Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family

You Can’t Burn Everything

160 You Can’t Burn Everything allison hedge coke First draft. Sixth grade. Mrs. Minor’s room. Near the end of the spring semester, just before finals, I turned in a large ream of manuscript, handwritten, titled “The Diary of a Mad Housewife’s Daughter” for extra credit to Mrs. Minor, our sixth-grade English teacher. She’d been so decent to me, never treating me as if I were different from anyone else in the room, something I’d rarely experienced at that time in my life. So I wanted to offer her something I’d shown no one else. I wanted to come clean with my own life with someone outside it. The film Diary of a Mad Housewife had been released, rated M for mature, so no one under seventeen was allowed. Still, Mom was back in the asylum, getting shock treatments, and I knew her story and my own, so my mind was set to write the daughter’s side of what I imagined the movie to be. I’ve never seen it—to this day—so I have no idea if it was about a schizophrenic who was acutely insane. The weekend passed. I wondered what Mrs. Minor thought of it and how much she’d read. Returning on Monday, I was completely shocked to discover she’d worked out with the high school and local college to get me into advanced writing classes at their schools. My novel was groundbreaking, she said, and she wanted to help me. Trouble is, it was memoir, and not affordable information for anyone outside the family to have. I took the manuscript, ran home down the same alley and across the corner and up our block’s alley as well, directly to the old coal 161 You Can’t Burn Everything stove we had in back for marshmallows and hot dogs, the stove my grandmother had used in the dugout they’d lived in. It was supposed to be a laundry stove, but they used it for everything back then: heat, cooking, you name it. My family used it for cookouts and fun, and a box of matches was just inside one of the lids on top toward the back near the chimney space. As propelled as I had been to write the memoir, I was equally propelled now to burn it. I simply put the manuscript into the stove and then struck a match and let the fire consume it, my first full memoir draft and collective biography of my mother’s insanity up to that point, a record of the systematic dismantling of our family and cultural , political, economic despair and glory, of our lives and the effect of her illness upon all of us, especially her. It was done as quick as it had started. There was no way to explain to the well-intentioned Mrs. Minor, whom I completely respected and appreciated, that anyone who read it could return me to foster care, or worse. My mother finding out could cause who knows what. Anything was possible. The book was a totally unaffordable divulgence and it was not my right to make things hard on my mom, or dad, as he was responsible for her completely, or Mrs. Minor, for that matter. Least of all, for me. The truth of it could not be told because we were in the core of it and it was happening. The story was real, and anything could happen as a result of its release, so there could be no release. Certainly not anything my family could be hurt by, and I would have never shown it to any of them to read, the consequences heavily imagined by me and too much to bear. Second draft. One-month residency-fellowship. MacDowell. Out in a cabin on the MacDowell Colony, rustic enough at that time but lush enough to splay the muse, you didn’t worry about anything but the work, and work came easy for a young writer who’d been given four weeks’ reprieve from all distractions. I’d have a chance to knock out a full draft of a memoir I’d begun. Working with incarcerated juveniles and traumatized adults, I’d been struck by how few 162 Hedge Coke nonfiction texts existed that they could relate to or grow from. I imagined something in my own story might resonate. I had come...