“Writing About Family: Is It Worth It?”
from The Writer’s Chronicle – October 2001
I made up my mind at the beginning of my writing life not to write about my family and friends,
since I want them to remain my family and friends.”
--Novelist Carol Shields
“Write what you know!” is the advice given freely to writers not engaged in academic research
and journalism—and what we know best involves family. If that becomes a problem, fiction
writers and poets have some wiggle room. They can say, “Hey that’s not you! That’s my
imagination at work!” and hope for grace. Memoirists and personal essayists have no such cover.
The pact we make with our readers is “This is all true!” and truth is expected, even if we include
disclaimers such as “To protect those who didn’t ask to be in this story, I’ve changed some
names and locales.” With close relatives—mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings—not even this
safety option is possible if we call our work memoir. Which is happening more and more in our
age of Oprah, reality TV, memoir courses, grass roots publications, not to mention the over thirty
million, true-story books sold last year.
People want to know about real lives, involving real names, and more writers are willing to share
their “true” stories. Partly, it is the awaiting public, but it is also, I think, the growing legitimacy
of creative nonfiction as a genre—one that encourages a merging of nonfiction and storytelling
so that the result must be interesting, not just factual. A friend who just came back from a
writers’ colony said that half the poets and fiction writers there were working on memoirs. She,
in fact, had just finished an essay on her mother. Would she show it to her mother? I asked. No.
Would she publish it? She wasn’t thinking about that yet.
Writers must think about it, I found out the hard way--after I sent my mother an essay about my
father that I thought she’d love. He was a hero in this particular essay—brave, prescient, a wily
outwitter of Nazis, and that was 90% of the story, enough to compensate for a few lines about
their forty years of marriage, which weren’t nasty lines, just this
“They were happy, my father loved to announce at weddings, because of two excellent rules:
Never go to bed mad! Always have a sense of humor! No matter that my father, as German
husband, always made the jokes and my mother, as German wife, was always supposed to laugh.
Sometimes it took a day or two.”
Nothing my mother didn’t remember after all those mornings of silent treatment she gave him.
Nothing family or friends who called or popped by didn’t know—or that the world, given the
scheme of sins, would condemn. But she was silent and hurt.
Partly, it was a privacy issue: What right had I to reveal publicly her private moments? Partly, it
was that she read a subtext that had eluded me until my Cousin Anne called. “You got your dad
just right! I could picture him again!” she said, much to my delight. But then she asked rather
pointedly, “How did your mother like the essay?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, but I suddenly knew.
“Oh, you mean the lines about her sulking?” I had worried about that passage, added and deleted
it several times before deciding that it helped to make a forty-year marriage seem real.
She laughed, I laughed—but I no longer rush to send stories to family members when I’m
euphoric after finishing something I assume they will love. I wait until all the subtexts (which I
don’t want to know early on or they sink me into caution and self-consciousness) reveal
themselves through time and feedback. I wait until I’ve shifted hats from writer (who avoids
analysis) to reader (who depends on it). I wait until trustworthy reader friends who know my
family give a green, red, or yellow light.
This strategy has worked for stories meant as homage, but what about those that intentionally tell
family secrets, embarrassments, betrayals—or tread in dangerous emotional waters we are still
in? Should we not write them because of hurt feelings and privacy issues, or should we go ahead
because, after all, they are our stories and demand to be told? This question became particularly
relevant last summer when my book on married life, Thoughts from A Queen-sized Bed, was
accepted by University of Nebraska Press. The idea that my husband, mother, and children (who
had been scattered safely in places they’d never read unless I alerted them) would all be found
between two covers sounded dangerous. I started asking other writers what they did about family
stories, and, as you’ll see, their answers depend on the genre, the urgency of a particular story to
be told as “true”—and the writer’s family.
Some writers, like Carol Shields, avoid all memoir, saying it causes too much ill will. Others,
like Lillian Ross (whose memoir revealed her forty-year affair with New Yorker editor William
Shawn), reply unabashedly to criticism about ruining reputations, “But it’s my story, too!” Most
writers fall in between these poles of “Never!” and “Why not?” basing their decision both on
motive (Why am I telling this story?) and craft (How well can I tell it?)
