2

Writing the Family

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 . . . 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.

—KIM BARNES

My brother is swinging the bat and I’m bored in the stands, seven years old. My mother has given me a piece of paper and a pen that doesn’t have much ink in it. I’ve written, “I have two brothers. One is a little one. One is a big one. There are only two girls in our family. One is me. One is my mother.” The mothers sit all around me, their straight skirts pulled tight across their knees. My brother is swinging the bat and wiggling his hips on the other side of the mesh. Where is my father? I squint to see him near the dugout, his hands cupped around his mouth. My brother swings the bat, and the ball sails, sails, sails out of sight. Everyone stands up, cheering, but I stay seated long enough to write: “The big brother just made a home run and I think that’s all I’ll write. Goodbye.” My brother prances around the bases, casually slapping the hands held out in high fives as he trots past third. The catcher already sulks unmasked against the backstop. My brother casually taps his foot against home.

On that scrap of paper, I naturally turn toward the people in my life as a way to begin a description of that life. As a child, it’s nearly impossible to think of myself as an individual separate from my family.

—BRENDA

Situating Yourself in Relation to Family

From the minute we arrive in the world, we’re put at the mercy of the people who care for us. And we might find the rest of our lives taken up with dual, contradictory impulses: to be an integral part of this clan and to be a separate individual, set apart. Our families, however they’re configured, provide our first mirrors, our first definitions of who we are. And they become our first objects of love, anger, and loyalty.

When we say the word “family,” we often mean our biological families—our families of origin. But we can also think of other families we create throughout our lives—our families of choice. We also often have friends that feel and act more like family. For the purposes of writing about this topic, you can define “family” as it best fits for you.

In writing about family, it’s often tempting, especially when you’re dealing with emotionally charged material, to try and encompass everything in one essay. Such a strategy will leave you, and your readers, numb and exhausted. Ask the small questions. Focus on small details that show a bigger picture. For example, in “Reading History to My Mother,” Robin Hemley spurs a complex essay about his mother by focusing first on her eyeglasses:

My mother owns at least half a dozen glasses, and I know I should have sorted through them all by now (we tried once). . . . On her dresser there are parts of various eyeglasses: maimed glasses, the corpses of eyeglasses, a dark orphaned lens here, a frame there, an empty case, and one case with a pair that’s whole. This is the one I grab and take out to my mother who is waiting patiently, always patient these days, or perhaps so unnerved and exhausted that it passes for patience.

In this memoir, Hemley will detail the decline of his mother’s physical and mental health as she advances in age, and he chronicles his own ambivalent responses to caring for her. This subject will lead into even bigger ideas about how we recreate our histories as part of our love for one another. Rather than approach such things head-on, Hemley wisely turns to the small, physical things first—those eyeglasses—as a way to not only create a convincing scene, but also to plant the seeds for the emotional material to come. Those mangled, mixed-up eyeglasses signal the state of mind we’ll be invited to enter.

The Biographer

When we’re writing about family, sometimes it’s helpful to think of ourselves as biographers, rather than autobiographers. This slight shift in perspective just might be enough to create the emotional distance necessary to begin shaping experience into literature on the page. It will also allow you to take a broader view of your subject that encompasses community, culture, and history.

As Tarn Wilson articulates in her essay “Go Ahead: Write About Your Parents, Again,” we write about more than just our own families when we do so with curiosity and a desire to understand our families in new ways. We can also see our family members shaped by the historical context in which they lived. She writes:

If I step back from my fears, I know that when we write honestly and richly about our families, we also write cultural history. While wrestling with my memoir about my hippie parents’ attempt to live off the land in the Canadian wilderness in the early 70s, I discovered that to truly understand my mother and father, I had to know the forces that shaped them: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the divisions and disillusionments of the Vietnam War; the rise of modern feminism; the movement toward an eco-spirituality. I began to see my parents not merely as individuals making choices, but as players in a larger cultural movement.

