I say no. I always say no. Essay and memoir writers don’t mess with plot or chronology, don’t invent dialogue or combine characters. One wrestles with words, molds language, atmosphere, tone, suspense—not history. The bones of the story are already there, laid across the table, and to bare it exactly is the writer’s role. Nonfiction is supposed to tell the truth—and telling the truth is what people suppose us to do. I have been stricter, even puritanical, about this than many writers I admire. (It does not escape me that obsessive concern with facts is an antidote to chaotic childhoods. Finding one’s secret turmoil to be the mundane anecdotes of psychology textbooks isn’t quite a cure.)
My students are disappointed when I answer their questions. Many clearly not only want me to say yes, they expect me to say it: yes, you can create, invent, conflate; yes, you can fill in the details. They are surprised when I say no.
Instead, I tell my students to write down all they can remember, all of it, to put everything in, all the chaff, all the crap, all the garbage. Only then do you find the wheat, the treasures. Wheat and chaff are entwined and must be thrown to the wind in order to separate. Put it all in because you may be wrong about which is which. Figure out your agendas, your vengeance, your grief and desire. Use the confusion and forgetfulness, the sound of crickets in August twilight, the thud of a heavy shoe stopping outside your bedroom door. So goes my lecture, and my students nod and write it down. Wheat, they carefully note. Chaff. Sound of shoes.
Our lives are uncertain, I tell them. Make that uncertainty part of what you tell. Believing that, taking it as my own measure, I am a liar, too.
A FEW MONTHS after my father died, my brother and sister and I were cleaning out his house. My father had lived alone for the last twelve years of his life, shrinking in on his grief at my mother’s death and his fifth decade of alcoholism. His house was not dirty, thanks in part to my sister’s regular visits, but it was as untouched as a crypt. A layer of dust covered almost everything—my mother’s books, his record albums, the cans of soup in the pantry, all gray with a fine, silky silt. His suits were wrapped in dry-cleaning plastic years old, and his bedroom was piled high with mail-order travel and history books still in their cardboard packages, books he couldn’t be bothered to refuse. When we began cleaning his house, we were literally dismantling it. I gathered up an armload of books from the position they’d been in as long as I can recall, and I half expected the house to come down around me, its structural integrity suddenly gone.
I bought my siblings lunch at the brewpub where the Sambo’s used to be. Perched up on teetery bar stools, we finally began talking about the furniture, the old dusty house, and what to do with it all. On the rare days when we are all together we are in a web made more of the tension between us than the strengths of our bonds. I hold each of our quiet conversations or pleasant hours as though they were ancient papyrus about to dissolve; I hold them with great care because they are so few. I was glad to be there, to be doing this, eating bar food next to the shiny vats of ale in the building that once upon a time had been the orange diner we hung out in after high school. The change from then to now measured the arc of my life. I was more than ready to tackle a project that had begun to seem more like archeology than grief. Do you want the green chair? one of us asked, and the mood was generous, without rancor. Do you want the kitchen table, the circular saw, the car?
Then this happened. We go back to the house and into the kitchen. I lean over the tiny kitchen table with its uncomfortable wrought-iron chairs and ask my sister, “Do you want this table?” And she loses her hold all at once, flaring like a gas main, and stomps past me as heavy and hard as my father had stomped, knocking the chairs aside. I feel a strange peace. I am standing at last in the DMZ of my own history, the small neutral territory where enemies meet and no one is right and no one is wrong.
“I already told her!” she shouts to my brother. “No one ever listens to me!” Together they run out to the yard. I’m standing in the kitchen door watching through the window as they yell at each other. I can’t hear the words. Then my sister peels out of the driveway in her Ford Explorer, almost taking my brother’s foot off where he stands, broad-shouldered, hands clenched, watching her go.
HOW CAN I tell my sister that I’m not writing about her at all? I’m writing about me—who she is in my life and work is not who she is in hers. The me you see is not the me who sees you. My students ask over and over again. I answer them. But I don’t believe what I say. My sister would tell a different story about that day; a story with a different moral, a different wound. How can I blame her? (Do I pretend that I am above blaming? What a comfortable place to be.) Alexander Smith called the essayist “a law unto himself.” We’ve heard it all before—we’ve said it all more than once, to each other, to our angry sources. Grist to the mill.
When it is my turn, I am like a pitcher facing a hard drive straight back to the mound; the ball so assuredly flying away shoots back, with no time to prepare. I have carefully avoided reviews of my new book, delicately stepping past them, whatever they may say. I’ve learned to shield my writing, when I can, from the work of being published; they are sometimes quite different things. But by accident I come across a brief review in the back of an influential national magazine. A bad review—mean. I flinch, read sideways, don’t finish. I call my editor, a friend, other writers. They commiserate—it’s really not fair. I have long conversations with my bedroom ceiling: defense, summation, resounding acquittal—and no one to tell. I can’t resist, and go back to count up: four or five short reviews in this magazine every week, and for months all are kind, a growing mound of genteel enthusiasm. Except for one review. Except for mine. It is so not fair.
“Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one’s past,” writes Jules Feiffer in his novel about identity, Ackroyd. One tried “to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.” I don’t get to talk back. No one ever does. But I write, and own the truth of every story I write because I write it. In writing it, I make it the truth. Complaints are impotent—competing versions of the story I’ve already told, and much less likely to be believed.
MY FRIEND MARIA Dolan has been working for years on an essay about her relationship with her parents during their divorce in her childhood. She has long been stuck somewhere in this tragic, funny memory of her girlhood. This particular block is partly my fault; I once told Maria not to think so much about whether the story was true, but whether it was fair, and now she can’t write at all.
“My desire to be fair means I never think it’s finished,” she tells me. “Since I keep interacting with my parents, I don’t want to freeze them in the way they used to be. I struggle to tell the story in a way that reveals them as people who can and will change.”
In the last few years, I’ve begun to tell my students that we can only say so much about the truth, and the facts, vital as they are, are not exactly the point. What we really want to write down are the unprovable facts, the experiences that can never be defined but demand to be considered, truths that seem to contradict each other and therefore can’t be true. One wants what I call the felt truth most of all. How easy to rationalize hurting people. How easy to say that our feelings count more than the facts.
My friend Deborah asks what I’m working on, and I describe this story I am writing now, and she tells me about something that happened when she was eighteen. It was the late 1960s in Los Angeles, and she was about to move into an apartment with her boyfriend. Her father often wrote her long letters of advice, and he did so then, carefully explaining why he thought this was a mistake. But her father also happened to be an editor at the Los Angeles Times, and after mailing Deborah her letter, he printed it on the editorial page.
He meant well, she added. She has not quite forgiven him.
Are we foolish enough to think others can rely upon our goodness of heart? Let us trust each other, our hope of redemption, our best u
se of words. But most of us don’t know ourselves well enough to know how good we really are—else we wouldn’t be writing so many words about what’s happened to us and what we’ve done, and how it felt and what it might mean in the end.
I REMEMBER MY childhood as though it were a silent movie with the subtitles removed—made out of black-and-white snapshots and the jerky 8mm whirring in the background. Bend and pick up an Easter egg and hold it up for the camera. Pose on the sled in the soft snow falling like a fog across the lens. The most vivid moments are recorded nowhere but in me, and yet they have the same quality, this mute and almost self-conscious quality of being recorded somehow. I am swimming across a silent lake through a dawn mist in the shadow of a white mountain, at first fearful and then exultant as I’ve never been before. I am sitting in the crotch of my grandmother’s black walnut tree, listening to the ratcheting of the blue jays above me, and there is nothing in the world but blue jays and walnut bark and nothing else needed at all. I am sitting at the dinner table when my father explodes and grabs my sister and begins spanking her, and she is yelling and my mother is crying and I leap from my own chair and shout at him to stop, to leave her alone, to leave us all alone. And the film fades out into black and the rest is unknown—after the lake, after the tree, the shouting, what?
For a long time after I left my parents’ home, I was drawn to simple stories—ones with obvious narrative devices and clear morals. That was how I told my own story, explained myself to me—in starkly defined characters with set roles and explicable motives. As time passed, these stories were less satisfying—less true. But the conventions of storytelling have a strong pull. We want neat endings and known winners. We want to answer that question—what happened next, what did it mean?—with all our hearts. We want to answer it so much we make out of the fragments a kind of whole cloth.
Memory is terribly uncertain, made as it is out of callow ignorance and youth. We invert the chronology, combine characters, reorient the compass of our lives, until it is like a vaguely remembered dream with potent and cryptic elements in random order. It is up to the dreamer to decide what each element means. We can only know this moment and try to see it clearly, this moment of remembering those moments then, a world long gone in which someone I used to be used to live. The very best we can hope for is the ability to tell a truth, some truth or other, some portion of it, and tell it as close as possible to the moment of its being true, before it changes into something else again.
I find now that a lot of my questions can’t be answered at all. Not being able to remember exactly is a story, too. And the story doesn’t end, doesn’t really have a moral, sometimes the crooks have good hearts and the heroes are corrupt and sometimes I can’t tell which is which, and that has to be the story I tell.
CLEANING OUT MY father’s closet this spring, I find a grocery bag filled with color slides dating from the 1940s. In among the weddings of strangers and blurry backyard luaus are hundreds of pictures of my brother and my sister and me when we were young that I have never seen before.
We are often together here, if nowhere else. From year to year, in summer and winter, by the riverbank and the Christmas tree, we stand beside each other—the kids, only a few years apart, bound together.
My brother leans toward the camera, grinning, perfecting self-confidence. By the age of five, he is a sturdy and seemingly fearless boy. At three, I am hardy and strong. He and I almost look like twins, except he smiles widely and I face the camera with composure—a rugged girl in jeans, giving nothing away. My little sister is pretty and dark with charming bee-stung lips and black hair falling in big, natural curls.