If the main impulse is self-disclosure, it’s best to resist these stories, says poet and essayist
Stephen Dunn. They are often “the kind that should be put in a locked cabinet, like diaries, kept,
if at all, as private data for our children to find after we’re dead.” How to tell? If the motive
never shifts from confession to exploring the story’s subject matter, the work will be
insufficiently transformed and include details for the worst of reasons—because they happened.
“The too naked poem,” Dunn warns, “the one that makes dirty laundry its flag, which never gets
beyond its original impulse” is a poem we have failed. We should hide it from everyone.”
Other reasons for restraint: because our motive for writing is revenge, and that’s a bad idea,
nowarns Annie Dillard. “While literature is an art, it is not a martial art place to defend
yourself from an attack, real or imagined, and no place to launch an attack.” Or because we
haven’t yet found a way to tell a story that family members will forgive—and that matters. That
is why Frank McCourt published Angela’s Ashes about the family struggles against poverty after
his mother died. And why Russell Baker waited to write Growing Up about his mother’s
struggles during the Depression until after she was senile and in a nursing home. And why others
wait for the safe venue, hoping, as I do with this essay, that no one who reads this will know my
mother and say to her, “Oh, you’re the one with the morning sulks.”
Sometimes to tell or not depends on getting permission. Annie Dillard says she wrote An
American Childhood with the idea of removing whatever family members found offensive.
“My parents are quite young. My sisters are watching this book carefully. Everybody I’m writing
about is alive and well, in full possession of his faculties, and possibly willing to sue. Things
were simpler when I wrote about muskrats my family that each may pass on the book. As a result
I’ve promised to take out anything that anyone objects to—anything at all.”
Threat of a lawsuit is something to consider, even though lawsuits are hard to win. Writers can
be sued for libel—if they say something that defames someone’s character and is not true.
Writers can also be sued for invasion of privacy, in which truth is no defense, according to Carol
Meyer, author of The Writer’s Survival Manual. “Even if what you say is true, you can be sued
for invasion of privacy, especially under the false-light and embarrassing facts concepts.” The
former refers to “embellishing, fictionalizing, or distorting certain facts” to make the person look
bad; the latter refers to making disclosures the person has not given you permission to reveal.
Whenever possible, it’s best not to use a non-famous person’s real name without permission.
Dinitia Smith in “Why Do they Keep Giving Away Other People’s Secrets” cites lawyer Leon
Friedman on this. You can use a person’s identity, he adds, without the name.
With people not central to the story—friends, neighbors, colleagues, second cousins, et al—
many writers opt to change not only names, but professions, physical features, and location.
Some use composites, and to those who argue that this crosses the line into fiction, they say, their
aim is to hide identity without changing the spirit—or emotional truth—of the story. As long as
they add a disclaimer that informs the reader of this, they feel they can still call the story memoir
or personal essay.
Ideal is to have family that supports your work, someone like Alicia Ostriker’s husband, for
example, who hasn’t objected (so far) despite all the ribbing he has received from colleagues at
work, for poems such as “Locker Room Conversation.” This one takes place in a university’s
men’s locker room where a bunch of professors typically shower “in the hum of conversation:”
“...Today he tells me someone he’s never seen
Walked into the shower, a kid, near seven feet,
Black curly hair, bronze, except for a bikini mark,
Blue eyes, face of an angel, body of a Greek hero,
Thighs the circumference of my husband’s waist,
Dong of a god; and conversation stopped.
Every man just soaped and rinsed himself.
Afterward, as they dressed, my husband asked
A couple of friends—What did you think of that guy?
—What guy? they said.”
“So what do you think?” Alicia asked one night when she and her husband had had enough to
drink. The poem had been published, so permission was not the issue, but she was wondering
about all the marriage poems she has published over the years—some much worse than this one.
“It’s your job as poet,” he told her. “You write for all those who can’t say things for themselves.”
“It was the perfect answer,” Alicia said to me. “Every once in a while they come through for
you.”
His support, she feels, encouraged her to write “Scenes from a Mastectomy,” a knock-yoursocks-off personal essay about her mastectomy and her marriage. As with all essays, it is far
more explicit than a poem; and the power of this essay, in particular, comes from its honesty
about self-image and relationships. I send it to everyone I know who has had breast cancer (in
Living in the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer).
