Telling stories, hearing stories

In the midst of writing and revising family memoirs for three different sets of clients, with two more on the back burner, I’ve learned more about memoir writing in the past few months than in all my years as a writer up to now.

The three active projects involve two couples in their eighties and one widow in her nineties. Perhaps not surprisingly, given their similarities in age, certain common themes arise, even though there are numerous differences concerning the specifics of their lives. Differences include where they were raised; where they live now; what their professional lives have involved; the number and ages of their children; their religious backgrounds. Commonalities include military service, a career path that began with manual labor and brought them eventually into the business world, the issues specific to immigrants (in one case) or children of immigrants (in the other two); losing a parent at an early age. Other details linking their stories arose unexpectedly, surprising me: two different memoir subjects mentioned the Horn & Hardart Automat – one woman frequented the one in New York City as a child; another couple visited the one in Philadelphia as graduate students – and two different subjects had connections to General Claire Lee Chennault and the Flying Tigers.

From each of them, I’ve learned a lot about life in America in the 20^th century, although each of my subjects experienced it differently: some as hardworking college students, some as soldiers stationed overseas. I’ve learned about a variety of perspectives on parenting and grandparenting.

And as their memoirist, I’ve also learned anew the importance of listening. Writing a memoir is a wonderful project for a senior because they are left with a book for their children, grandchildren, and future descendants to read, but what I am increasingly coming to understand is that the process itself matters. Last week I received an email from the daughter of my 91-year-old client that said this:

“Yesterday i called my mom. It was quite apparent to me that she sounded more vibrant and alive than I have heard her in a very long time. I asked what was she doing and she told me about writing a memoir of her life.  What a wonderful thing to do - she has had quite a life!  This appears to have brought new vitality to her.”

It reminded me that the process itself is as worthwhile as the end result. All of my clients have children and other family members who willingly and eagerly listen to their stories, but there’s something different about narrating a life in chronological order. Most families tell sporadic anecdotes, not unbroken narratives, and sometimes children hear their parents’ stories often enough that they stop listening. Having the opportunity to hear a life story from its beginnings gives me a perspective that isolated anecdotes usually lack.

Two years ago, I worked with residents at a nursing home on a community memoir project. A couple of months after the book was published, I saw the obituary of one of the participants in the newspaper. I felt privileged to think that I was probably one of the last people who heard her tell a story about her life. She had loving children and grandchildren; I don’t mean to suggest no one took an interest in her, but I had the privilege of sitting down with her without other distractions to hear exactly the life story she wanted to tell me, a story she was most likely telling for the last time.

Telling our stories matters, but listening to them does too. In my work as a memoir writer, I’ve become a dedicated listener. And I’m grateful anew for every story I have the opportunity to hear.

Many voices, one story

Not long ago, a friend recounted an event that happened while he was in law school. One morning during class, a professor left his laptop in its case by the open door to the classroom. Suddenly in the middle of class, someone darted from the hall through the doorway, grabbed the laptop, and ran off.

The professor asked each student to write down what had just transpired, and the students realized soon enough that what had looked like a random happening was actually staged by the professor to introduce a lesson on eyewitness reports – a lesson whose significance became obvious once the students discovered how many different narratives existed within that one class where they all witnessed the same event.

I thought about this story over the weekend as I interviewed more than a dozen members of one extended family for a memoir project. The subject of the memoir is a grandfather in his eighties; each child and each grandchild, most of whom are now adults themselves, was asked to tell me stories and anecdotes about their grandfather. The interviews were private, so no family member knew what any other one had said.

Accuracy of eyewitness accounts is important to attorneys, of course. In the case of my friend’s law class, the point was how unreliable and how widely varying a description of a happening can be. Journalists take a different approach to this: rather than exploring the varying viewpoints, they tend to keep interviewing witnesses until a consistent picture begins to emerge.

But I was following the model of neither attorney nor journalist when I did these interviews over the weekend. I welcomed differences in perspective. Many of the children’s and the grandchildren’s stories overlapped or coincided, but each time I heard the same event described, the details were different. One child remembered the grandfather taking them out for ice cream after a long day’s work; another recounted that the highlight of that excursion was a ride at a go-cart track. One sibling, describing the walk to a neighborhood candy store fifty years ago, said it was a long walk up a big hill; a younger sibling remembered it as an easy little foray, though he later admitted that as the youngest, he was usually pushed in a stroller and might not have appreciated just how steep the hill actually was.

