Erasing Family Stories—and Reclaiming Them

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing


I learned to erase stories at a young age.

This profoundly inhibited my writing, so much so that I didn't realize it until well past college and into adulthood. Then, in the late 1980s, I took a workshop with Bobbie Louise Hawkins, the indie fiction writer and poet, in which she urged us to write down a family story.

Every family has stories, she said in her tell-tale drawl, stories they tell for comfort, for fun, for explanation—even if it's the wrong explanation. Family stories are powerful, she said.

I nodded along. But I felt my arms locking around my body. A stone seemed to lodge in my throat. I could visualize the stone—egg-shaped, smooth, glittering, obsidian—but no story.

At the time, her collection Almost Everything, which includes "Back to Texas" about Bobbie Louise's childhood, seemed like an unsentimental gem to me. In "When I was little...," she writes:

"The bottom fell out of melons that year and made them not worth the picking. We would walk along the rows busting ripe melons and eating only the heart. It was a luxury that took some heroism; the sand was hot as a frying pan and we were bare-footed."

I remember Bobbie Louise exhorting us to delete all adverbs and adjectives. That wasn't hard for me to do. But stripping out the sloppy language left me with nothing like a melon's heart.

I had no tall tales to draw on, I realized, no stories about larger-than-life aunts or uncles or "favorite cousins." I didn't come from a Southern storytelling tradition. But worse, I came from a family with little motivation to remember.

Growing up with a mentally ill parent encouraged helpless watching. Our family creed was constant erasure of pain, of blame. For the budding writer I was, it undercut my ability to convey what I saw.

My mother used to tell me to lie about her affliction, especially on medical forms, because of the prejudice against the mentally ill. This became a received truth for me, an uncontested way of being. Meanwhile, she often abandoned her own advice, explaining her diagnosis to work acquaintances, hair-cutters, postal carriers, grocery-store checkers.

Now I see too well the problem with erasing the consequences of breakdowns and raging fits, of shifting the blame in euphemisms such as "your mother was sick." For a good story, you need protagonists, not helpless watchers. You need someone to admit what's wrong.

When children grow up with adults erasing and reworking the truth, those kids can rebel. They also freeze up.

I've done both, and I still imagine every line I write disappearing as soon as the pencil moves on, every word I type vanishing on the screen. I see a little girl hunkering at the bottom of a deep hole, only a circle of blue sky above.

I see teenage me scribbling in lined yellow notepads, drawing cartoons, some of sexy women with ballooning breasts, some of angels and fairies—and every one of these forbidden images erased as soon as I mark it down.

Bad things would happen in our family—even good things—but nobody ever talked about them. I grew up with no sense of shared narrative, no comforting beginnings, middles, and ends. For a girl who loved The Lord of the Rings and Sherlock Holmes and Mary Renault novels and the Greek myths, it was like being blindfolded. 

Then, I think, that's not true. We did talk about the time my mother trudged all the way up Mt. Lassen, as if she'd conquered Everest. We talked about our adventures driving across the Mojave desert late at night, eating pinion nuts at dawn in our over-heating Dodge. I think we must have.

Yet the tenuousness of my own memories disturbs me. I do remember, but few events of my childhood were converted into cherished stories we told over and over. Without that cherishing, memories become endangered, too.

For the longest time, pulling together stories or articles eluded me as a professional writer, no matter how much I knew about expository writing. I wrote poetry, but my impulse faltered there, too. Even in the most non-linear of forms, truth eventually needs to shine through.

It's not an accident that I toiled as an editor of other people's stories for years. For at least a decade, my husband and close friends knew I was doing the equivalent of yanking my own hair out—I need time to write! When will I ever have time to write?—trapped by my own tangle of frustrations.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins is not immune from erasing and reworking the truth of her life. She was once unhappily married to the poet Robert Creeley, and I remember her talking about her insomnia, her own depression. Perhaps reshaping stories is what all writers do. Yet mining our own lives does seem like the right place to start. You can't get to the poetic compression of Bobbie Louise's work, for example, without acknowledging what came before.

