Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory

6. Ethics: Writing About Child Abuse, Writing About Abusive Parents

131 chapter 6  Ethics writing about child abuse, writing about abusive parents What are the author’s responsibilities to those whose lives are used as “material”? —G. Thomas Couser, Vulnerable Subjects I always win the [bleeped]-up-childhood contest . . . no matter who’s in the room. —Augusten Burroughs, quoted in Hank Stuever, “Growing Up Truly Absurd” In the prologue to her autobiography of childhood Ugly: The True Story of a Loveless Childhood, Constance Briscoe describes a visit she made to Social Services when she was eleven years old. She asks the woman at the reception desk if she can book herself into a children’s home. The woman replies: “You cannot refer yourself to a children’s home, luvvie.You need to get your parents’ consent first. Why don’t you go home and think about it? . . . I can’t book you in just because you feel like leaving home. Do you want us to contact your mother?” Constance replies, “No thanks . . . I’ll handle it myself” (1). Afraid that she will receive another beating from her mother, Constance goes home and drinks a glass of diluted bleach. She writes: “I chose Domestos because Domestos kills all known germs and my mother had for so long told me that I was a germ. I felt very sick, happy and sad. I was happy because tonight, if the bleach worked, I would die” (2). Briscoe survived to write her autobiography. She went on to become a barrister and one of the first black women to sit as a judge in the United Kingdom (Meeke). Briscoe’s autobiography describes the physical and emotional abuse she endured from her mother during her childhood. Writing about child abuse presents a way for abuse sufferers to address the abuse, disclose intimate 132 contesting childhood details from the past, and declare oneself a survivor. However, in declaring oneself a survivor of abuse, someone else must be declared as the perpetrator; in autobiographies of childhood, as in life, this is most often the parent or guardian. Autobiographies of childhood are necessarily relational; they become “auto/biographies” conveying the life narratives of both the author and his or her parent/s. They are also what G. Thomas Couser refers to as “intimate life writing—that done within families or couples.” Couser writes, “The closer the relationship between writer and subject . . . the higher the ethical stakes” (Vulnerable Subjects xii). Who is the auto/biographer responsible to in constructing his or her life narrative, or, as Couser asks, “What are the author’s responsibilities to those whose lives are used as ‘material’?” (34). And do the stakes shift if the author is writing about child abuse? In comparing and contrasting three auto/biographical depictions of abusive parents—Constance Briscoe’s Ugly (2006), Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors (2002), and Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called “It” (1995)—I explore the ethical dilemmas that underlie these different auto/biographical projects—whether the author demonstrates an awareness of these ethics or not. In these auto/biographies we can see the tension between the weight of traumatic life writing, or the need to write, and the ethical responsibilities that relational auto/biography, and more particularly children writing about parents, summons. Humor and Trauma: Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors Running with Scissors, published in 2002, is a highly comic autobiography of childhood. Told in a series of hilarious vignettes, it recounts Burroughs’s experiences living with the highly unusual Finch family—led by his mother’s psychiatrist, Dr. Finch—in Massachusetts during the 1970s. Burroughs was sent to live with the Finch family shortly after his parents split and his mother began her association with Dr. Finch. Running with Scissors is filled with witty, often outrageous anecdotes, as the reader follows the young Augusten Burroughs through (what Burroughs depicts as) a neglected and exploited childhood. Running with Scissors was made into a film (released in 2007). Burroughs has penned two nonfictional accounts of his adult life: Dry (2003) and Possible Side Effects (2006). He also wrote a second autobiography of childhood, A Wolf at the Table (2008), which details his early childhood spent with his mentally ill, alcoholic father. Burroughs’s father is largely absent from Running with Scissors, save an early reference and sporadic mentions in the latter part of the text. ethics of writing 133 Running with Scissors turned out to be a highly successful and highly...