Andy Nash | March/April 2011

NOTES | HOW TO HANDLE FAMILY SENSITIVITIES

Robertson Davies was once asked why he had waited until he was sixty to write some of his best work. "Well," he replied, "certain people died, you see."1 The fact that Davies was a fiction writer certainly makes the reticence of the nonfiction writer all the more understandable. Forget being sued; what's the Thanksgiving dinner table going to be like when you've just spilled the beans about family and friends?

A Variety of Approaches

The issue of family sensitivities has brought a variety of approaches from memoirists and other nonfiction writers. Some writers, such as Carol Shields, avoid memoir altogether, explaining that it "causes too much ill will."2 Frank McCourt waited to publish Angela's Ashes, which he felt needed to include the story of his mother's affair with her cousin, until after his mother had died.3 Angela Lam Turpin was offered a six-figure advance for her memoir about growing up Chinese-American with a strict authoritarian father. "Do 100 pushups," he had commanded her. "Must have a good chest if you want a good husband." The only condition: that Turpin include even more examples of her father's discipline. Before she accepted the offer, Turpin mailed her manuscript to her father. Sensing his hurt and considering how much he had changed, Turpin turned down the offer altogether. The manuscript has never been published.4

It's not true, as has been reported, that Russell Baker intentionally waited to write Growing Up, which discussed his mother's difficulties during the Depression, until after she was senile. In reality, it was Baker's witnessing of his mother's senility that prompted him to furiously take notes on their conversations and write the memoir. What is true is that Baker writes Growing Up with an air of freedom (given that his mom was no longer capable of being offended), allowing him to describe something as sensitive as strained relations between his mother and grandmother. "She never forgave my mother (for eloping)," he writes, "and my mother returned the scorn measure for measure."5 This tension resurfaces throughout Growing Up, most memorably in an argument between Baker's mother and grandmother, who lived across the street, about eating between meals.

"I'm telling you I don't want him eating jelly bread between meals. He's my child, and he'll do as I tell him."
"Don't you come in here telling me how to raise children. I raised a dozen children, and not one of them ever dared raise their voice to me like you do."
I cowered between them while the shouting rose, but they had forgotten me now as the accumulated bitterness spewed out of them. Finally my mother noticed I was still standing there with the buttered bread in my hand. "I want you to stay on the other side of the road where you belong," she said to me.
"He belongs over here just as much as he belongs over there," my grandmother exclaimed.
The anger seemed to drain suddenly out of my mother. She started to leave but turned at the door and said, very much in control of her temper, "You can eat the butter bread, but I don't want any jelly put on it." At this (Grandmother) jabbed her knife into the jar and smeared the bread with a thick coat of jelly, all the time glaring at my mother.6

The tension and richness of this family drama is undoubtedly one of the reasons Growing Up won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for biography/autobiography. Would Baker have told the story so honestly if his mother had still been clearheaded when he decided to publish it? Probably not. In a later interview, Baker acknowledged that when he asked his wife if he could include her in the book's conclusion, he offered: "If there's anything you want cut, I'll cut it."7

Annie Dillard removed from An American Childhood anything that her family members found offensive. "My parents are quite young," explained Dillard. "My sisters are watching this book carefully. Everybody I'm writing about is alive and well, in full possession of his faculties, and possibly willing to sue.... As a result I've promised to take out anything that anyone objects to—anything at all."8 Beyond her family's cuts, Dillard made additional cuts of her own, leaving out her stories of relationships with boys ("I didn't want to kiss and tell," she says) and instead wrote about boys in general.9

Other memoirists have tiptoed in their own ways around the sensitivities of more-than-interested observers. Of his short classic, My Life and Hard Times, which highlighted the eccentricities of family, friends, and townsfolk, James Thurber told the New York Times that his stories were based on truth—but distorted.10 In his book of memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea,11 Elie Wiesel discussed the pressure a writer feels to include material that might be sensitive and acknowledged leaving such material out:

I am told that to write your memoirs is to make a commitment, to conclude a special pact with the reader. It implies a promise, a willingness to reveal all, to hide nothing. People ask, Are you capable of that? Are you ready to talk about the women you have loved for a year or a night, the people who have helped or denigrated you, the grandiose projects and petty schemes, the true friendship and the ones that burst like soap bubbles, the fruitful adventures and the disappointments, the children dead of starvation and the old men blinded by pain?12

