After Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff, two brothers, wrote separate memoirs about their troubled upbringing, Tobias quoted his mother as saying, “If I’d known both my boys were going to be writers, I might have lived a little differently.”
It isn’t easy having a memoirist in the family—someone who, casting a light on his past, can’t help casting some of that light on you. My own mother knows that. I have written a memoir that is an investigation into the death, by suicide, of my father when I was fourteen, but I realized early that I would not be able to make sense of his life without trying to make sense of my mother’s, too. She reminded me of that when I began my research and sat down to interview her about my father. “You know,” she said, “I have a story, too.”
I asked her about that story: about her difficult Depression-era childhood, her joyous teenage romance with my father, her sudden marriage to him at seventeen when she became pregnant, and the two decades that followed in which she gave birth to eight children and witnessed her husband become increasingly distant and sick, physically and mentally.
In My Father Before Me, I wanted to tell the truth, or as much of it as I could discover, but the story I would tell—even if it involved events that occurred to other people, sometimes long before I was born—would necessarily be mine: a memoir is the account of one mind, the writer’s, contemplating a life. The narrative details in the book would be there because I had decided they were relevant, and they would be articulated in words I chose, with all of those words’ attendant tones and implications. Whatever truths the story implied would be my own truths, my own hunches.
My mother must have known this, but she trusted me with her story. My brother and sisters trusted me, too: I interviewed them all about their memories of our father. As I wrote, referring to the facts of their lives, I realized that they might recount those facts differently—or not at all—were they to tell the tale themselves. I began to worry: would my sister feel uncomfortable about my describing an assault she suffered when a stranger broke into the home where she was babysitting? Would my tactful, proud mother feel pain at my mentioning the pregnancy that caused her, as a teenager, to rush to the altar? And how would the family feel about my narrating the final days of my father’s life and the morning of his death, fixing that horrible, perplexing time in language, translating a mysterious and private sadness at the heart of the family into a story for public consumption? Would writing about my family seem an invasion, a pirating of the lives of others in service to some abstract notion of the value of truth and the integrity of art? Could I write an honest book without it seeming a betrayal of the people I loved?
Unlike some writers, I did not feel comfortable waving the flag of art to excuse my hurting people. I gave my mother and siblings veto power concerning what I wrote about them.
I shared drafts with my family, promising to remove anything that struck them as inaccurate, unfair, or too private to mention. They surprised me: no one told me I had revealed too much. My mother requested only two superficial revisions: the deletion of a questionable detail about her father and the rewording of something I’d heard her utter in a quarrel decades ago.
Nonetheless, by the time I finished the book, I sensed that her assent to it was taking some effort. She was saddened especially that, contemplating my childhood, I seemed to recall more tension and discord than joy. When the manuscript was accepted by a publisher and she knew that thousands of strangers would be reading about her marriage, she—perhaps feeling as the Wolff brothers’ mother had—sighed, “I’m glad you wrote a book. I just wish it weren’t this one.”
But she never asked me not to write it. She never requested, even with polite indirectness, that I not publish it. Whatever unease she and my siblings might have felt about my project, they set that feeling aside and trusted me. They let me do what I had to do.
For sharing their tale, memoirists—those revealers of secrets, those untanglers of mysteries—are often called “courageous.” Sometimes the greater courage is that of the other people in the story, the ones who didn’t write it.
Chris Forman’s books of poetry include Black Leapt In and Ransack and Dance. His memoir My Father Before Me is a 2016 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.
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Sig Nordal 