“From the minute we arrive in the world, we’re at the mercy of the people who care for us. And we might find the rest of our lives taken up with dual, contradictory impulses: to be an integral part of this clan and to be a separate individual, set apart. Our families . . . provide our first mirrors, our first definitions of who we are. And they become our first objects of love, anger, and loyalty.”
— Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, Tell It Slant.
How difficult it is to write about family. It’ s hard enough to live with this miscellaneous collection of personalities we share our rooms, our meals, our memories with, let alone put them down on paper. Nothing else in the world pervades our emotional lives and colors the way we see the world more profoundly. That is the reason the writing we do about our families can be so powerful. It’s also the reason writing about family can be a leap into a vast stew of joy, rage, comfort, and fear.
Families don’t just push our buttons—they are the people who gave us those buttons. We love them so deeply it hurts—because few things are more devastating than when they cannot be there for us, when they turn against us, when their own broken souls can’t respond to our yearning needs.
I have written very little—nothing, really—about my family, even though their stories are calling out to be told. The brother I seldom see but think of daily. The sister living in far-away Italy. The vivacious younger sister, dead at 51. The mother, whose swings from laughing, cheerful warmth to heart-stopping cruelty still waken me in the darkest part of night. My dad, who still found meaning in his life after losing his wife, his child, and his life’s savings, stolen by unscrupulous businessmen he thought were there to help. No one except my husband rests so firmly in my heart than these, my parents and siblings. And no one have I found so impossible to write about.
So lately, I’ve been looking for ways to write about family. Ways to break through the frozen paralysis that strikes me when I try to create stories and essays about them. And on this Tips for Writers Thursday, I would like to share some of the tools I’ve gleaned from other writers, and some of the ideas I’ve come up with myself.
Parts of the body.This one comes from Tell It Slant, the wonderful book on creative nonfiction I quoted at the beginning of this post. Miller and Paola suggest you start writing about family members by describing them in terms of a part of the body. They suggest hands, but for me it would be eyes. My mother’s green (she called them “drab”), my father’s deep blue, my brother’s gray. I could compare and contrast my three sisters’ eyes: one a startling almost aqua-blue, the others dark as coffee. Or perhaps I would go with hair—platinum to red to ebony. Or arms or mouths. So many possibilities.
A story your mother told you. It doesn’t have to be your mother, of course—just any family member (usually older) who told you a story. Don’t just tell the story. Tell the story of your family member telling the story. That’s what Maxine Hong Kingston does in her essay “No Name Woman” from The Woman Warrior. She begins her memoir with her mother telling the tragic story of a long-ago aunt in China. In the telling, we learn not only about her aunt, but about the ancient Chinese tradition Kingston came from, about her mother’s personality, and about her relationship to her mother.
I see my parents’ stories in pairs: My father’s the lonely tales of a sad boy growing up in a troubled home; my mother’s full of fun and laughter, even in the bleakness of the Depression. Recollections of those stories—of the telling of those stories—are among the most vivid memories I have.
The holiday that went awry. We’ve all had them. The Thanksgiving, the birthday, the anniversary celebration where everything went wrong. Or perhaps it was a family vacation or a picnic. Days in which tempers flared and conflicts raged and hopes were dashed. It may seem like an unpleasant topic, but those days can shine a light on family dynamics in a way few other situations can. Who went ballistic? Who wept in the bathroom? Who took off in a huff? Who wrung his hands? Who kept calm, took charge, stepped up to the plate? What do those responses tell us about the members of our families? About how the family as a whole functions?
The six-word biography. When all of these possibilities still leave me stuck, here is a simple exercise I have adapted. You’ve probably written six-word autobiographies before (if not, check them out at Smith Magazine), but you may not have applied the same technique to family members. You can write a six-word biography of your entire family, summing it up as a unit, or you can write individual six-word biographies of each member.
I like a lot of things about this technique. It is so basic that it can easily break through the resistance I come up against when I try to write about my family. But, despite its simplicity, it can yield some amazing insights. I might not be ready to write fully and in depth about my parents and brother and sisters, but I can write six words. And those six words just might lead to more. They might lead to pages and pages.