Wiesel then answered the questions he knew would follow:

I mean to recount not the story of my life, but my stories... Certain events will be omitted, especially those episodes that might embarrass friends and, of course, that might damage the Jewish people. Call it prudence or cowardice, whatever you like. No witness is capable of recounting everything from start to finish anyway. God alone knows the whole story.13

The Purists

At the other end of the sensitivity spectrum are memoirists such as Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness (about her childhood in a Pentecostal family) and Hungry for the World (about her teen and young adult years in a world of sex, drugs, and boyfriend abuse). Though Barnes's family members were still alive and coherent at the time of writing, she doesn't hold back in honestly reporting even the most sensitive aspects of her life.

Describing her father's "authoritarian discipline," Barnes writes: "I would lie on my bed wide-eyed, listening for the sound of my father's footsteps coming down the hallway, the slap of the leather belt in his hands.... What both my father and my faith demanded of me was complete obedience, the total submission of my will."14

Barnes later tells of submitting her will to another man, a David Jenkins (not his real name) who at first blush was the perfect gentleman, leaving her flowers at the bank where she worked and even delaying intimacy with her in the early weeks of their relationship. But the relationship turned to dramatic abuse, reaching a zenith when David pushed and pushed Barnes into having sex with other men, all at David's direction. Barnes doesn't go any easier on herself. She acknowledges a "certain curiosity" toward the sexual encounters with her boyfriend's friends and confesses going too far in distancing herself from her family's faith. Telling the "darkest moments of my passage" didn't come easily, writes Barnes,15 knowing that her parents would be reading.

Barnes told the journal Fourth Genre that while she's a fan of Dillard's writing, she disagreed with her approach to family censorship. "I'm very sensitive to the feelings of my family members," said Barnes. "I have no desire to hurt them or injure them in any way with my writing; nonetheless, I believe that memoir writing has to serve the art first, it has to serve literature first, just like fiction should. What can really muck up that process is allowing the family to become censor."16

Barnes held back Hungry for the World from her family until the very last moment. Toward the end of the memoir, Barnes describes telling her religious father about her most private and shameful experiences, including the boyfriend that had prostituted her.

Over the years it has taken me to write this, I have, in small, interlocking pieces, told my mother and father the story... And because my father believes that everything works together for the good, he tells me that there is a reason why I have chosen the paths I have walked.

"It's not that I want to hear these things," he says. "But I'm glad you've told me. It helps me understand."

In an e-mail interview with Barnes, I asked whether she had ever left out anything important to a nonfiction narrative because of family sensitivities. Barnes responded that she can't recall ever having done so. She added that she believes in a "lie of omission" in nonfiction: that when the writing calls for a certain detail to be told, the writer needs to tell it—or at least acknowledge not telling it. "As writers," she said, "we can direct our readers in what to expect, and if we say, here's this door but I'm not going to walk you through it, they might be curious, but they also accept our direction."

Also taking a purist position toward family sensitivities is Joy Castro, whose memoir The Truth Book: Escaping a Childhood of Abuse Among Jehovah's Witnesses tells about the abusive treatment she and her brother received from her stepfather in particular, but also, to varying degrees, from her mother, father, and stepmother. At the time of her book's publication, her father had already died, but her mother, incarcerated stepfather, and stepmother were alive and coherent.

Castro paints a complex portrait of all her family members—for example, her father moves from pretty good dad and lousy husband to pretty good husband and lousy dad. It's Castro's relationship with her mother, however, that is especially revealing. She loves her mother and includes her in the book's acknowledgements section (which she terms "Gratitude"), but the raw candor about their relationship comes early and often in Truth Book. When five-year-old Joy finishes a ballet performance and asks her mother if she likes it, her mother responds: "Ballet? You? More like the elephant walk."17 Castro frequently details the sudden and confusing shifts in her mother's moods, from morning singing to a raging temper.18 Most painful of all, Castro's mother fails to stand up against her new husband's psychological and sexual abuse in the form of inappropriate touching, including nighttime "massages." One evening, as punishment to a now-teenage Joy for snooping, her mother invites Joy's stepfather to "come tell her good night now."19

I asked Castro whether she left out anything important to the story because of family sensitivities.