In law or reporting, these kinds of variations are wrinkles that require ironing out, but in memoir writing, they add texture and intrigue. This was the first time I’d taken a multi-generational approach to writing a memoir; normally I focus on just one person, but this family came up with the idea of having all of them contribute their own anecdotes and recollections, and as my weekend of interviewing progressed, I realized what a great idea it actually was.

On the one hand, it generated a lot of stories. With more than a dozen different individuals recalling the same person, many different memories were excavated and many tales told. But just as much fun was hearing one or two of the same favorite stories, told over and over again, in different voices and with different interpretations. 

Accuracy matters in some fields, but in memoir writing, perspective is more important. The multi-faceted perspectives offered by one large family reflecting on their grandfather – his life, his personality, the lessons he imparted – made his story much richer than a single narrative ever could have done.

Lives like snowflakes

It’s fun to be immersed in other people’s long lives once again.

My new company, Concord River Publishing, recently signed on to write a community memoir at a nursing home in Newburyport. Last week I did the interviews – twenty in all – and this week I’m drafting the stories.

It’s my second full-scale community memoir, and I wondered as I approached the project if the stories might start to sound familiar. Last year I wrote about 47 people in their eighties and nineties at a continuing care community in Bedford; now I’m talking with twenty people at a very similar facility on the North Shore. Demographically, the two groups have much in common: their age, their educational and professional backgrounds, their predominantly East Coast roots.

But as I dove into the interviews, I was reminded once again of how no two stories end up being alike. This set of seniors includes military veterans and scientists, professors and doctors, homemakers and gardeners and boaters, people widowed young and couples celebrating sixty or more years of marriage. Some had children and some didn’t; some lost children.

So yes, of course there are commonalities. But just as each participant has a different name and face and history, each story manifests differently, because people recall different details from their lives, impute importance to different aspects of their experiences, and react to twists of fate with different attitudes.

It’s only our second project, but I don’t anticipate this work ever growing dull. “Everyone has a story to tell,” my colleagues and I say when we approach potential clients. And perhaps this task on which I’ve set out is a little like collecting snowflakes. Many are similar….and yet each is ultimately unique. My mission is to catch each story like a snowflake and examine it until I can extract the essence of how it is different from every single other story out there.

Learning from other people's stories

At the Unitarian church my family attends, this past Sunday was the special day that the first graders receive their Bibles – illustrated versions designed especially for kids their age. 

The minister addressed in very simple terms the relevance of the Bible to the Unitarian Universalist faith, which has no written creed. She told them that the Bible contains stories about things that happened to people in the past and stories about how people lived. She explained that unlike some faiths, Unitarians don’t see the Bible as an instructional manual telling us what to do but rather a reference for us to learn about choices and actions committed to by other people.

It occurred to me as she explained it that this is really the value of almost all stories, whether fiction or nonfiction. I have often thought that biographies, memoirs and novels generally have far more impact than self-help books on readers like me. In a way, it’s a bit of a paradox. In order to make compelling literature, each character – whether actual, historical or fictional – needs to have a unique story. 

And yet in order to have meaning, stories must be universal, must have some element that resonates with any reader. So the goal of good story-telling, fictional or nonfictional, is to be able to home in on these universal elements while also telling a story we haven’t heard before in just those same words or under just those same circumstances or with just that same outcome.

My father, who taught English for 40 years, recently told me about a high school junior who marveled over a character in a novel she was reading for class, “That’s just how I feel! But I didn’t know anyone else felt that way!” My father told me that to him, she seemed a little bit old to be making this discovery for the first time; most readers discern this aspect of literature when they are still children. But in fact, most readers have this experience again and again, and for some of us it feels new each time.

When I interview article subjects or memoir clients, I look for what is unique in their story but also what will resonate most with readers. Unsympathetic characters are just less interesting than those with whom we have some small element, however small, in common. As our minister said, Bible stories tell us what happened – whether historically accurate or not – to other people and give us ideas about how to live (or how not to live) our own lives. So do novels, biographies, and memoirs. From each person’s experience, we derive common experiences. And from each character’s lessons, be they fictional or nonfictional, we all learn.

The stories they tell

Once again, my summer is turning out to be full of stories.

I say “once again” because I feel like a summer of adventure-through-narrative hearkens back to my childhood, when summer vacation meant spending hours reading – reading in the air-conditioned library, reading in cars and airplanes en route to vacation destinations, reading in cabins or motel rooms or condos, reading in bed late at night.

