Too Personal
I have a really, really good idea for a book. A nonfiction book. A book with a "platform"--one I could very ably talk about, I think. The book would be funny--sort of my "real-life" voice, which is a lot more like my Demon Baby blog. Kind of Erma Bombeck on acid. It has a single-word catchy title (which I won't share in case I do it someday) like "Blink" or "Outliers."
It's really about my life. Not a memoir. But about raising a toddler while having concerns about aging parents, or in particular, my father, who has gone blind. My experience isn't unusual--there are millions of women facing this. Maybe their kids are not quite as young as mine . . . but as people's life expectancies advance, chances are many people reading this will one day find themselves in my shoes. Minus the Demon Baby. He's one-of-a-kind.
I have a million stories from these weeks and months with my dad here. Funny stories. Poignant stories. Last night, we laughed so hard, I thought I would choke. I had such a bad day, but then . . . my God, but the stories he told from when my parents were first married were hysterical. Well, actually, my mom was telling them. She married my dad for love. She stayed with him for SPITE. Swear it. She was going to leave him, with me in tow, and she walked out on him for real, sat down on the front steps of their apartment. I was 6 weeks old. And she said to herself, "I will be DAMNED if all the people who took bets this marriage wouldn't last a year will be proved right." So she stayed. They're married for better or worse over 40 years.
Of course, no one then could have pictured we'd be leading him around now, or counting his money because he can't see it or whatever. That's the thing called life. It throws you curveballs when your back is to the pitcher.
Anyway, as I pondered all this . . . I realized . . . there are some stories that are just too personal. Who do stories belong to anyway? If I share about his hypochondrical tendencies . . . is it MY story of my stress? Or his? Or the universe's?
So for now, I write fiction. And I suppose I am grateful I do. I can filter in the experiences, process my feelings about then, use what's dynamic and dramatic, and keep the rest in my heart.
Thoughts?
34 comments:
I've noted here before that there are stories I can't utilize in fiction because they're too personal. From time to time I've considered using something from my life for nonfiction, particularly when it comes to dealing with a Alzheimer's parent or even writing a memoir about my life in a genetics lab, but I realize they're too personal and/or too painful to share. At least for me.
Mark:
I could share them, I think. BUT, I feel like it's simply not fair to the people I'd be writing about. I know David Sedaris "mines" hbis family for stories all the time. What's amazing is they are SO hysterical . . . yet at the same time, he doesn't appear to balk at sharing some of the darker stories--even if it's just a throwaway line about how much his parents drank, for example. He also shares the painful coming of age of being gay in the south, and kind of a hardscrabble existence in spots.
However, in one essay about his sister, he has a long passage about how very sorry he is for telling family stories sometimes.
E
Some things are best just kept as memories, I think.
I know you won't want to hear this, but it's easier after they pass. In one of my women's fiction books, a protagonist has a mother with Alzheimer's in nursing home.
Writing those scenes was emotional for me. It helped me heal. But I couldn't have written it while she was alive and we were going through it.
Jude:
I agree. Some things are just my own. They don't belong to anyone else.
E
Hi Edie:
Well . . . my dad doesn't have any dementia or anything. Just blind. So . . . I'm nowhere near that point yet. But my mother's mother had dementia, and I do think for my mom, it was . . . a sense of peace when it was over.
E
I could never write about my family as nonfiction ... why bring all that up again? Too many of those wounds are still oozing. And the one time I wrote a fictional character directly based on a real member of my family, the reader response was pretty uniform: this person is so awful it destroys the whole story. I tried submitting the book and the first agent who read it said, "Well, the writing is good, but as soon as I hit Person X, I just couldn't go on. I had to set the book down." The sad thing is, I'm not even entirely sure where this leaves me ...
Easy for me to say because I know the people in my life don't read my stories... but I could use stories from my life and from the lives of the people close to me in my stories. I'm sure that if it ever came to the point where they were interested in reading the stories I would probably not feel the same, but then again maybe I would. Definitely something to think about. Right now it is just getting to do and say a lot of the things I never did or said that I would have liked to... :)
Erica, I think writing about a personal experience is the mainline to reconciliation. But, whether to share them publicly is entirely up to the writer. As David Sedaris does so beautifully, he sheds humor into the situation, which perhaps makes it easier for him to deal with whatever angst he felt at the time. He sort of humanizes the problem for others who have, or are, going through the same thing.
So, I guess you could justify sharing it as helping others. (Just don't "James Frey" it, lol.)
Lurker:
Well . . . to be fair . . . I am thinking more of a Sedaris-like blend of hilarity with a little pathos. But even that is too close to home, I think.