"My goal in writing the book," said Castro, "was to answer two driving questions: 1) What caused my father to kill himself? and 2) Why do I seem to have no personality? When I began the book, I genuinely did not know the answer to either. They were painful and compelling, and they provided clarity and direction to my writing process.... In writing, I left out nothing that was essential to the answering of my two fundamental questions."

Castro added that she avoided using specific details about family members—as well as "gratuitous criticisms." The book, she said, wasn't about revenge but about finding answers: "I felt that to write with the motive of revenge would be to compromise the moral authority of the book. Moreover, no matter how momentarily satisfying revenge might be, it would ultimately trap me in bitterness." Castro said that the only family member she allowed to read the manuscript ahead of time was her brother but that no family member has questioned the truthfulness of her story.

With regard to the cautious approach taken by a memoirist such as Annie Dillard, Castro said that, because their backgrounds were so different, their decisions as writers were different:

She had a very different childhood and a very different experience from mine: she came from more privilege, more stability, more love.
In my case, my family had already shattered long before I wrote. If I had offered my manuscript to my mother, for example, very little would have remained. When a political exile leaves his country and then writes about it, he doesn't offer his manuscripts to the people in power; of course they would censor it.

Risking a Relationship

One might imagine that family sensitivities might be especially worrisome when the memoir writer is Carmen Bin Ladin, ex-wife of Yeslam Bin Laden—whose brother is Osama Bin Laden. While Carmen doesn't specifically address any personal jeopardy she might have felt in publishing what she described as an "honest" account of her life as part of the Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia, her memoir certainly includes a less-than-flattering portrayal of both her husband and of an overly-zealous Osama himself. In a chapter called "Two Mothers, Two Babies," Carmen describes an interaction she had in Saudi Arabia with Osama and his wife, Najwah. Osama had insisted their exasperated baby only drink water from a spoon, not a bottle.

"I'm sure," writes Carmen, "Osama would not have wanted to lose his baby. It was not as if he didn't care about the child. But to him the baby's suffering was less important than a principle that he probably imagined stemmed from some seventh-century verse in the Koran. And his family, simply awed by Osama's zeal, was intimidated into silence. For them, as for most Saudis, you simply could not be too excessive about your religious beliefs."20

In reading My Life, one doesn't get the sense that Carmen felt intimidated into leaving out anything she wanted to say. Indeed, in her postscript, Carmen describes her only real concern was losing her children to Yeslam in a custody fight. Indeed, it's the story's truthfulness that matters most deeply to her.

The story's truthfulness also matters to memoirist Patricia Hampl, who acknowledges many strained or broken relationships over the years as a result of her commitment to telling it like she saw it:

I've lost quite a few people along the way. ...the one who accused me of appropriating her life, the one who said he was appalled, the poet miffed by my description of his shoes, the dear elderly priest who said he thought I understood the meaning of a private conversation.... I have the letters somewhere stuffed in a file drawer I never open. The long letters, trying to give me a chance to explain myself, the terse ones, cutting me off for good... Some of them close friends, some barely known, only encountered. All of them "used," one way or another, except for the baffling case of the friend who complained because I had not included her.21

Hampl acknowledges that writing about family and friends isn't easy, and at times she seems to have wavered on the decision. She tells of her mother's reaction to not a memoir but to a poem Hampl wrote. (Hampl makes the argument that memoir is more closely related to poetry than to novel, explaining that the "chaotic lyric impulse, not the smooth drive of plot, is the engine of memory."22) In her poem Hampl had made reference to her mother's epilepsy and a grand mal seizure, a particularly sensitive area. Her mom strongly objected and asked that the poem be removed from the larger collection. Though Hampl felt strongly about inclusion of the poem, she told her mom that she would remove the reference—but that her mom needed to realize that "it really is the best poem in the book." The next morning Hampl's mom called to say that she could publish the poem.

Years later, out of curiosity, Hampl called her mom to ask why she had given her support for the poem: Was it because her mother became convinced about the poem's merit? "Or," asked Hampl, "did you just do it because you loved me?"

Her mother responded: "Because I loved you.... I always hated it."23

While corresponding with Hampl, I referenced her offer to remove the poem about her mother's epilepsy and asked how this compared to a nonfiction writer removing sensitive material that served an important purpose in a nonfiction narrative. Hampl replied that not publishing the poem wouldn't have made her collection of poems less honest or true. "Its omission," she said, "is not a betrayal of truth." Hampl didn't respond, however, to the question of removing a sensitive but important incident in a nonfiction narrative.