When I was in grade school, I read adventure stories: Island of the Blue Dolphins; The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. By middle school, it was more likely to be realistic fiction about the modern-day lives of girls in middle school or high school.

This summer the stories are different, though. They’re true stories, and they’re being told to me in person, and they range from tales of being sent off to boarding school or summer camp to stories of enlisting in the Royal Air Force to remembrances of being the only woman at medical school to stories of discovering a passion for painting at the age of eighty.

All spring, I foundered for a summer project: I wanted an endeavor related to writing that I’d be able to really sink my teeth into. The answer arrived serendipitously, after the Globe sent me to a nearby retirement community to cover an environmental activism group that had recently taken hold there. “This place is so full of stories,” I thought to myself as I left, after an hour of interviewing a group of women in their eighties and nineties. “I wish there was some way to capture those stories.”

Well, it turned out there was. I consulted with a staff member at the retirement community, and she and I designed a project: members who opted to participate would be interviewed on the topic of their most formative experience, the events or circumstances that they consider most responsible for making them the person they are today, and then I would write up the stories into a compilation.

So far I’ve completed 28 interviews, with another 12 scheduled for later this week, and it turns out my intuition was right. The place is full of stories, indeed, and one by one, the residents are sitting down at a conference table to tell me about them. A 90-year-old woman traveled 6,000 miles through Europe on a motor scooter when she was in her early 20s. A man from rural New Hampshire was sent off to Philips Exeter at the age of 13; eventually he became president of the student body. A woman in her eighties immigrated to the U.S. from England as a young mother and found herself befuddled by the cultural differences between metropolitan London and suburban New Jersey. An early entrepreneur in the computer field was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the height of his career and learned to reprioritize to save his health.

So far all I’ve done is listen and record; the writing and editing will take place later, and I’ll get to explore all of these tales and anecdotes all over again as I revise.

What a perfect summer job. My family isn’t leaving town for any summer travels for several more weeks, but I’m getting to venture through time as well as space through these narratives. And just as in childhood, my summer resonates with stories.

The one (story) that got away

My kids love to hear their grandfather’s tales about when he was a camp counselor: over dinner they ask for story after story. When their cousins are present, sometimes the older kids are able to chime in with details they remember from when they heard my father’s stories for the first time.

But recently I found myself thinking about the stories that do not get passed down: not necessarily serious or tragic ones, or family secrets, but anecdotes no one ever bothered to retell.

This was on my mind because I was making a salad to bring to a party and decided at the last minute not to bring the set of salad servers that matched the bowl in which I was preparing the greens. That particular situation may sound like it has little to do with family stories, but in fact this particular salad set has everything to do with story-telling, or the lack thereof.

When I was growing up, my mother had a Lucite-type salad bowl, clear durable plastic, in which was embedded what appeared to be real preserved butterflies. It was a pretty serving bowl with lots of colors, so when my sister was cleaning out my grandmother’s kitchen inventory after my grandmother’s death and asked if I would like a similar bowl, I said I certainly would, happy as always to have kitchenware that reminded me of the pieces I grew up using.

Just a couple of weeks after the bowl and its matching servers arrived, I made a large salad for a dinner party. “So about these salad servers…” one guest said midway through dinner, and some of the other guests started to laugh. I assumed I’d missed an inside joke while I was in the kitchen and didn’t give it another thought until the next get-together to which I brought a salad. At that gathering, someone was more direct, asking outright, “Why does your salad set have a pattern of marijuana leaves?”

Honestly, I had no clue. It turned out that the new salad set was similar in materials and style to the butterfly one, except had I bothered to look a little closer, I would have noticed that where the other bowl had pressed butterflies, mine had what appeared to be pressed marijuana leaves. The pattern appeared in the serving pieces as well as the bowl.

I’ve had this salad set for about eight years now. More often than not, when I use it, someone asks about the unusual inlay. And the fact is, I don’t know the answer. I asked my mother, but she had no idea why her parents possessed such a peculiar kitchen item. She too had always assumed the decorative items under the clear Lucite were butterflies or dried flowers, and admitted that even if she’d looked more closely, she wouldn’t have recognized the five-point leaves for what they were. But apparently that puts her in the minority of people I know, because everyone else seems to zoom in on the pattern with laser focus.

So this is a case where a family story was not retold, and details were lost in time that can probably never be recaptured. Whatever the story behind this salad bowl is, my mother and her sisters do not know, and my grandparents are long gone, so we will probably never know.

