The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative

9. What Is Telling the Truth?

9 What Is Telling the Truth? Some Kind of Liar I wish I had taken a friend’s warning about memoir and family; it’s engraved in my mind (now) like an eleventh commandment: “It’s more important to whom you don’t show your work than to whom you do.” My mother was one of those “don’t show”’s. I mailed her a long story about an incident in our family’s early life that had always troubled me. She was on the phone one week later, chastising me for putting us in a snowstorm the night Dad drove her, my two brothers, and me away from his parents’ home in Evanston, Illinois, following a fight my father had had with them. “I don’t remember any snowstorm, Tom,” she said. “That’s all in your imagination.” She sounded absolutely sure. I remember —I think I remember—the snow that night: hard, wet, Hitchcockian flakes. I remember my father’s leather-gloved hands clenching the wheel, his temper coiled inside him. Too bad he wasn’t  larson.100-212 4/26/07 11:46 AM Page 100 alive, after I began writing about our family, to confirm the snow one way or the other. Mother disapproved of my stating in the story that she and my father undervalued Dad’s parents’ home. “They didn’t have room to put us up,” she said, “not because my folks offered, as you suggest , a better Christmas, but because his folks had only two bedrooms .” But her parents did offer more. They were wealthier. Their Victorian home and elm-darkened yard on State Street in Rockford, Illinois, was many times the size of an Evanston walkup . For me, from ages three to fifteen, that equaled a much finer Christmas, the Frank Capra holiday we all cherished. In short, Mother didn’t trust me with spilling the family’s beans. What parent does? Most interrupt the child’s telling, convinced there’s a correct version that the progeny must be told to remember . Mother sensed, instead, that as a writer I was up to something. (Or, to put it in a less accusatory way, it was my “imagination” that corrupted me, made me artistic when others, like her, suffered or indulged no such streak.) The snowstorm made her suspicious , and my preferring one grandparent’s home to the other cinched it. If I could falsify the weather, she reasoned, wasn’t I likely to overstate or make up other details, too? Besides, where did I get this “ability” to recollect word-for-word dialogue, describe the exact wrapping-paper colors of the presents under the tree? It didn’t come from her, she said. Then, unprompted, she added, “The past is over. Nobody cares about all that anymore.” All that for me was the alluring inexactness of memory, made palpable and profound via my first forays into writing memoir. But Mother felt such exposure would soil our name. For me to write about anything of our past would be to remove it from the family memory, which carries unalterable certainty, and place it into the public record, which carries unnecessary shame. “You’re not going to publish this, are you?” What Is Telling the Truth?  larson.100-212 4/26/07 11:46 AM Page 101 I didn’t tell her I already had. In fact, I never told her, for she died about a year later. In retrospect I think she may have been most confounded by what she perceived as a literary writer’s concealment. She used to say that in college (Northwestern, class of 1941) when her English professor asked the students to ponder a poem’s meaning, she’d recoil. Meaning made her blanch. She wasn’t smart like the others , she said. She could neither find nor articulate any nonobvious interpretation in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” for example . She wanted to be told what it meant, not endure the treasure hunt. Meaning emerged with discussion, but that didn’t defuse her view of authors: They were, by nature, mystifying what could otherwise be clearly stated. For her, an imaginative author was some kind of liar. Several years before this incident, I had begun writing about my father. When I told her, she thought that my endeavor would be a chronicle of his life—adopted at birth, Depression childhood, college, Navy, war, paper...