Hampl did say that she has shown work to family and friends ahead of time. "I have not offered to change anything ahead of time," she said. "I simply have let the 'subject' read the work and respond to me. Sometimes I get a factual change and am glad of that. Sometimes I have had to go ahead. I have never published intimacies which I think would cause pain or humiliation to old friends or lovers or family. I follow Emily Dickinson's dictum, I hope: tell the truth but tell it slant.... I suppress certain vignettes that happened in life but serve no purpose in the narrative I'm writing."

It isn't as though Hampl doesn't know how it feels to be on the receiving end of what she describes as the "scary movie" of seeing yourself written about. In her case, a coffee-and-conversation friendship with a visiting writer from Eastern Europe resulted in publication of the book in the writer's native language. Hampl describes her alarm in seeing the words "Patricia Hampl" leaping out from the "alphabet soup"—and her increasingly alarm when an interpreter read the references and remarked: "I don't think you'll be too upset."24

Communicating with the Reader

Like other choices in nonfiction narrative, the issue of sensitivities obviously calls for common sense. There are times when the writer may decide that the consequences of telling too much is just too great. In such cases, as Barnes suggests, a good alternative is to at least acknowledge that something is being left out.

This is the approach taken by Azar Nafisi in her memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, in which she describes a fiction book club she hosted during the fundamentalist siege of Tehran. In much of Lolita, Nafisi writes with compelling candor, particularly when she describes the events of the Revolution itself: "The loudspeakers interrupt us. 'Neither East, nor West; we want the Islamic Republic!' 'America can't do a damn thing!' 'We will fight we will die, we won't compromise!' I could never accept this air of festivity, the jovial arrogance that dominated the crowds."25

But the candor with which Nafisi describes groups of people and the government is managed a bit when it comes to individuals. In her author's note, Nafisi writes:

Aspects of characters and events in this story have been changed mainly to protect individuals, not just from the eye of the censor but also from those who read such narratives to discover who's who and who did what to whom, thriving on and filling their own emptiness through others' secrets. The facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful, but I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves...

Few would find fault with Nafisi's desire to protect the lives of her friends. A memoirist who chooses the safety of others is making the right choice. And when key portions are left out, it's the right decision to at least alert the audience.

Still, even in the most understandable of situations, we should at least acknowledge the impact of sensitivity-driven edits on the final product itself. If a nonfiction narrative writer alters or removes an integral portion of a story because of sensitivities, the story suffers in the same way that a novel would suffer if an integral portion of a novel were removed. And the more frequently that this occurs, the more widespread and accepted it becomes, the more the genre of nonfiction is diluted. If a story is left out, or modified, because of potential embarrassment to friends and family, this might indeed be, in the larger picture, the right decision. But we shouldn't pretend that the writing itself is just as strong without the story. As Elizabeth Andrews once told a writer who wanted to avoid telling of sexual abuse, "If your readers don't know the hurt, they are not going to understand the healing."26

To downplay the impact of softening a narrative because of sensitivities, or to use the extreme argument, as Wiesel surprisingly does, that "no witness is capable of recounting everything from start to finish anyway," seems to me to bypass the core issue—when a nonfiction narrative is gutted too much, it becomes its own category: censored nonfiction. The more this occurs, the more we're left with a least common denominator version of a narrative that those involved in the story feel most "comfortable" with.

But this isn't necessarily what the reader is most comfortable with. In a unit on childhood memoir in a nonfiction literature class I once taught, I included American Childhood along with Angela's Ashes and My Dog Skip. By far, the students reacted most negatively toward American Childhood, describing it as lacking drama and life. The students much preferred the candor of Angela's Ashes and even My Dog Skip, a lighter story that nevertheless told of a complicated wartime family. I had to agree with them. As good as Dillard always is aesthetically, and notwithstanding some excellent moments (such as her description of a heretofore jarred-up Polyphemus moth dragging itself down the driveway, never to fly), this childhood memoir simply wasn't very engaging. It felt much more shallow and sanitized than her other work, such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a spiritual/nature memoir praised for the way it describes "what is, in all its complexity."27 American Childhood, however, loses this complexity, and when I learned that Dillard had allowed family members to censor any portions they felt uncomfortable with, it made perfect sense. The life had been gutted.