Some writers try a collaborative approach to family stories. To write The Color of Water, James
McBride taped his mother’s history during hours of interviews and then wrote alternating
chapters, one in his voice, one in hers. Hilda Raz and her son Aaron, both seasoned writers, are
collaborating to write one memoir jointly. Called What Becomes You, it tells the story of Aaron’s
trans-sexuality in alternating chapters that allow each a voice and perspective. The authorial
power, usually in the hands of one, is shared but not diluted—and there are other perks, says
Hilda, editor of Prairie Schooner and a poet. “By exchanging and critiquing drafts, he’s pushed
me to greater and greater candor. It’s been hard, but important for both of us.”
Sometimes there is no permission, and still the true story must be told. That is what Helen
Fremont, author of After the Long Silence, decided when writing about how her life and Catholic
identity were affected by her discovery of her parents’ Holocaust story. She had started by
writing a novel based on their lives, but two years into the project, when she discovered, through
research, that her grandparents had died in Auschwitz, she knew she had to switch to memoir-even if it meant revealing her parents’ biggest secret: that they were Jewish.
“As a fiction writer, I thought it would be easier to make the story up, using the general outline
of their lives as a guide. But once I received pages of testimony documenting how my
grandparents had been killed, and once I learned that everyone in my family had been Jewish, I
was seized by the need to find out the truth, to steep myself in research, to interview as many
survivors--including my parents—as I could.”
Fiction felt wrong, not only because the real story was more powerful, but because no matter
what the family fallout, the truth had to be preserved: to bear witness and pay tribute.
“In effect, my grandparents and aunts and uncles had been wiped off the face of the earth by
fascist regimes. There are no gravestones, or markers, and the generation of eyewitnesses is
rapidly dwindling. Holocaust revisionists and deniers increasingly dismiss the fact of the
extermination of Jews as fiction or .Fiction nofantasy, and I felt it important to add my voice
to the record longer served my needs; I realized that I had to write the story, finally, as memoir.”
Helen’s family has not yet been reconciled to her book, but she still feels, two years later, that
the price was important enough to pay. For others, like journalist Andrea Cooper, that price is
too high. When her brother vehemently objected to an essay about their childhood, she got him
to allow her to submit it, at least, to a contest. It won, but she has not published it yet, and a
lawsuit is not the issue. “My relationship with my brother matters more than a publication. He
felt that his life was being raided for my purposes, reducing the power of what happened to him,
to us. I had to accept that.” But she is still hoping to change his mind.
Whatever the final decision—to call it fiction or memoir, to publish it or not—everyone seems to
agree on two things: 1) you have to write first and worry after you have a full draft that’s waited
in a drawer for awhile; and 2) you must decide, on a case by case basis, how much you are
willing to risk. If your story, like one of my student’s, involves telling Mafia secrets, it’s
probably smart to forget it, even if you change everyone’s name. But if the story involves your
grandfather, and your mother and aunt scoff, “You got it all wrong!” the response should be the
one that Michael Steinberg gave to his mother and aunt: “This is about my grandfather, not your
father.”
The risk of ill will is often reduced by gaining distance from the material. Wordsworth’s
advice—to let emotion be recollected in tranquility—is particularly apt for family stories because
one’s initial impulses to write about family often begin with self-pity or fury. The result is an
impassioned journal entry, but a dull read for others. As I warn my students, the more you make
yourself the hero of memoir, the more readers sympathize with your adversaries. You become a
Woe-is-Me character who, as in life, overpowers the urge of others to root for you.
To avoid this, I remind them (and myself) of writer Bret Lott’s advice that a memoirist, in
particular, must think of truth as having a small t, not a big one—as in my truth rather than the
truth. Fiction writers do this more naturally, particularly writing in third person, for they have
invented every character, and so are invested in letting each one make his or her own strong case
for truth. But in memoir, when the ‘I’ represents both author and speaker, the temptation is to
become myopic with self-centeredness—to see the world, especially family, as we did as
children: full of heroes and villains, victims and victors, bullies and wimps. Unless we challenge
these initial certainties—my father was a saint, my sister a prick—we lose the complexity of
character that make readers care about and trust our vision. It’s that complexity that offers the
best chance to hear “You got it just right.”
