When Is It Okay to Write About Your Family?
And when isn't it? I meet a lot of memoirists, published and un-, and most of us agonize over that question.
And for good reason, as Julie Myerson found out when her memoir about her son's drug addiction appeared in the UK: "A bit of a witch burning was what it felt like," she says. Now it will be released in the US, and she's braced for further controversy.
As today's New York Times piece about Myerson asks, "Are there limits to writing about loved ones, particularly one's children?" Among the memoirists canvassed, David Sheff feels that "the imperative to protect a loved one, particularly a child, outweighs the responsibility to tell the truth," while Susan Cheever, who tried to buy off her 5- and 12-year-old to get their approval to write about them, disagrees: "I strongly believe everybody has the right to their own story," she says, and she sees this as including other people's stories that intersect with the writer's own.
Writing about children, whom one has the obligation to protect, is one thing, while writing about parents and older relatives--as Beatriz Terrazas did, in the great piece below--is another. Tayari Jones, a novelist, blogged recently about shying away from the genre due to her parents' responses when she floated the idea of writing a memoir. As she writes, "the notion of parental displeasure is a real creativity killer." So true.
This whole question has fascinated me since The Truth Book came out, and I've spent the last couple of years collecting essays by writers who've lived the question, who've published about their families and lived to tell about the fallout. Now it's an edited collection tentatively titled Family Trouble: Writers on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, currently biding its time on an editor's desk at a good university press--and I sure wish they'd hurry up, because I think you'll be fascinated by the surprises, good and bad, that people have encountered when they've published work about their family members: their alcoholic cousins, abusive parents, troubled or long-suffering spouses, adopted children, biological mothers.
Long story short? Ethical consensus does not emerge, but it's definitely a lively read. Writers hold strong views on all sides of the issue. Some of the essays in Family Trouble offer useful principles about where to draw lines, while others share painful cautionary tales. The pieces are funny, blistering, moving, selfish, smart, humble, and warm by turns. I can't wait for them to see the light of print!
If you have an experience in this regard, please leave a comment (or email me privately) and let me know. I would love to hear about it.
And for good reason, as Julie Myerson found out when her memoir about her son's drug addiction appeared in the UK: "A bit of a witch burning was what it felt like," she says. Now it will be released in the US, and she's braced for further controversy.
As today's New York Times piece about Myerson asks, "Are there limits to writing about loved ones, particularly one's children?" Among the memoirists canvassed, David Sheff feels that "the imperative to protect a loved one, particularly a child, outweighs the responsibility to tell the truth," while Susan Cheever, who tried to buy off her 5- and 12-year-old to get their approval to write about them, disagrees: "I strongly believe everybody has the right to their own story," she says, and she sees this as including other people's stories that intersect with the writer's own.
Writing about children, whom one has the obligation to protect, is one thing, while writing about parents and older relatives--as Beatriz Terrazas did, in the great piece below--is another. Tayari Jones, a novelist, blogged recently about shying away from the genre due to her parents' responses when she floated the idea of writing a memoir. As she writes, "the notion of parental displeasure is a real creativity killer." So true.
This whole question has fascinated me since The Truth Book came out, and I've spent the last couple of years collecting essays by writers who've lived the question, who've published about their families and lived to tell about the fallout. Now it's an edited collection tentatively titled Family Trouble: Writers on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, currently biding its time on an editor's desk at a good university press--and I sure wish they'd hurry up, because I think you'll be fascinated by the surprises, good and bad, that people have encountered when they've published work about their family members: their alcoholic cousins, abusive parents, troubled or long-suffering spouses, adopted children, biological mothers.
Long story short? Ethical consensus does not emerge, but it's definitely a lively read. Writers hold strong views on all sides of the issue. Some of the essays in Family Trouble offer useful principles about where to draw lines, while others share painful cautionary tales. The pieces are funny, blistering, moving, selfish, smart, humble, and warm by turns. I can't wait for them to see the light of print!
If you have an experience in this regard, please leave a comment (or email me privately) and let me know. I would love to hear about it.
Faye said:
I have often agonized about what to write about when it comes to my father, who is a Holocaust survivor. I recently wrote a 45-page critical essay for my MFA program comparing two memoirs by the children of Holocaust survivors, and the paper incorporated reflections on how their experiences compared to my own. My conclusion included mention of some of the more difficult aspects of my relationship with my father, as well as his pain and how that translated into our lives, and how all of this affected my own life and writing. I felt "safe" because I didn't imagine the paper would ever be published or read by anyone in my family, but my father, upon hearing about the paper, shocked me by asking if he could read it. I did edit out just two sentences before I sent it to him that I didn't want to share, but sent him the rest of the paper. To my surprise, rather than being angry, he loved it. But even more to my surprise, for the first time in all of my 46 years, my father (who has rarely spoken about his past) called me a few weeks later and asked if he could tell me the story of the day his father was taken away in the Warsaw ghetto when he was a child, with the hope that I would write about it.
August 31, 2009 6:03 PMBeatriz Terrazas said:
This is an issue that comes up so often in classes and workshops in which I've participated. There is no easy answer. We writers have our stories, and for some of us, telling them means the difference between life and death, either literally or spiritually. I feel that I own my story -- it's as much a part of me as my hands or legs, my liver or my spleen. I do try however, to be fair to those who are part of my story and would rather not be part of it, and one way I do it is to not name them. This, of course, works only with shorter pieces. You can't write a book without giving someone a name, even if you change it, right? The thing I keep coming back to is how brave writers have to be to own their stories in the face of those who would rather they not.
September 2, 2009 12:04 AM