By contrast, the finest memoirs are those written with both tenderness and candor. It's not a coincidence that Tobias Wolff, author of one of our best memoirs, This Boy's Life, didn't show the manuscript to his mother until after it was finished. Wolff admitted nervousness at how she would react and once remarked: "In her life she didn't get anything right, except one thing, and that was love. After reading the book she said: 'I'm glad you didn't tidy me up and turn me into someone I wasn't. That would have meant that I hadn't been of any use to you as a mother.'"28

AWP

Andy Nash received his PhD in English-Creative Nonfiction from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has worked as as magazine editor and as a consultant for Reader's Digest Association. His new memoir is called Paper God.

1. Carol Shields, "Opting for Invention Over the Injury of Invasion," New York Times, April 10, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/041000shields-writing.html.
2. Mimi Schwartz, "Writing About Family: Is It Worth It?," the Writer's Chronicle, October 2001.
3. Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes (New York: Touchstone, 1999),
4. Angela Lam Turpin, "When Not to Publish," The Writer, November 2008, 34-35.
5. Russell Baker, Growing Up (New York: Signet, 1992), p.24.
6. Russell Baker, "Life with Mother" Inventing the Truth, Ed. (William Zinsser. New York: Mariner Books, 1998), p. 34.
7. Russell Baker, "Life with Mother" Inventing the Truth, Ed. (William Zinsser. New York: Mariner Books, 1998), p. 40.
8. Annie Dillard, "To Fashion a Text," Inventing the Truth, ed. William Zinsser (New York: Mariner Books, 1998) p. 155-56.
9. Annie Dillard, "To Fashion a Text," Inventing the Truth, ed. William Zinsser (New York: Mariner Books, 1998) p. 154.
10. James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), 104.
11. Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p.16-17.
12. Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p.16.
13. Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p.17.
14. Kim Barnes, Hungry for the World (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), p. 8, 31.
15. Kim Barnes, Hungry for the World (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), p. 152.
16. Robert Jr. Root, Interview With Kim Barnes, Fourth Genre, August 1999.
17. Joy Castro, The Truth Book (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2005), p. 21.
18. Joy Castro, The Truth Book (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2005), pg. 28.
19. Joy Castro, The Truth Book (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2005), p. 143.
20. Carmen Bin Ladin, Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia 2005: (Warner Books, 2005), p. 87.
21. Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000), p. 228-29.
22. Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000), p. 224.
23. Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000), p. 222.
24. Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000), p. 220-21.
25. Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House Inc., 2003), p. 106.
26. Elizabeth J Andrew, Writing the Sacred Journey: Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir (Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 2005), p. 50.
27. Elizabeth J Andrew, Writing the Sacred Journey: Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir (Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 2005), p. 138.
28. William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth (New York: Mariner Books, 1998), p. 4.

HOW TO HANDLE FAMILY SENSITIVITIES

1. Think about the product first. In deciding how to handle family sensitivities, we should begin the process by thinking about the product itself. Ask yourself: If people's feelings were not a factor at all, what does this story itself call for? What elements are essential to telling this true story the way it should be told? With this-the story in its purest form-as a starting place, we can then consider whether we need to sacrifice any elements of the story because of family sensitivities.

2. Communicate with the reader. If we do remove elements, we can at least preserve the nonfiction form by explaining to our readers, as specifically as possible, what we have done. In short, we tell all that's pertinent, and when we don't, we tell the reader why. While this may not make as effective a story, it at least keeps the reader informed.

3. Be fair to your subject. In Inventing the Truth, William Zinsser points out the two ditches in writing about family: withholding too much or gratuitously revealing all. Memoirs at their best, says Zinsser, are written with love.

They elevate the pain of the past with forgiveness, arriving at a larger truth about families in various stages of brokenness. There's no self-pity, no whining, no hunger for revenge; the writers are as honest about their own selves as they are about the sins of their elders. We are not victims, they want us to know. We come from a tribe of fallible people, prisoners of our own destructiveness, and we have endured to tell the story without judgment and to get on with our lives.

4. For narrative journalists, let your subjects know their options. If you're writing someone else's story or helping them write their own story, it's appropriate to explain the different options available to them, rather than pushing them to spill sensitive information.