Sometimes it helps to take this biographer’s stance as a necessary distancing device. For example, in Brent Staples’s essay “The Coroner’s Photographs” (see Anthology), Staples assumes a reporter’s role, using the coroner’s statistics and graphic photos as a way to begin dealing with his brother’s violent death. Because the subject holds so many emotional land mines, Staples uses this structure to step back from the scene, but at the same time he’s able to give us intimate physical details of his brother, such as the way his second toe “curls softly in an extended arc and rises above the others in a way that is unique to us.” Not until the very end of the essay do we hear a direct emotional reaction from the narrator; rather, he allows the facts to speak for themselves.

Sometimes it’s helpful to imagine our relatives as they might have been before we knew them as mother, father, grandmother, and so on. In Paisley Rekdal’s essay “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee” (see Anthology), she allows herself to imagine in vivid detail her mother as a sixteen-year-old girl:

Age sixteen, my mother loads up red tubs of noodles, teacups chipped and white-gray as teeth, rice clumps that glue themselves to the plastic tubs’ sides or dissolve and turn papery in the weak tea sloshing around the bottom. She’s at Diamond Chan’s restaurant, where most of her cousins work after school and during summer vacations, some of her friends, too. . . . My mother’s nails are cracked, kept short by clipping or gnawing, glisten only when varnished with the grease of someone else’s leftovers.

We then move from this imaginative scene into a real one closer to the present day. The contrast between the two scenes allows for a level of character development that might otherwise be impossible.

Family and Cultural Identity Through Food

As we saw in Chapter 1, “The Body of Memory,” sensory details are key to developing our memories on the page. And look back to the Paisley Rekdal quote in the preceding section; note how she turns to the sensory details of food to immediately evoke a picture of her mother’s situation as a young woman. Whether you’re writing about family relationships for the first time or for the hundredth time, food can often serve as an especially effective portal to describe and articulate both your familial and cultural identity.

For example, in her essay “There’s No Recipe for Growing Up,” Scaachi Koul describes her upbringing through a focus on specific foods she had throughout her childhood and into the present day. After describing the foods her mother prepared for the Hindu holiday of Diwali, Koul goes on to describe the everyday foods of her childhood:

Food is a big part of any Indian holiday, but in my parents’ home, hearty homemade Indian food was a fixture every day. Nightly, we had mounds of basmati rice, baby eggplants stewed in spices that I’d hold up to my face like bejeweled earrings, collard greens and turnips (gross, until I grew up). Best of all were the nights where she made Kashmiri rogan josh, a lamb dish she’d whip together in a pressure cooker that was perennially broken, the whistle propped up with a wooden spoon and screaming every five minutes on a Saturday afternoon.

Notice how specific Koul is in her detailed descriptions of the food in her home (and of that “perennially broken” pressure cooker!), and how that food defined the culture of her growing up. She immerses us in these details, without extraneous explanations, so that we experience her household from the inside out.

As the author digs deeper into her memories, we are led, inevitably, to an imagining of what will happen when her mother is no longer with her. The essay then transcends a personal story into a universal concept: “When you emigrate, you end up the last person to touch a lot of your family history.”

This longing to connect to one’s cultural identity through food—especially in the light of a family member’s imminent or recent death—is quite common and creates a bond with the reader. Through an author’s attention to sensory detail—and a strong individual voice—these moments can stand above the rest. For example, in Ruby Tandoh’s essay “From Soup to Nuts,” she describes the transformation she experiences after her grandfather’s death:

I had been happy enough at school to let people twist my Ghanaian surname into knots—Ruby Tandoori, Ruby Tango—and make jokes about the ashy colour I went in the sun, or the woolly tangles of my hair. I hadn’t really known what Ghana meant to my family or who my extended family even was. . . . But when Ransford died I found that I never wanted to be that rudderless or that acquiescent to people’s everyday bigotries ever again. I wanted a taste of my heritage; I wanted to know who I was.

