Call Me Charlie

Issue 324

You guys,

How do we write about our parents in memoir?

In earlier drafts of my manuscript I mostly left them out. They were mentioned briefly, peripherally. I reasoned that my memoir spanned ten years of my life when I was far from home. Why distract readers with stories about my parents and upbringing?

In later drafts, after the story was fully on the page, I let myself sit with how my parents had impacted me in ways that had to do with one of the main themes of the book—my relationship with my body image. The details, while not flattering to them, were true and I wanted to include them. But it felt like a takedown, like I was blaming my parents for my own insecurities, and that didn’t feel right either.

Hester Kaplan, the author of Twice Born, wrote an entire memoir about her father. Justin Kaplan (who went by Joe, even to his three children) was the literary biographer of Mark Twain’s biography, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1967. Hester had grievances about her dad—things he’d said and did or didn’t do that had hurt her.

In the following passage, Hester writes about her father when she was a young girl:

“There was almost nothing and no one deemed by my father too sacred to be poked fun of. This extended to children, especially his own, and teasing was a way to bypass the stickier parts of parenting. My disappointment could be turned into a frowning face he drew on the shell of my hard-boiled egg at breakfast. An extended joke that my real mother was a Pakistani woman who’d abandoned me at birth … became a kind of shorthand for my sensitivity, with echoes of his own absent mother. He convinced a friend of mine—we were about twelve years old—that there were traffic lights in the ocean so passing ships didn’t run into each other. It sounded entirely plausible to me, but unlike my friend, I knew better than to admit this and had already learned to take the safer cynical stance. Her gullibility delighted my father, or maybe his delight was in how he could fire up the engines of her imagination, but in either case he didn’t disabuse her of this idea that the vast sea had road rules.

“When the young son of some friends, riding in the back seat of the car, asked my father why he held on to the handle above the door frame, Joe said it was to keep the roof from blowing off. He colored the white spots on the beagle with Magic Markers so the dog might wander the neighborhood in vivid green and pink, and when asked about it, he could tell people that she had been born like that.”

The beginning part of this passage highlights a few parenting flaws of her dad: he was dismissive of her feelings, he turned her disappointment into a joke, he teased that she was adopted. This is reminiscent of the types of things I wrote about my own parents—details that I’m sure they wouldn’t be too thrilled to read, that maybe they weren’t even aware that they had done or that they’d had so much negative impact on me. But what struck me most about this passage was how I felt at the end, which was completely endeared by her father. He was funny and silly and even though he had flaws he was still quite lovable.

When I asked Hester how she approached writing about her dad, and how she thought about sequencing these details, she said,

“The first part of that paragraph is really about me, and my relationship with my father, and then the second part is really about viewing my father as he relates to the world.”

I had been writing my memoir through two lenses—me at the desk and me in the story. Both lenses were through my eyes, whether it was the present day writer, with knowledge and hindsight and empathy, or the character in my past, full of emotion and naïveté. But I had not included this third perspective, which had nothing to do with me and everything to do with how the rest of the world views and observes the characters in my story. What was it like for my friends who came to the house? How did they interact with my mom and dad? What stories did they remember when they thought of my parents?

There was so much more I learned from my conversation with Hester, including the circular nature of writing a book, deciding which details and anecdotes are relevant to the bigger story, what to do with memories that keep surfacing, the inclusion of fiction in memoir, and differences between memoir and biography.

Listen to the episode here.

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Until next week,

Charlie