Here's how she autographed my copy of Almost Everything: "For Martha, with pleasure—keep it up—see you again! Bobbie Louise Hawkins, August 6, 1988." I haven't seen her since, but even the hint that I had something to share or "keep up" has propelled me forward. That workshop became a turning point.

Now I write down every passing idea in my writing notebooks, and they pile up year after year. Sometimes I read through a notebook cover to cover, especially when I'm on a long airplane ride by myself, when I have time to stare at the clouds, to allow that smooth obsidian egg its due.

My notebooks are rich in ideas, stories, anecdotes, mental life, but often I come across entries that I've completely forgotten. It's not just that I'm getting older; I was well schooled in how to forget. But I don't want to forget. Not ever again. I'm obsessed with the notion of writing it all down, of the words remaining solid and present.

Sometimes I worry I'll lose the notebooks, they'll burn in a house fire, they'll be stolen.

It still comes hard in my own family, telling stories with my young son. But I make sure that we talk about "the time you had to swallow that malaria pill and you kept spitting it out" or "the time you sprayed insect repellent in your eyes, and you screamed so loud we had to call Poison Control. We had to hold you close until you calmed down."

I know this pool of stories is the underground life of my family. For an adoptee like my son, having family stories to draw on, to claim, seems crucial for his evolving sense of self. We build identity through stories, through being allowed to speak—not by keeping our mouths shut.

In a 2004 monologue, which she performed at the Naropa Summer Writing Program in Boulder, Colorado, Bobbie Louise Hawkins talks about a "happy ending" ironically, poignantly, wisely:

"It's time to adore the mundane. The daily is your heart's desire. The mundane world must be our joy. The daily, be our darling. The commonplace, be our morning song. The usual, be our heaven. The common place, our morning star. The usual. Sit on the veranda, drink tea, watch ducks navigate the pond. It is summer. And you are living a very long, unfinished, Russian novel...."

Yes. Every family has their own version of War and Peace. Mine hovers somewhere between The Idiot and Nabokov's Pale Fire.

But I've learned to live with my guilt and shell-shock. I've learned "to adore the mundane," because I'm writing my own Russian novel.

Uh-Oh, Mom's a Writer: The Ethics of Memoirs About Kids

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing

It's so tempting: One minute my seven-year-old son is a goofball, the next he's a sage. The anecdotes overflow my journal, the Post-it notes on my desk. Before long, he's my lead.

I'm not the first parent-writer to realize I've stumbled on to the greatest subject of my life. Writing about myself in relationship with a constantly evolving, inscrutable other person takes me beyond narcissism, I hope.

But do parents have a right to tell a child's story, even anecdotally? And what justifies the telling? These questions have begun weighing on me, as I write more frankly in print about my experiences as an adoptive parent. I've also started several blogs—and there's my biggest problem. With the touch of a few keys, my son is exposed and parsed in a new viral medium.

Blogging revels in the personal and in many ways demands it, as do memoirs, from the literary to tacky tell-alls. At least one recent book has sparked new concerns about a perennial dilemma for writers: the ethics of family memoirs. But I have a feeling those outraged by Julie Myerson's The Lost Child haven't yet cruised through Dooce.com.

Myerson, a literary writer, has been exoriated in the British press for "incontinent exhibitionism" in detailing her son's addiction to skunk—a high-powered form of marijuana. An excellent piece by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times discusses The Lost Child blow-up and the ethical ambiguities it poses.

The few excerpts I've read of The Lost Child are moving as well as cringe-inducing. I suspect this is the reason it's set off such howls among other writers. I cringe in part from my own recognition of ethical lines I might have crossed.

In the coda to her book, Myerson describes her son's response to reading the manuscript: "You and your short, snappy little sentences, he says. I know what you're doing, you know."

Even the most honest memoir writer turns herself and family members into characters. Professional writers know how to make their constructions appear more "real" than reality itself. Those who are skilled like Myerson are experts at creating emotional impact.

“You have to write the book you have to write," she says in the Times Online. "I write with a piece of my heart that I don't really have full control over."

But confusing the "uncontrolled" writing process with the published product is disingenuous. The more such writing moves readers, the more it seems true. And riveting stories often fool us into thinking that one author's take on the world translates into everybody else's.