I’d like to have some interesting tale to tell, but I haven’t even managed to make one up so far. I have no idea what lies behind my peculiar salad servers, and frankly, sometimes I get tired of being asked, which is why on the recent day that I was making a salad, I’d actually decided not to use that salad set simply to avoid the familiar old conversation.

It’s not really surprising that my grandparents neglected to jot down the story of the pot-leaf salad bowl and file it away with their legal documents, but I regret the fact that it’s a story I’ve never heard. All the narratives and details that family members share with one another as the years go by, whether it’s about being a camp counselor or where the key to the safety deposit box is hidden, matter on some level. Most of them matter more than the origins of my salad bowl. But I’m still sorry that this story is the one that got away.

Kaleidoscope writing

Among the most interesting observations I’ve heard this week at the Aspen Summer Words writers’ conference is this one, from National Book Award winning novelist Colum McCann: “There are no new stories to tell. As writers, we must be kaleidoscopic.”

What a fitting image for the way we writers tell stories, I thought to myself. Kaleidoscopic. You look through a cylinder at a specific object, and you see its colors and approximate form – but it is variegated strangely, and if you turn the cylinder, the colors will change as the shapes will shift. That’s exactly what we do when we tell stories, especially if we are in the genre of day-to-day narrative nonfiction as I am. It’s fair for me to assume that nothing that I write about hasn’t been written about before. Right now there are millions of women writing books, drafting essays and blogging about the same topics I cover: daily life, child-rearing, writing, running, friendships, life lessons. In none of those spheres are my experiences unique, or even unusual. But we each shift the kaleidoscope and watch the pieces break into different shapes, colored in different hues: we each tell the same story a little bit differently.

Sometimes the same story can be told differently even when being told by the same person. When I was growing up, my father told us lots and lots of funny stories about pranks that he and his friends played when they were kids in school, or at camp, or at home. In one of his stories about junior high, a science teacher left the room briefly and all the kids put their heads down on their desks and closed their eyes. When the teacher returned, he thought the students had all passed out, and in his flustered confusion, he flung a chair through a window. I’m quite certain that the way my father told this story amused us when we were young. But years later, I heard him tell the same story with different nuances; in this one he included the detail that the science teacher was a World War II vet, and in this telling it became a disturbing story about a prank gone wrong as the teacher apparently had a post-traumatic stress disorder flashback and thought some kind of chemical had been released into the room and knocked all the kids unconscious, breaking a window out of panic.

The memory has stuck with me for just the reason Colum McCann identified: its shape-shifting, color-changing qualities. Sometimes the same thing happens to me when I remember stories from my own past: something that seemed funny or entertaining at the time becomes unnerving or alarming in retrospect. Lots of my favorite and funniest childhood memories involve glitches in household operations that as a parent myself I now realize were probably sources of frustration rather than amusement to my parents (the way that the Blizzard of ’78 knocked out our electricity for five days, for example).

A simpler way of saying it is just that most of the stories we know vary with perspective. The parable most often used to illustrate this concept is the one in which several blind people describe an elephant, each feeling a different part of the animal. I like McCann’s invocation of the kaleidoscope image, though. I’m exploring the same stories as millions of other writers: stories about children, households, community life, marriage. Shift the kaleidoscope and it’s a little different for each of us, and from there comes the art of narrative.

Helping tell stories

I’m helping a lot of people tell their stories these days, and I’m more convinced than ever that this is the work I was intended to do.

For several months now, I’ve been helping a 76-year-old woman in Concord write her memoir. She’s a second-generation American born to Italian-American parents. She grew up in the Boston area, met her husband on White Horse Beach in Plymouth a few days before her eighteenth birthday, and spent her college years having fun with him and his friends around the Harvard campus.

People who know I’m working on this project ask me why I find it so worthwhile. It’s not that I think the story will be of great interest to people who don’t know the main characters. It will be self-published with a print run of 25 or 30; our target audience is the woman’s children, grandchildren and a few family friends. But the fact that it’s no literary masterpiece doesn’t keep me from loving the time I’m spending working on it as a ghost writer. I like hearing about people’s lives, but more importantly, I embrace the challenge of using words to impart the same sense of importance that the people involved sense intuitively. To the woman in this story, whose husband died three years ago, this is a love story, a tale of how two young people from humble backgrounds grew up to be valued citizens, good parents, and dear friends to many. It’s a simple story – but it matters to her, and it matters to me.

