Guest blogger, Marion Roach Smith
It was not a bit surprising to read recently that the memoir recently published by Augusten Burroughs’ mother differs wildly from the famous writer’s best-selling Running With Scissors, nor could we be shocked by the reminder that his brother, too, has his own version of the family tale.
Both my sister and I released books this year—hers, a memoir, and mine, a guide to writing memoir—in which we recount the same moments in our lives through the different and utterly personal lenses of our separate views. My sister and I agree on nearly nothing that happened in our family, and for good reason.
About twenty years ago, on the couch of a good psychiatrist, a question arose about my childhood that made me realize I was in the right hands. The doctor was not the sort who wanted me to relive everything, preferring instead that his patients move forward. I liked that, especially when he summed up his outlook.
“You must get a version of your childhood you can live with, and live with it,” is what he probably said.
But I heard something else. “An aversion to my childhood?” I replied. “Nice. Somebody pays you for this advice? My sister has an aversion to our childhood. I don’t need one too.”
“A version,” he repeated, laughing.
And that’s what memoir is: a version of an event. Does realizing that someone else readily disagrees with your version of your life diminish your tale, or make it less true? Not a bit—and quite the opposite.
None of us grows up without the influence of others. A key to getting along with the rest of the world—and therefore in life—is simple: When everyone tells you that it didn’t happen that way, you can agree. It didn’t happen that way to them.
My sister and I live by different rules; we give different gifts, and even have different random facts we share about our lives. We are two sides of the same coin, not bookends. We are sisters: different because we grew up in the same household, not in spite of it. The blog we share is called “She Said/She Said”, and the comments our posts elicit support this idea every day, as well as giving good weight to our shared belief that memoir, the single greatest portal to self-understanding, should never be avoided just because of the existence of an alternate view.
Want to preserve something about your life? Write.
In fact, write about your life and you might understand it and enjoy it more, though you will never have the last say over your sister, who still says you started it.
Now, should everyone publish what they write?
Of course not. But that’s another subject.
To thrive in the alternate realities of memoir, be accurate. For guidance on one part of this, I defer to the French who (of course) have a phrase for what we should never do when we write about ourselves. It specifically refers to those delicious bon mots we wish had popped out of our mouths, but didn’t. The phrase is esprit d’escalier, and it literally means “the wit of the staircase.” It is among memoir’s most dangerous temptations. Do not go up those stairs.
The desire to have a snappy comeback—to portray ourselves as witty, clever, and informed—is universal. But rarely are we witty on demand. We all wish we’d said some clever thing when we got dumped. We didn’t—not out loud, not at the time.
At moments of confrontation, our inability to spit out what we long to say reveals our frustration; as we walk away, the words that roll in our heads represent our fears, our manners—ourselves—better than any snappy retort. Not being witty on demand is far more human than having some patterned repartee. And far more interesting. In fiction and movies, everyone is witty. In nonfiction, we wrestle with the obvious, and we share our humanity. These little moments, revelatory real events, are what turn and shape our lives. So write about those. What do you wish you had said? That might be interesting; it’s certainly universal.
What does your sister wish she’d said? That’s her version, and she’s welcome to it as much as you are to yours.
“One family, three memoirs,” read part of one headline on the recent Burroughs memoir dust-up. But of course. One memoir, three family members: Now that would be news.
Marion Roach Smith, author of The Memoir Project, A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Visit Marion at www.marionroach.com.
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There is a difference between Augusten Burroughs version of his life and other relative’s versions. He wrote his memoirs and the others wrote a reaction to his memoirs. I tend to believe Burroughs.
I wrote my journals since the age of 12 years old regarding my childhood which was very dysfunctional and I was astonished when my older sister told others how much I was the more loved in our childhood, not her. She did not record her memories as I did nor seek help from mental health professionals. The truth was neither one of us were loved and both of us were abused severely. .
I think it is important to go over the past with a good professional as I did so that I could let go of the attachments that I had to those experiences. I could not have done it without someone I trusted. Now, those events are in the past and I begun the process of forgiving- not to forget but to let go of the anger.
We all have a different perspective of our past, but someone who takes the pen or the word processor and writes about it in order to understand it is someone who first has the courage to face the monsters under the bed. It is a different matter to write after the fact of someone’s else exploration of these scary shadows that it just isn’t so. Augusten Burroughs was such a brave person and his detractors sound like so much sour grapes.