Fact or Fiction: It Might Depend on How You Feel
“You’ve got this all wrong. It was cold,” My brother Bob insisted. “The fiercest cold I’ve ever felt.” He pulled his arms in close to his sides and visibly shuddered even though we were standing in a hot, New England kitchen in July, 2014.
He had just read a section of my memoir about my husband’s death in Vietnam in 1969. Bob is two years older than me so I couldn’t attribute his faulty memory to our relative youth back then. I was twenty-two and Bob, twenty-four, when my husband was killed. We were adults. So, why, almost fifty years later, did he recall a broiling hot day in spring as frigid?
I tried a rational approach: “The funeral was on May 29th. It was almost 100 degrees that day. Don’t you remember – Uncle Ephraim had a heat stroke in the middle of it?”
My brother and I are emotionally close in spite of the fact that he is 180 degrees different from me in his political views. We can argue with hammer and tongs about taxes and politics but we’ve never disagreed vehemently about the weather. It felt eerie to be debating something I’d written that was so irrelevant to the event itself. But he continued to insist; it was cold, freezing cold, that day.
This dispute with him about air temperature on one of the most terrible days of my life stayed with me after my book was published and went out into the world. I wondered, briefly, what other details readers/critics might challenge and whether I should worry.
I resolved that it didn’t matter if my brother thought it was cold; that this was his emotional […]
Brothers and Sisters
My brother Sam would be 67 today, November 21, 2016. He died from AIDS while still young and handsome at the age of thirty-nine in 1989. We were very close, in spite of a sibling scrimmage now and then. When we were growing up, I seemed to be the person he preferred to fight with, but also the person he came to whenever he got into difficulty. He was fiercely competitive with me throughout our lives, about everything from my doll collection to Christmas tree decorating to who had the better education. My first memory from childhood was about Sam, a scowling baby sitting in our red flyer wagon. I remember his dying words, too. He said, “I’m trying to dial 1954, but I can’t get through.” Eventually, I had to write my memory of his life in order to approach understanding what he was trying to say.
I was honored to have my essay about our life as brother and sister, Sam’s Way, published in The Gettysburg Review (Spring, 2012), and doubly honored when it was listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2013. Writing our story was a way to bring him back into the world – and it worked. Many people who had known him contacted me and I had lots of great conversations about what a funny, courageous, difficult and generous person he was. In honor of Sam, I’ll be making his favorite yellow cake with chocolate icing today and thinking about all the beautiful and talented people who were lost to a horrendous disease. Happy birthday, Sammy. Wish you were here.
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Truth Be Told
“Do you swear to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” We’ve heard this intimidating oath on every television show with a courtroom scene. Fortunately, writers of memoir and personal essay don’t have to make this declaration – at least under oath. Or, if they did, it would be with the caveat that, “This is my truth. This is the way it was for me, so help me Goddess of Imagination.”
It turns out that “truth” has many levels of being, depending on what one is writing about. For most of us, our truth is what we think we remember. Other people might recall the same event differently, but if what you are writing is a memoir about your life, then even other witnesses, like your brother or sister, might remember details differently than your recollection. This is an important concept to keep in mind when writing your story because, if you are swayed to consider some other rendition, based on what someone else claims is the almighty truth, you may not get to the essence of what you are after.
Intention matters. As Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz describe in Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, “If our intent is to capture the messy, real world we live in, we fulfill the first obligation of creative nonfiction. Intent helps us resist the urge to change facts, just to make a better story. It stops us from telling deliberate lies, even as we let our imagination fill in details we only vaguely remember.”
In my memoir, Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War, describing my experience of […]
Brothers and sisters: Remembering loved ones who died of AIDS
My brother Sam was three years younger than me and died from AIDS while still young and handsome at the age of thirty-nine in 1989. On November 21st, 2014, he would be 65, eligible for Medicare. I’m not sure how he would have handled getting older. We were very close, in spite of a scrimmage now and then. When we were growing up, I seemed to be the person he preferred to fight with, but also the person he ran to whenever he got into difficulty. He was fiercely competitive with me, even though I didn’t want to compete. My first memories as a child were about Sam, and my memory of his dying words stuck with me. Eventually, I had to write about it in order to try to understand what he was trying to say.
I was honored to have my essay about our life as brother and sister, Sam’s Way, published in The Gettysburg Review (Spring, 2012), and doubly honored when it was listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2013. Writing our story was a way to bring him back into the world – and it worked. Many people who had known him contacted me and I had lots of great conversations about what a funny, courageous, difficult and generous person he was. In honor of Sam, I’ll be baking his favorite yellow cake with chocolate icing on Friday and thinking about all the beautiful and talented people who were lost to a horrendous disease. Happy birthday, Sammy. Wish you were here.
Fathers, Sons, and Daughters
Approaching Father’s Day, I scan the years that I shared with my father, remembering the handkerchiefs, the ties, the cuff links, the homemade cards, the terrible black walnut cake I proudly presented him with one year, but the same unanswered questions bubble up. I have no doubt of his goodness, however I still wonder about the inner life of this person I knew for the first thirty-five years of my life. He died young by today’s standards, only sixty-one, as a result of falling from a roof he was shingling. He took risks, one of them being his intolerance for safety harnesses when working on the top of a three-story building. He often commented about the birds he had seen and heard while working high above the ground: sea gulls, mourning doves, mocking birds – even an owl at dusk. Perhaps he began to identify with creatures who could fly and that reduced his need to be safe with a tether. My appreciation for mountain tops may have come from my father’s unabashed fearlessness of high places, but I never went to a mountain with him during his life. I remember only watching him from the ground as he strolled across a building truss, using his arms for balance, looking like a visitor from Ringling Brothers circus rather than the father of four children.
Jess Maghan, in his book Forty Sons and Daughters: Finding Father Within, eloquently expresses through vignettes of forty sons and daughters describing their fathers, the contemplations we can have about our parent. In the preface to the book, he says, “Leaning over the coffin, saying my final good-bye, I reached in […]