:-)
E
ewoh:
I think it would probably depend on if you could write--knowing they would read it--without self-editing. Lose the honesty in writing and something is missing, which is why I admire Sedaris so much.
E
If you ever followed up on your idea, the book could be helpful to a lot of women. Just looking from the outside, I sure see a lot of stress (and the need for Erma Bombeck on steroids-type humor) for the millions of women in this group.
Kath:
I may play around with it privately for now. It would definitely be about finding the humor line.
E
Hmmm...you could always keep a "secret" blog for now until all the ideas have fleshed themselves out more clearly. That way you can kinda see for yourself if having that much personal story is "do-able" in your eyes. I think it's a great idea, and like your friend "Kath Calarco" says, writing about it from a humourous, yet honest perspective leads to healing/reconcilation of some sort. So even if you don't make it into a book, it will still have served some sort of a purpose. That's how I felt after I finished my memoir that no one wants to publish. :D
And my mom stayed with my dad out of spite too. Makes for some humourous family gatherings, eh????
Realm:
Well . . . to be honest, in my parents' case, you have to read "spite" like a Seinfeld episode. They are still MADLY in love with each other, total soul mates, totally crazy about each other.
E
Realm:
P.S. . . . . in that respect, as wacky as my family is, it's actually very loving. Insane. But VERY loving.
:-)
E
Okay, get outta my head!
Erica,
I was seriously just thinking about sending you a private email about just this topic today...
For me, there is that line about including people in my real life in any writing. It feels like taking advantage or invading their privacy. At the same time though, your relationships with people are imperative to who you are and what your experience is... so how do you leave it out?
With the current wip it's becoming increasingly difficult, because the story is set in my neighborhood. The neighborhood itself is the same, but I've developed these characters with their own lives and have tried to be very careful about not intersecting their stories with real people. But I have a feeling that anyone from that neighborhood will read it and find themselves in the pages - I don't know yet if that's good or not. The best writing I've done, the stuff that most moves me, always comes from home.
And then, lately, I've had real world people reading my blog. That's never been an issue before - it was mostly writing circle people and there's nothing on it that would or should embarrass anyone... but lately when I put any personal stories on there I'll get a call from someone on it... which is making me self-censor, and that's a hard place to write from. I've never gotten a complaint by a person who was in there, and I don't think I've ever used anyone's name... but now I'm rethinking stories I was going to write...
And I wonder if it's one of those cosmic things. I've been shoving off that fear that the writing is too close to home with the wip, to push through without censoring myself... so now I've got the same issue with the blog. Maybe it's God's way of making me deal with it first.
Again, we have many parallels. I started my book as a memoir about my life as a divorced mom, what it's like to be single when everyone around you is married, what it's like to have an ex get married and what it's like to have him die.
I couldn't write it. I mean, I could write it. But I could not do it to my children. Even though the pages were about how I dealt with things and was from my POV, it is a story we share. Their pain will never be my gain.
So, I ripped out some of the real and added surreal. I made it better, worse, crazier, saner. I made it what it wasn't, with a touch of what it was, and I made up people, which I never thought i could do. The problem with flipping a story - is that people always think they see what isn't there. It's a quandary still for me, but I have truth as my defense.
It's fiction.
I think you're right to wonder to whom the stories belong...and you are right to care for them, well, carefully.
Hi Merry:
We always seem to hop in each other's heads. :-)
You know . . . I feel that it is a writer's curse to self-censor. And developing the ability to be really honest and truthful (even in fiction) is something probably either done from the get-go (i.e., I find teenage writers to be really honest because they usually don't give a shit about offending anyone . . . they write more raw) . . . or suppressed and then developed in the same way you develop a voice.
In fiction, I make absolutely NO apologies. That is my world. But I also won't answer questions about it. My stock answer is: "It's fiction." What people read into it is their own problem (such as the woman I referenced yesterday). I "own" it from that perspective. And as solicitous as I sometimes am in real life, to avoid hurting people's feelings, I am NOT with respect to my fiction. If it hurts someone because THEY choose to read about themselves through the fictional veil (which may not even be so), that is their problem. For instance, in Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven, the ex-husband is called Spawn of Satan. I really do not feel that way about my ex-husband at all. But at the TIME of my divorce, he had once threatened me in such a way as I could draw on that experience to write about a woman terrified of losing her children because she was sick. Now . . . if he chose to read that book and be offended? That's his problem.
As for my blog, it is weird in that more people I know from my real life drop by, but by now, my writing muscle is total honesty, so frankly . . . it is what it is. I can't stop writing what I write here. My mother-in-law, whom I have shared has no interest in seeing or even meeting her grandchildren, and who loathes me . . . occasionally, if I reference that, my significant other hears from that side of the family. His stock answer is "It's her blog and her business. If you don't want to read what she has to say, don't read it."