There are, of course, an infinite number of ways to handle family material in creative nonfiction, but many writers turn to memories of eating because food—whether it be abundant or scarce—is so elemental to family and cultural life. Food can become, on the page, not only sustenance for the body, but also fortification for some of the deepest (and most complex) memories of family we hold.

The Obstacle Course

When we write about family, we set ourselves up for a plethora of ethical, emotional, and technical issues that may hinder us from writing altogether. It’s one thing to write about your sister in your diary; it’s quite another to write about her in an essay published in a national magazine. And when we set out to write about family, we are naturally going to feel compelled to break long silences that may have kept the family together in the first place. Many creative nonfiction works take on issues of child abuse, incest, alcoholic parents, and other emotional issues. When you sit down to write, you might also feel obligated to write about traumas of your family history. You might feel these are the only issues worth tackling in literature.

Family is always an enormous subject, and as writers, we must find a way to handle this topic with both aplomb and discretion. If your family history is particularly charged, it will be even more essential for you to find the smaller details that will lead the way into a successful essay. For example, as noted in Chapter 1, Bernard Cooper focuses on the sound of his family’s sighs to describe crucial differences between his father, his mother, and himself in his essay “The Fine Art of Sighing.” Paisley Rekdal focuses on her mother’s fingernails “varnished with the grease of someone else’s leftovers.” You might find yourself drawn to take on big issues with your family. But they must arrive on the page less as issues and more as scenes, images, and metaphors that will evoke a strong response from the reader.

Permission to Speak

While drafting your essay, you must instinctively drown out the voices that tell you not to write. Your mother, father, sisters, and brothers must all be banished from the room where you sit at your desk and call up potentially painful or embarrassing memories. But once you know you have an essay that is more for public consumption than private venting, you have some difficult decisions to make. How much of this is really your own story to tell?

Writers deal with this dilemma in a variety of ways. Some merely remain in denial, convincing themselves that no one—least of all their families—will ever read their work. Some go to the opposite extreme, confessing to their families about their writing projects and asking permission to divulge certain stories and details, giving them complete veto power. Some, such as Frank McCourt with Angela’s Ashes, wait until the major players have died so that they can no longer be hurt by the exposure or pass judgment on the writer. Some decide that writing about this material in a nonfiction form is just too risky and decide to present their work as fiction instead. Some writers change the names of their characters—some even write under a pseudonym—to protect both themselves and their families.

However you choose to negotiate these tricky issues, remember that your story is your story to tell. Yours is not the only story or perspective on family or on your community, but it is a perfectly valid voice among the chorus. In her essay “Writing About Family: Is It Worth It?” Mimi Schwartz reminds us 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.” And if you examine this truth with a healthy sense of perspective and with literary skill, you may be surprised at the reactions you evoke among your subjects. They may feel honored to see themselves couched in a work of literature. (See also Chapter 11, “The Particular Challenges of Creative Nonfiction.”)

Here is how Robin Hemley dealt with these issues when he wrote and published “Reading History to My Mother.”

I think this is one of the few essays I haven’t shown my mother. . . . I don’t think that one needs to show everything one writes to those involved—sometimes one can actually do more harm than good with the full-disclosure impulse. Sometimes, one acts more out of one’s own need for absolution rather than actually considering the feelings of the person to whom the disclosure is made. . . . We write for many different reasons, and often our best work is dangerous, edgy, and guilt-inducing. Sometimes we feel it’s worth sharing with others, whether the reasons are literary or therapeutic, and I don’t think we should necessarily engage in self-censorship simply because we might be unwilling to share our work with the person(s) the work deals with. . . . I’d say that my decision was made of equal measures of love and cowardice.

Love and cowardice might aptly describe all of us when we find ourselves writing about family or about those close to us in our communities. Complex emotions beset us in this endeavor, and we must remain aware of them before they ambush us altogether.

Our Motives

If we are going to write successfully about family, our motives must be more than simple exposure of family history and secrets. We must have some perspective on our experience that spurs the essay beyond our own personal “dirty laundry” and into the realm of literature.

