Family Secrets

Posted on May 2, 2008 by moonbridgebooks

I watched The Savages last week, expecting a touching story of adult children coping with their father’s end-of-life dementia. It was all of that, but what made the story even more deep and more poignant was that the father had been abusive to his children so that as adults they had no relationship with him. In the end we see the daughter has written and is staging a play about their twisted lives. This is a thoughtful (R-rated) movie.

On another front, writer Holly Silva recently reviewed Augusten Burrough’s latest family secrets memoir, A Wolf at the Table. Burroughs is currently famous for his Running With Scissors book. Brother John Robison has his own memoir, Look Me in the Eye. These two men have hung out all the dirty laundry!

Tell-all family exposes are not new and shocking anymore. The question for memoir writers is one of conscience: should one not write unpleasant things about their family at all, just mention minor offences, or go ahead and tell the darkest secrets. Should we at least wait until the “bad people” are dead? For those not interested in revenge or making money off the closet skeletons, this can be a delicate dance.

None of us is perfect, so it does not make sense to show only the best of people in family stories. When we see the quirks and foibles in others, we relate better to them; they become human. We can learn about culture and social history. We can see how behaviors and ways of thinking are passed down through generations. We learn from the mistakes and failures of others, which can actually be quite inspiring. The trouble comes when crime or various types of abuse are involved.

When we write our memoirs or family stories, we hope they will be passed on to future generations as a legacy. Our first thought may be to sugar-coat them, often out of respect for family, but maybe out of embarrassment. Our stories are personal, sometimes intensely personal, and when others read them we may have conflicting feelings of pride, awkward shyness, or sometimes downright horror at the sudden realization that other people now know our innermost thoughts!

In the end, each of us has to grapple with our own feelings about the level of dirt we want to show about our families. We must balance the desire to show the truth with a respect and understanding of the person and their situation. Will exposing abuse be helpful, or will it just be sensationalism. Will your relatives be upset? If the people you write about are still alive, will they sue you?!

There is a difference between personal diaries and stories meant to be shared. When working on memoir and family stories, write calmly and knowingly, round out stories with both good and bad aspects, share different points of view. Write as though you are speaking to strangers. Write with respect, because the way you present your stories is a reflection of you.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
Posted in bad memories, memoir writing | 1 Comment

Hidden Love and Inman’s War

Posted on April 25, 2008 by moonbridgebooks

Jeffrey Copeland’s flea market find of a suitcase stuffed with old letters has blossomed into a movie. Inside that suitcase was the hidden love story of Inman Perkins and Olivia Merriwether, a young black couple separated by The War. The two teachers met in 1940 at Sumner High School in St. Louis, fell in love and were secretly married. At the time, married women were not allowed to be teachers so the young Mrs. Perkins had to hide her marriage to keep her job. This was not too difficult as her new husband was sent off to war in Italy where he was unfortunately killed in an fuel explosion caused by lightning. Miss Merriwether, to honor her husband, then insisted on being called Mrs. Perkins. She was not forced to resign and instead taught school for another forty years.

Inman’s letters to his wife described his trials with segregation and discrimination during WWII, all the more painful to a boy raised by his parents to believe that “differences were created by men, not inherently in men.” His letters inspired Copeland to write a book about Inman’s African-American military experiences, with the added interest of his hidden marriage to Olivia. Apparently none of Olivia’s students or colleagues thought anything of her later name change, and after 1948 her marriage would not have affected her job anyway.

How much do we know of our own parents’ or grandparents’ lives. Inman and Olivia became known because a stranger discovered a part of their lives lost in a suitcase. Our own families may have hidden lives that we might uncover if we only ask the right questions. After publication of Inman’s War: A Soldier’s Story of Life in a Colored Battalion in WWII, one of Olivia’s past students commented, “And to think, we all thought Mrs. Perkins was a little old lady with no life.*”

*from St. Louis Post Dispatch, 4/20/08

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
Posted in book talk, letters, multicultural, WWII | Tagged | Comments Off on Hidden Love and Inman’s War

Earthquake Memories

Posted on April 18, 2008 by moonbridgebooks

Well, we in the Midwest were certainly surprised out of a sound sleep this morning by our unusual earthquake, our family’s first ever. The shaking bed woke my husband and I, then we heard the windows of our old house rattling nonstop and a strange rumbling noise that seemed to emanate from upstairs–what in the world were those kids doing in the middle of the night! Our disoriented minds took awhile to figure out what was happening. Our youngest daughter jumped into our bed; our oldest we thought had slept through it, but the next morning she said she had been shaken awake and scared but thought we would think she was having a strange dream if she had run downstairs to tell us. Midmorning, there was a shorter and milder aftershock. The earthquakes are the talk of our normally quiet midwestern day and provided the school teachers with learning lessons.

My mother in her senior apartment complex slept through the main earthquake, but felt the aftershock. She remembered the stories her mother told of the big 1923 Tokyo Earthquake and its tremors that lasted three days, killing many thousands and leaving many more thousands homeless and heading for the countryside. That earthquake began around noontime, when many people had fires lit to cook their lunches. In the damage, the cooking fires spread through the wood and paper-walled houses and helped cause much of the Yokohama and Tokyo area to burn to the ground. City people fled to the countryside, many following the train tracks since so many of the roads were buckled and impassable. My grandmother told of how the safest places to be during an earthquake were thought to be in groves of bamboo because of the tightly intertwined net of roots holding the closely spaced trees together.

Unfortunately, so many times earth’s natural events bring a burden of memories. Fortunately for us, our 5.2 Richter Scale earthquake caused no damage, not even a teacup falling out of the cupboard. Fortunately, we are left with exciting memories.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
Posted in memories | 2 Comments