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Writing About Your Family:
Respecting Boundaries, Taking Risks
Tips from remarks by three speakers at
the Writers Life 2011 program, co-sponsored by the National Writers
Union and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.
(notes by Barbara Beckwith)
Katrina Kenison, author of The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother's Memoir,
"backed into this book." She'd spent a year researching a book on the
stress high school students feel when preparing for college. One say,
she put the book aside and simply expressed her feelings, which her
editor like better than the book she was supposed to write. In order to
write the book, which was about raising her two teenaged sons, she
thought it best to write with the assumption that no one would read it.
But when it came out, she felt exposed, as if she was running around
town in her pajamas. Her readers thanked her for her honesty; her
family's response was more mixed. Her husband felt hurt: she'd focused
on the central story (since memoir can be overwhelming) and he felt
left out. As for her sons, she'd given them a chance to read the
manuscript. Her older son read it and appreciated learning about
physical problems he'd had at birth, which explained a lot, giving him
a sense of the shape of his life. He objected only to details ("I never
put raisins in the cookie! That day was NOT the World Series!"). Her
younger son didn't read the manuscript and later took issue with every
statement ("How could you write about hiding my black shirt!").
Happily, he soon got over it, being more interested in the present than
the past. Kenison realized that every family member had a different
memory; "you're not going to please everyone -- it's an occupational
hazard." Since she wanted her sons to trust her, she would ask herself,
in deciding what to leave in or take out: "What's more important: the
story or the relationship?" It helped that as a writer, she chose not
to use her married name, which was also her sons' last name, but
instead, as Katrina Kenison.
Marianne Leone's Knowing Jesse: A Mother's Story of Grief, Grace, and Everyday Bliss
(Simon and Shuster), now out in paperback as Jesse: A Mother's Story,
grew out of an essay she published in the Boston Globe after her son
died at age 17. Leone, who describe herself as growing up in a working
class Newton neighborhood, came late to prose. She was an actor and had
sold a screenplay but started writing this memoir for personal reasons:
"selfishly, to spend time with Jesse" and to alleviate the pain of
loss. Her son, born with cerebral palsy, was paraplegic and non-verbal,
but became a Latin scholar, poet and honor student. Her memoir
describes the lengths to which she and her husband Chris Cooper (the
actor), went to insure that schools and medical personnel appreciate
Jesse's full potential.
Writing a memoir in which you name abuses can be problematic. Leone
wrote frankly about an abusive aide, a clueless teacher or doctor,
although she did change the names. She got most flak from describing
the upbringing of a beloved aide as "hardscrabble" which offended the
aides mother. Simon and Shuster vetted the book and assured her hat she
needn't worry ("We do mafia books"). But Leone is now writing fiction.
Jan Freeman is the author of three poetry books, Hyena, Simon Says, and Autumn Sequence, all largely about family, and editor of Sisters, An Anthology (Paris
Press). Her motivation for writing is "to understand something" and her
first collection was a coming our book that told an emotional truth.
She chose "comfortable" poems to read at her book party, rather than
those with erotic lesbian content, but knew that everyone in her family
had bought her book and would go home and read those she hadn't read.
Her father seemed so uncomfortable with her poems that he stopped
reading poetry, which hurt, since he had been the one who had
introduced her to Rilke and Roethke.
Freeman's impetus for editing and publishing an anthology about
sisters, was personal. After her friend's sister died, she looked for
and could not find such a book. She put out a call for submissions that
drew pieces in various genres, mostly about sexual abuse or a sister's
death. She chose those that achieved "transcendence," which she defined
as the ability to speak to a broad readership. She faced the
"respecting boundaries" issue again when deciding whether to include a
poem of her own. "My sister's discomfort made me decide just to be
editor," said Freeman. Her sister's advice to anyone who writes about
family: Wait until the family's dead.
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