I’m also helping another client compile inspiring interviews with NFL players. Each player has been interviewed and has told us the story of his life: my job is to weave those stories into a compelling and accessible narrative. And again, just as with the story of the Italian-American immigrants, it doesn’t take a lot of effort for me to sense and to try to convey the heartfelt importance behind these stories. The men in the NFL book all became successful professional athletes. They took a variety of paths to get there, but they all have lessons to impart if I just listen to them carefully enough and give enough consideration for how to explain what they are trying to say.

Last night I went out for dinner with a friend who wants to write the story of her family’s current life, which is a lot different from either of the other projects. She was a divorced mother of three; a year ago she met a divorced father of three, and the two married. She has started crafting the anecdotes from their first year of marriage into a memoir, and as we had dinner, I told her how genuinely I believe in the potential of her project. She too has a vital story to tell, one that will be meaningful and significant to a particular audience.

I like writing my own stories too, but as I work more with other people on theirs, I am beginning to believe this is a calling of sorts. Everyone has a story to tell; I feel as though I have an ear for discerning the narrative thread in each person’s account of their own life and helping them to weave it into a whole. I love these stories, and I’m honored to help tell them. Stories are an archetypal part of being human, and it’s fascinating work to be playing midwife to so many examples of how people turn their lives into narratives full of meaning, significance and ultimately even profundity.

If I heard it, I'll remember it

I was making a quick stop at the general store here in town when I ran into a woman I had met only once, at a New Year’s Eve party six months ago. She was buying a cake mix to make a Summer Solstice cake and mentioned that her elder daughter was home from college for the summer and doing an internship nearby. “And is she still seeing Henry?” I asked.

The woman looked briefly stunned. “How do you know about Henry?”

“You told us on New Year’s Eve. Oh, and by the way, I was thinking of you recently because of a novel I’m reading that reminded me of how you and your husband started dating in high school.”

Now she looked even more astonished. Oops, I’d done it again. I’m usually more careful, but because our encounter was unexpected, I’d let my guard down.

I have this very, very peculiar problem. Though this is entirely self-diagnosed, my theory is that I have a phonographic memory: not a photographic memory, where I remember what I see, but phonographic, where I remember what I hear. Specifically when people are telling me anecdotes about their lives. So when I’m talking to friends or acquaintances, I routinely refer to trivial details that they’ve relayed to me in the past, only to find them astonished and sometimes a little disturbed that I recall those details.

In my thirties, I finally realized that this tendency made me a bit of a social oddity and learned to rein it in. Now I pretend not to know things about people simply because I know there’s no way those people will remember having shared those details with me. Occasionally, people find it flattering that I remember the littlest stories they’ve recounted. For example, the mother of one of my daughter’s friends was amused when I remembered that her sons named a vitamin after their aunt, and now I always ask after Aunt Vitamin when I see this mom. But other people just find it weird, almost as if I’ve been spying on them. “What do you mean, how was my college roommate’s layover in Iceland?” they’ll snap, having long forgotten themselves that they mentioned to me one day at the post office that their roommate was en route to Europe via Iceland that very day.

And sometimes it makes certain events a little more boring than they might otherwise be. When I meet friends-of-friends, I can recall every detail that our mutual friend has told me about them – details that people often share as small talk at weddings and other get-togethers. So sometimes I pretend not to know that someone follows a vegan diet or once dated a U.S. senator’s son simply so that we’ll have something to talk about when we meet.

Several years ago I had the opportunity to talk to a newspaper columnist whose work I’d followed for a long time. I mentioned finding it funny that her son confused his kindergarten teacher with his rabbi. “My son is a senior in high school,” she said, sure I was thinking of someone else.

“But you wrote about it once,” I told her.

“I wrote a column about my son mistaking his kindergarten teacher for our rabbi?”

“Not a whole column. You just mentioned it.”

She clearly had no memory of including this tiny detail in a column that was probably about an entirely different topic. But I remembered.

I assume this phonographic memory is related to the fact that I became a journalist, though I’m not sure which came first: the interest in telling other people’s stories, or the improbable aptitude for remembering what I’ve heard. I tend to think I’m unusually attentive to what people tell me; thus I remember. But I suspect it’s somewhat physiological in nature as well, something about cognitive patterns. My sisters and my mother are both very good at remembering people’s stories as well, though I don’t think they’ve found it to be quite the social liability I have.