Photographs are false truths, too. My brother’s confidence is shallow, brittle. My composure is deeply cracked. And my sister, who is almost dainty, is crying or beginning to cry or has just finishing crying. She sits on our mother’s lap, with big eyes, because we have left her behind, forever ditched in the backyard when we want to climb trees. She isn’t plump; I was wrong; how could I have remembered it that way? I was wrong and I was right, for this is what I meant by that word—this fragility, this girlish weakness in a world where weakness was lethal. These are the chorus lines beneath the singers. Beneath it’s not fair and that’s not true runs this river: I was strong. You were weak. You walked away and left me behind. You stayed behind, and I survived. You—we’re not sure about you yet.
MOST WRITERS APPROACH a new story like a boxer circling the ring—with a certain reluctance to engage and break the spell of what might be. To write memoir is to live in what is—not only the truth, but the story one is capable of writing and not the great story of which we dream.
I was excited when I began to write “The Basement.” The anthology was a good project—a dozen or so writers were each assigned a room; we had only to write a true story about something that happened in that room. I wanted to write about my grandmother’s basement, where we spent a lot of time as children. I could revisit that world where my brother and sister and I were together, a gang of three. I would write about driving to Grandma’s house in the old station wagon, how we would run through the living room and down the basement stairs and play all day long in a child-driven world while our boring relatives visited upstairs. I began there, and then I was paralyzed for two months. I could write nothing at all. I played solitaire for hours, read mysteries, took naps.
Toward the end of my writing workshops, when everyone’s guard is down and little secrets have slipped out, when the room is as safe as rooms of nascent writers can be, I sometimes ask students to fill in the blanks of this sentence: “I can’t write about __ because __ .” I give them only a few minutes, time for a few words.
Then I make two columns on the blackboard. On the left, I list the first words they wrote: A car accident. Sex. Parents’ divorce. A crime I committed. This is hard for the students, to say out loud what can’t be written. Then, on the right, I list the reasons: I feel guilty. Feelings will get hurt. It’s embarrassing. No one cares.
Finally, I erase the column on the left—the events, the memories, the ideas. The stories. All that matters is the reasons. Those are the stories—this is what you write: how it feels to commit a crime, to be afraid, to not know how it ends. This is what all good stories are about. Start there, I tell them. Start there.
I sank for two months into the lassitude of unspent words until I started to ask myself that question. “I can’t write about Grandma’s basement because—because—” Because. Because I was so lonely there it was as though I’d already died. Because childhood is a dangerous place. Because we were ordered into that basement and it seemed to me that we might never be allowed to come out, that the whole world was filled with sunlight I would never see. Because I hated my grandmother, and you are not allowed to hate your grandmother. Right before me like a ghost in the room was that poor little girl with her solemn face and her jeans and dirty t-shirt—right before me stood that poor thing who is not me and has not been me for a long, long time, and I started writing like crazy.
So I wrote the truth no one but me knows and no one but me can tell. I rewrote history: down, down to the basement we go in the story, again and again, and at the end of the story, up I come, and fly away. That is the moral of my true story, that I did fly away, on wings light as the summer, wings I made out of words like these.
My friend Maria says she is unwilling to freeze her parents in their mutual past. I tell her that the story will also freeze her, in its telling. We fear getting stuck with the claims we make, with any day’s untidy thoughts. It isn’t just the people who live on; the story also lives on, its narrator lives on—forever the same, saying the same things, the writer’s ghost. When I look over books and essays I’ve written, they were clearly written by someone else. I could not have written these stories—that is not my point of view, these are not my beliefs, this is not my voice. It is not me, they are not true, and it is not fair.
One of the few things I wrote about my father in the new
book is that my mother brought him a Bloody Mary in the morning. It was part of her ritual day, and meant to say as much about her as him. What I didn’t say, what my sister called family business, was known by the whole small town: his decades of drunkenness, just keeping his job, sleeping much of the rest of the day away, the sudden snapping of temper like a hurt dog, the kind of drunkenness that makes morning such a trial my mother had to bring him a drink while he still lay beneath the covers, and after he’d taken it he’d totter slowly into the kitchen where we were eating our Frosted Flakes and reach behind me into the cupboard to pull out the whiskey and pour himself a neat two fingers, his hair uncombed and his crumpled pajamas sour with the night, and then shuffle back, like an old, old man, to dress for the day.
I didn’t write that. I didn’t use the bare words. I told myself it was tangential to the story. I told myself there were too many musty confessions of alcoholic childhoods out there, it was a too-familiar territory. In fact, I could see my brother’s face, my sister’s face, wanting it not to be true. Most of all, I could see the composed face of that plain little girl, who was such a tough cookie and loved her daddy after all.
“Please don’t use my name without my permission again,” my sister adds, late at night, alone in her room. And the please makes my heart flip over. It is so plaintive. But I don’t stop. I don’t have the right to tell these stories. How could I have the right to the lives of others, to their former selves and hard losses? These stories are like slamming doors. No right to speak unprovable truths. Life’s not fair. It’s all so not fair.
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