This is the most treacherous ground for writers. The hyper-reality of good memoir and feature writing can expand our understanding of the truth. But depending on blind spots, it can easily become self-congratulatory. That goes for all those cute stories about toddlers that populate slick magazines and parenting blogs, too. I like to think I know what the ethical boundaries are when writing about my son. But I'd be lying if I said he'll thank me as an adult for the articles I'm writing now. I simply don't know how he'll feel.

Adoption memoirs provide a good case study of the ethical dilemma for parent-writers. Who's verison of an adoption is true—the adoptive parent's? the adoptee's? the social worker's? the birth parent's?

In the past decade, a growing crowd of white adoptive parents have written memoirs about adopting internationally, including investigative reporter Jeff Gammage's China Ghosts—the "No. 1 adoption book on Amazon." A smaller number of memoirs by adult Asian adoptees (Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood, Katy Robinson's A Single Square Picture, Mei-Ling Hopgood's Lucky Girl) counter such parental visions with more complicated identity struggles. As for birth parents, their side of the story is rarely heard.

While the debate about who gets to tell an adoptee's story is healthy, the fuss over Myerson has reduced the dilemma to a clash between those who think she's a bad mom and those who call her brave for speaking out.

But there's another slippery slope for writers as well: not saying enough about difficult topics, especially in the short format of a blog. Anita Tedaldi's controversial New York Times post on a terminated adoption, "My Adopted Son," is disturbing not because it's so heart-breaking (it is) or because she reveals too much (she doesn't). I applaud Tedaldi's honesty—as many have—but I'm troubled by all that is not explained.

Tedaldi, the mother of five biological daughters, describes her failure to bond with a baby boy she adopted from South America:

"[W]hile it was easy, and reassuring, to talk to all these experts about D.’s issues, it was terrifying to look at my own. I had never once considered the possibility that I’d view an adopted child differently than my biological children. The realization that I didn’t feel for D. the same way I felt for my own flesh and blood shook the foundations of who I thought I was."

In many ways, this is an amazing admission, and she's right that this child has likely gone to a better home. Tedaldi does her best to keep his identity anonymous. Yet does she really believe it's easier for a mother to attach to a biological child? Or is it just her? She skirts a hard answer, which leaves this zinger in readers' minds, reinforcing all sorts of stereotypes about adoption.

If she had answered this question, she probably would have received even more criticism, especially from other adoptive parents like me. But at least there would have been a real debate about the elephant in the room.

Tedaldi's post appeared in Lisa Belkin's Motherlode blog, and Belkin defends her in a later post, detailing the extremes some commenters went to in unearthing the son's real name in Tedaldi's past work. In "Protecting Your Child's Privacy," Belkin presents this all as a cautionary tale about the ethics of parental memoirs. Yet her discussion has far less bite than an e-mail comment she included from one reader:

"In light of the post by Anita Tedaldi I have a suggestion for a future topic: parental blogging and how it might affect the kids. What’s going to happen in 5 or 10 years (depending on the age of the kids) when they learn how to use Google and find what their parents have been posting about them for the entire world to read?"

Belkin says her basic rule is "no column is worth a relationship”; she clears all references to friends and family with them before publishing anything. Fair enough, but sometimes getting the truth out really does matter. In the bad old days, adoption, for example, was considered a dirty secret that couldn't be discussed.

My rule is to make myself more vulnerable in print than my son, to out my own weaknesses, to call myself to task. So here I sit, typing out my worries, ready to send another post into the blogosphere. I think of my sweet child, sitting beside me and typing his own story on a laptop.

In a recent feature in Brain, Child magazine ("What's My Heritage?"), I consider the aftermath of a difficult family trip we took to Vietnam, his birth country. I close the piece with this anecdote: "He's my son, on his very own planet of one. Last week, he talked about hexagons, all the geometric shapes he's learning about in school. "I wish I could make my own shape.' He smiled to himself. 'I'd make a Saigon.'"

He was delighted to see his name in this article. But to rely on his happy desire "to be famous" now is to fool myself. If I'm not cutting close to the emotional bone, I'm not doing my job as a writer. If I don't feel some guilt—and shut my mouth when appropriate—I'm not doing my job as a parent.

This post originally appeared as an Editor's Pick on Open Salon.