reading about these "secrets" can be cathartic. It gives the reader a chance to look into the souls of those who have tried to keep them and to learn the lessons they learned--or should have learned.

Saying that what writers do is angelic implies that we are above the world, seeing all and carrying messages from God. Isn't that exactly what writers do? There is a spiritual aspect to all writing, whether or not we are religious. There is a higher power of some kind at work as we seek to delve beneath the surface of a person's soul. I have used the word "soul" three times in the above sentences. That's not because I can't think of another word; I just can't think of a better one. Emotions, actions, thoughts, personalities all add up to the soul, that deeper entity that defies facile descriptions. That's why writers spend their lives trying to unravel the secrets others, and we ourselves, carry. We know that no life is fully described without revealing at least some of its secrets.

And so we spy. We witness and we record. And we attempt to explain, either directly or indirectly through the use of parable, analogy, simile and metaphor. We have come to earth to speak to the hearts of ourselves and others. You could even say that we have a divine imperative to do so.

It's not easy to be a revealer of secrets. It requires a certain sensitivity and discretion. We need to speak the truth in love. That is what angels do.

My Map Story: Two Houses

A little girl rides up and down on her tricycle in front of a brick ranch house. She does this every day until a woman finally comes to the door and asks if she wants to come in to play. She never goes to the door herself. She always waits to be asked.

That little girl was me and this is a metaphor for my life.

I was always intensely shy and waited for everything that came to me. My sister, on the other hand, reached out and grabbed what she wanted. When we were pre-teens my mother told us that we could have our rooms decorated any way we wanted. My sister was quite specific: miniature yellow rose wallpaper, green carpet, frilly white curtains, white painted bed and dresser. I said I didn't mind leaving my room the way it was. It was already wallpapered by the previous owners and although I hated its pink gingham design, I hated to ask for a complete makeover. It would be too much trouble. It wasn't even that that bothers me now. It was that I didn't even know how I really wanted it. It might have partly been because I'd been forced to leave my special bedroom behind when we moved down the street to an almost identical house from the one I lived in from the ages of 5 till 12.

In our previous house I had asked for and gotten a room with three red walls and one white. The wall color was called "Apache Red." (It had either been that or "Canary Yellow.") I used ticky-tacky to put up maps all over the walls that I'd gotten out of our National Geographics and was particularly proud of the perfect accent: the globe that sat on my desk. In the new house, I didn't even have a desk, just a huge ugly gray dresser and two twin beds. I don't remember now how I ended up with the pink bedroom. In the first house it had been the master bedroom but a larger master bedroom had been added to the new house and I suppose because I was the oldest I got the next largest.

I liked the size of the room, but I never did anything to make it my own. I was twelve and the move wasn't easy on me. Even though it was just down the street, it took me away from the immediate circle of friends I'd had at the first house. The two houses were exactly alike except for the raised roof in the back of the second one that enabled the addition of a new master bedroom and bath. And it had a basement. But I never warmed up to the new house. I lived there for seven years--the same amount of time I'd lived in the old house--but I always thought of the old one as my true home, as if the second one was an imposter.

I still dream frequently about the first house and rarely about the second. I loved the shake shingles of the first, painted gray with white trim, the rock garden that Mom had built in the back yard, the brick patio with its huge awning outside the family room window, the pitch black attic where my sister and I tried to scare the bejeebers out of each other and our friends. We were the first family to live in that house. Our back yard was a sea of mud that first year. I remember falling into it and thinking it was hilarious.

Our dog became famous at that house. He followed us everywhere, to school, where we could hear him howl when the principal shut him up in the boy's bathroom until my mom could come get him, or to the grocery store where he learned to let himself in using the automatic door. Everyone in the village knew Jojo. He was de riguer at birthday parties because he would "sing" along with "Happy Birthday." The neighborhood kids were always trying to get him to howl to that and the Mickey Mouse Club theme--those were the only songs that did the trick.

When we moved to the new house, I had to leave all those memories behind. I felt homeless. I never settled in. It didn't help that I moved to middle school shortly after we moved and I began to have to navigate the waters of prepubescence. That wasn't the hardest part, though. We had originally moved to the new house so that my maternal grandfather, who'd been a widower for many years, could move in with us. I adored my grandfather and couldn't wait. I still remember the day he called and told us that he was getting married and moving to another town instead. I was crushed.

I was crushed a lot in that house. I had all of my first loves, requited and not, while living in that house. My mother and I began to fight bitterly during those years. And not five years after we moved there, my grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack.

With all of that, why would I care about pink gingham wallpaper?

Writing Exercises

I hate writing books that sprinkle writing exercises throughout their text. Like medicine, I know they're good for me, but I find them irritating. I usually don't feel like doing what they prescribe. But I've admitted my need for outside advice. So why do I resist taking it?

Sometimes I just don't connect with the exercise. It seems too obvious, I've done something like it before, or I don't have the patience. But I often resist because of the author's tone: in Writing Life Stories, the author doesn't just suggest that you do his exercises, he demands that you do. I don't react well to that. I'm not saying that the exercises aren't valuable. I just want more meat in the text before I jump into a writing exercise.

One thing that throws me is when I don't know how thoroughly I should do the exercises.The first one Bill Roorbach presents is to make a map of your childhood neighborhood. He's used this exercise in classes he's taught and the response has been everything from a quick sketch to a collage. Another assignment is to make a timeline. Again, he's received the bare minimum to a color-coded life-long calendar. How detailed do I need to be? Isn't it enough that I have the map or timeline in my head? I can see the value of these exercises, especially if you're getting ready to write a memoir, but I'd rather come back to them later, if at all. I want to hear more from the author about his own writing and teaching experiences.

But it seems that this book is very much an exercise book and it seems that for maximum benefit I need to do the exercises in order. I bridle at that. I decide to compromise: I won't draw the map or the timeline, but I will do the writing exercises he assigns to go with them.

The first one is to tell a story from your map. Mine starts out with "A little girl rides up and down on her tricycle in front of a brick ranch house. She does this every day until a woman finally comes to the door and asks if she wants to come in to play. She never goes to the door herself. She always waits to be asked.

"That little girl was me and I've waited to be asked all my life."