E
Erica, my first writing project was a memoir about me and my husband and how we ended up in Mexico. While it focused on us, I did have a chapter that touches on my real dad and things that I've never talked to him about. I chose to write it truthfully, knowing that if it ever went anywhere, I'd have to have a little chat with him.
For now I've put it aside, but one side effect of writing it is how honest I've been about our immigration struggles. It's a large part of my memoir and I knew I'd have to get used to people knowing my business if it's ever published.
I think you should write it for yourself now, and see what happens in the future. You may decide to edit, but you may love it so much you'll decide it's worth sharing your family with the world.
Some things are too personal to share, probably why fiction is so alluring. I do love, though, how life gives you amazing feedback.
Melanie:
Great advice--obviously from one who knows. I think I will play around with it.
E
LaDonna:
My heart is always in fiction, I think.
E
When you write about your life in non-fiction be prepared to be judged. I love memoirs and read one about a woman who was a cutter (you've sat on a writing panel with her). I think she has regrets about publishing this because she asked another memoir writer the question, "Do you ever feel that people act like they know you when the truth is they know nothing, just that little bit you've revealed?" The impression her tone of voice gave was that she felt they judged her as lesser person for what she was.
Hi Richmond:
I do know who you are talking about and thought writing about that was brave. Then I read some reviews. And for the most part, she got very good reviews. But one mainstream (can't recall which) review pub--either PW or Kirkus or someone--wrote a scathing review basically saying she had no insight into her own self. It struck me as cruel.
As I said here, my own take is on the hilarity of dysfunction and chaos. Demon Baby would be part of it. But then, I had a friend who wrote about her kids, and people were so nasty about her as a mother. Basically that she was mining her kids' lives. I don't know. I have had a few real life readers ask me if Demon Baby knows he has a Demon Baby blog. And I think people think I'm a little nuts . . . but I feel like that blog is a tribute to his uniqueness. I also feel like my kids have a mother who is a f/t writer and this is part of who I am for them and with them. So . . . it is what it is. However, maybe someday they will all go into therapy and say I was a horrid woman who wrote stories about them. You never know.
E
Oh I know....that's exactly how it is with our family. There's all this "dysfunctionalism" going on, but in a very loving offbeat sort of way, that just doesn't get any better. I know EXACTLY where you're coming from. :)
Wouldn't trade my family for the world!!!
I guess it's different if you're going to write a story as non-fiction. That means you're firmly stating that this is *your* story---I don't know. I much prefer fiction, where you can take bits and pieces from many different places and people, and soften edges or sharpen others.
This is a great question! Good luck with whatever you decide to do!
I am attempting to write a memoir style nonfiction book about my days working for a morally bankrupt boss at a small Texas feed store and have found it harder to be honest about myself and remember the past than it is to simply make up fiction.
I definitely mine my family's life when I write non fiction. Luckily, they think it's hilarious. My kids have become minor celebrities in their school! The other kids thought it was cool. Go figure. I was a bit nervous about that.
When I wrote "Shrink Rap" I literally ran it by family members, if I thought they might be offended - particularly my mom, who is a very private person. She vetoed a couple of stories, and I was fine with that.
Last thought - there's a way to write about people and give a more superficial overview, with deeper glimpses, while keeping the more private parts to yourself. Even if I write about something that seems incredibly personal, I keep some stuff held away for me only.
I'm a total chicken, because I write under a pseudonym and I did write about a very personal memory, almost identical to what really happened.
It was definitely a turning point in my writing. Before, I think I'd gotten a few reader emails, but after, I heard from readers more. I think it encouraged me to allow myself to be more vulnerable and more honest when I write.
But at the same time, it's the one novella that, with distance, has so many problems I don't know how to edit it. It's such a mess. There are bits I love, and I wish I could throw the whole thing away and write it again with what I know now.
C'est la vie. What can you do?
Chris:
Yeah . . . I think the rules change when you say, "This is my story and I'm sticking to it."
Travis:
Totally hear you!!!
I worked for a corrupt bank, briefly, in the 80s. WOW . . . what a story that was. But having to get the details right? Maybe one day in a novel.
E
Robin;
Amazing insights.
Your blog is always so honest . . . so utterly funny and poignant . . . you have a knack for nonfiction, and I am sure your fiction will be awesome.
E
spy:
When I wrote short stories, I found the ones that sucked the most were closest to truth. LOL! I think I like hiding in my fiction.
E
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