That complexity also offers the best chance to avoid bad feelings, as Kim Barnes found out when
her parents read her memoir, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in an Unknown Country. She had
worried that her father, in particular, would be angry at her version of her rebellion against her
parents’ Pentecostal religion, but his main complaint was about a few facts she got wrong. As
she says,
“One thing that we always assume, wrongly, is that if we write about people honestly they will
resent it and become angry. If you come at it for the right reasons and you treat people as you
would your fictional characters—you know, you don’t allow them to be static—if you treat them
with complexity and compassion, sometimes they will feel as though they’ve been honored, not
because they’re presented in some ideal way but because they’re presented with understanding.”
Sometimes changing the tone of a story is the answer—not only for good relations but for a good
story. After an infuriating family weekend, I wrote a draft that felt great, but was whiny and
totally unsympathetic—even to myself, rereading it two months later. A few months after that I
was telling a friend about the weekend: how I was trapped with twenty-two relatives in a lodge
during a hurricane; and how I kept running outdoors all weekend to hike in pouring rain rather
than hear the constant pick, pick, picking of relatives about how my son should have rented a car.
Now I sounded more like a bemused E.B. White than Attila, the Hun, so I tried again, and my
writing group liked it—a funny story, everyone said. My son, not laughing, did give me
permission to publish, so it is tucked into the middle of my marriage book and, maybe, the other
twenty relatives won’t read that far.
Sometimes calling it fiction is the only solution—not just as cover, but also because, as Pam
Houston believes, “I write fiction to tell the truth.” If the real facts inhibit the telling, and it is
imagination that captures what is true, tell it as fiction. That’s what Bret Lott did in Jewel, his
novel about his grandmother, which is 85% true. He wanted to write it first person, from a
woman’s point of view, and fiction gave him maneuvering room. It was also nice to tell his
grandmother, “Oh, that was greatly exaggerated,” when she questioned his rendering of her.
“Fiction” satisfied her. It also worked for Dinty W. Moore, writing about his parents’ alcoholism.
He also took another precaution: to publish in a journal his mother would never read, but , alas,
he did send it to his sister, who sent it their mother. This story has a happy ending, however,
thanks to the cover of fiction. His mother said, “Ah, that Dinty. He has such an imagination!”
Most writers are less lucky, more like my friend whose novel came out right before she went
home for a family wedding. She got the cold shoulder from people who saw themselves in her
“novel” and didn’t like what they saw. “But that is not you!” she explained amicably, not even
remembering the complainers. Her disclaimer accomplished nothing.
If only we could use the disclaimer my friend, Penelope Dugan, thinks we should add to all
family stories: that “none of my family members ever existed in fact—or bears any resemblance
to anyone living or dead.” How liberating—even though, if true, we memoirists would have
nothing left to write about! For it is the need to capture people who did exist and make their
world, and thus our own, come alive again that is at the heart of this genre. So we renter old lives
to discover what they meant to us: to pay homage, to bear witness, to commemorate, to learn
something new, and to pass that on
“To write one’s life enables the world to know its history,” Patricia Hampl says, referring to
memoir at its best, and the authentic memoir voice “...that singular voice—it not only has the
evidence. It is the evidence.” But not, I would add, without family stories—whatever their risk.
Sources Cited
Barnes, Kim - The Fourth Genre, Volume 2, issue 2.
Dunn, Stephen - “Degrees of Fidelity.” Mid-American Review, 2000.
Dillard, Annie - “To Fashion a Text.” The Fourth Genre, edited by Steinberg and Root, Allyn &
Bacon.
Fremont, Helen - email response, November 2000.
Hampl, Patricia - “First Person Singular.” Alaska Review, Winter, 2000.
Meyer, Carol - The Writer’s Survival Manual, Crown Publishers, New York. 1988.
Ostriker, Alicia - phone interview, September, 2000.
Poem excerpt is from The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998, Pitt Poetry Series.
Raz, Hilda - phone interview, August 2000.
Shields, Carol - “Opting for Invention Over the Injury of Invasion,” New York Times, Monday,
April 10, 2000.
Smith, Dinitia - “Why Do They Keep Giving Away Other People’s Secrets?” New York Times,
October 24, 1998 Sec. B, p. 9.