Family Matters

This is my last Family Matters column. I'm wrapping it up for a multitude of reasons. First off, it's now been three months since my daughter died. Am I healed, recovered, over it? Not a chance; not by a long shot. I know that someday there will come a day without crying, but that day is still a long way off. I also know that I dread that day's coming and will in a perverse way resent it when it finally arrives. Grief has been my constant companion for these past three months. It will seem somehow disloyal to Emily to let it go.

But for now, I have grown tired of showing my grief in public, and most of all of receiving advice from clueless people who feel the need to regurgitate some fatuous piece of pseudo-advice they once read in a magazine or heard on TV from someone who had in turn once read a paraphrase of something from Kübler-Ross's book. It doesn't help any, and some of the things certain well-meaning dolts have told me have only made me really angry. Seriously, of all the delusions people are prone to, the idea that reading a magazine article (or more likely, watching a PBS program) about something and somehow believing this has conferred both meaningful authority in the subject area and the obligation to dispense advice is one of the most noxious. Sometimes—often times, I suspect—the most helpful thing you can do is shut up and listen.

But that seems a rare quality in our species, so rather than remain open for more probably well-meant but ultimately aggravating advice, I am taking my grief private, and reserving it for close family and friends. The topic is now off the table.

Which meanders in a roundabout way to my second topic, which is the morality (legitimacy? advisability?) of using your own family as source material for writing. As some of you may have noticed, a few Sundays ago I stopped right smack in the middle of a multi-part series about my family's history. What stopped me was the discovery that certain things I thought were true weren't, and other things I knew to be true weren't common knowledge, even among my siblings.

To some extent, I blame this on my maternal grandmother. She was an artist—a lousy one, but an artist nonetheless—who was continually reinventing herself and not much into fidelity in any sense of the word. I was middle-aged before I realized that three different women's names in the family history were all merely my grandmother in different phases as she swooped into and out of my mother's life. (I never actually saw the broomstick, but back in the 1960's the temptation to ignore her name d'jour and simply call her "Endora" was almost too strong to resist.)

I'd always believed my desire to write came from my Dad, who was a bookish man and some sort of frustrated history professor. Lately I've grown to suspect it actually comes from my maternal grandmother, who quite possibly was a pathological liar, or at least was never one to be afraid to enhance, embroider, alter, omit, elide, or sometimes even completely rewrite the story as suited her whims and needs of the moment. And granted, there can be good money and worldwide fame in claiming lies fabricated out of whole cloth as your personal history: as evidence, consider Binjamin Wilkomirski, Herman Rosenblat, James Frey, Misha Defonseca, and Margaret Seltzer, just for starters. If you play it right there might even be a Nobel Peace Prize in it for you, or at least a tenure-track assistant professorship at some podunk out-state Midwestern college.

But as for the rest of us, who have to continue to live and interact with our families even after the written work is published...

Change the names, disguise the details, and call it fiction.