Our role as writers can be that of the witness. We continually bear witness to those around us, and sometimes our job is to speak for those who have never spoken for themselves. When we write about our families or take on the mantle of the biographer, we are really writing (and forging) community. As Terry Tempest Williams writes, in her essay “A ‘Downwinder’ in Hiroshima”: “I think about . . . how much we need to hear the truth of one another’s lives. . . . The Japanese have a word, aware, which speaks to both the beauty and pain of our lives, that sorrow is not a grief one forgets or recovers from but is a burning, searing illumination of love for the delicacy and strength of our relations.”

TRY IT

1.   Try to reconstruct the names of your matriarchal or patriarchal lineage. For instance, what is the name of your mother, your mother’s mother, your mother’s mother’s mother, and so forth? How far back can you go? Naming them brings them to life and enables you to begin writing about them. Where do the names come from? Does your own name have any “inheritance” attached to it? What are the stories behind the names? Are you adopted? How does this affect how you construct your sense of lineage?

VARIATION: Circle one of the names that intrigues you for whatever reason, then do some research on this person. Find photographs, letters, or birth certificates—whatever might be stored in a family archive. Begin an essay that builds a portrait of this person from the name outward.

2.   Describe every member of your family in terms of a part of the body. For instance, describe the hands of your mother, father, siblings, grandparents, and yourself. How are they alike? How are they different? If necessary, imagine the details. For instance, imagine your grandmother’s hands as they were before she was a grandmother. Which traits emerge in your own physical makeup? Which ones do you hate? Which ones do you love?

3.   As Paisley Rekdal did, begin an essay by imagining the life of someone close to you—a family member, friend, mentor—before you knew them. Use your imagination coupled with your experience of this person. Use any clues that may exist: objects from the past, documents, photographs, and so forth to form a portrait of this person before you were in the picture. Then complete the essay by contrasting this portrait with the person you know today. How are they different or similar?

4.   Write a list of the foods you remember most from your childhood. Use as many sensory details as you can to evoke how this food was a backdrop to your growing up.

5.   Write a paragraph or two starting with the line: “I would love to taste again. . . .” Use this phrase to evoke what you miss the most from family meals or other food experiences. See if this opening might lead you to other details or people you miss (or don’t miss) in your family history.

6.   Gather with some friends to create a potluck based on key foods from your cultural and/or familial histories. Encourage storytelling at the table. Perhaps write an essay based on this present-day experience as a platform for evoking memories of the past.

7.   Create a picture of your family based on some simple gesture: the way they sigh, laugh, cry, and so on. Begin with a vivid description of this gesture, then describe your father, your mother, yourself, or any other family members. Try to see how examining these small gestures reveals larger details about the family.

8.   Try writing a family story you think you know well in a voice other than your own. Use the point of view of another family member and see how the story changes or which details now become important.

9.   The writer and philosopher John Berger has said: “I have always thought that household gods were animals. Sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, but always present.” Begin an essay by writing about the animals in the life of your family. What role did a particular animal play in the family dynamics? You can begin by describing the way this animal arrived in your life, using the types of sensory details and scenes you’ve been practicing in other work.

FOR FURTHER READING

In Our Anthology

•   “The Fine Art of Sighing” by Bernard Cooper

•   “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee” by Paisley Rekdal

•   “The Coroner’s Photographs” by Brent Staples

•   “First” by Ryan Van Meter

Resources Available Online

•   “There’s No Recipe for Growing Up” by Scaachi Koul

•   “From Soup to Nuts” by Ruby Tandoh

•   “Go Ahead: Write About Your Parents, Again” by Tarn Wilson

Print Resources

•   Open House: Writers Redefine Home, edited by Mark Doty

•   “Reading History to My Mother” by Robin Hemley in Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Spring 1999

•   This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home, edited by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters

•   “Writing About Family: Is It Worth It?” by Mimi Schwartz in The Writer’s Chronicle, Oct./Nov. 2001