No matter; professionally it’s tremendously useful. I don’t need a Rolodex; it’s all in my memory, whether I need to contact someone who has a family member with a food allergy or track down a source who has a neighbor that works for NASA. And some of my friends have even learned to take advantage of me as a resource, which I fully support. One close friend routinely calls me when she needs to fact-check certain details of her own life. “What was the name of the town where I lived when I was studying in Russia?” she’ll ask. “What were the circumstances of the case I heard the first time I had jury duty?”

For a writer, this total recall is not a bad thing. Perhaps it will lessen somewhat with age. But in any case, I’ve learned to hold back most of the time so that I don’t come across like a stalker when I encounter acquaintances about whom I know far more than they realize. Except for times like today when I briefly lose those inhibitions.

The woman I ran into in the general store said that her daughter and Henry were not currently seeing each other. I’ll be more prudent about bringing up the subject next time we meet, which probably won’t be until next New Year’s Eve if then. But when I see her, I can ask how the Summer Solstice cake she made for her younger daughter and friends came out. There is that one advantage, after all: I’m never tongue-tied at parties. And if the CIA has any questions about anyone I’ve ever met, they know where to find me.

What the dog did on our April vacation

Considering how many school vacation weeks have found our family traveling absolutely nowhere – due to my work schedule, financial restrictions, or both – I was thrilled that this year’s April vacation, which fell last week, saw the kids and me hitting not one but two different destinations. First, we traveled south to Washington, D.C. for four days to visit my sister Sarah; then, after a brief layover at home to check in on Rick and the dog and do some laundry, we headed north for an overnight stay in Portland, Maine.

I was delighted that we had these opportunities. Mostly, I was happy to be able to offer the kids some new experiences and cultural enrichment and adventure, but I have to admit a tiny part of me was also happy that they wouldn’t once again return to school to hear about all their classmates’ adventures and admit that we hadn’t gone anywhere. Not that this has ever seemed to bother them in the past – they always pull up accounts of a daytrip to the aquarium or a hike at a local nature preserve to shore up their end of the “what I did during vacation” classroom conversation – but in truth, I was a little smug thinking that they too would name cities in other states when it came time for class sharing.

Eagerly, I asked my 7-year-old about how school went as she ate her afternoon snack yesterday. “We all talked about our vacations,” she recounted cheerfully. “Sammy went to the Caribbean, Jamie went to California, and Maggie went to New York City.”

“And did you tell about our trips?” I asked.

“No, I told about how Belle threw up.”

“You mean you told that she threw up,” I corrected automatically.

“No, I mean how. What she had been eating before and what it sounded like and everything.”

Wonderful. I took my kids to our nation’s capital and all Holly got out of it was that it almost caused her to miss being there when the dog threw up.

It wasn’t the first time that the kids’ penchant for literary realism has made it difficult for me to look their teachers in the eye. Earlier this year, Holly wrote a short story about how eating a particularly juicy and delicious pear made her reflect on how she often wishes she could run away because her mother (that’s me) acts like she doesn’t really love her. Holly’s teacher was troubled enough to call me before Holly brought the story home. She wanted to forewarn me. “Oh, that’s okay,” I said breezily. “It’s not as bad as the story Tim wrote in kindergarten.” Tim’s epic account of life in our household had started off like this: “I had a bad cough, so I took a long shower with my dad and then got into bed with my mom.” He even illustrated it.

Fortunately, I suspect our kids’ teachers grow accustomed to these too-close-for-comfort snapshots of their students’ domestic lives. Still, I feel like protesting that we really did have a very culturally enriching vacation. We visited the Natural History Museum. We biked all along Portland’s waterfront.

But Holly’s right; the dog threw up also. All were components of our week off, and I suppose I’m glad she doesn’t have my tendency to focus on only the show-offy parts of our vacation.

Besides, it does somewhat take the pressure off me as I look ahead toward summer. Ideally, I’d like the kids to spend some time in day camp, take musical instrument lessons, and sign up for a reading group at the library, plus the four of us are planning to go to Colorado at some point. But if Holly has her way, something gross will happen, and that will be all she needs to make it another great summer.

Does self-publishing my 7-year-old's book make me the Biggest Helicopter Parent ever?

In my experience, children learn very young that it can be more fun to give than to receive, even around Christmas time. Children love to make projects and present them to adults, buoyed with pride at their artistic accomplishments as well as the excitement of surprising a parent or grandparent with something special.

Even knowing that, I admit that what we did this holiday season was a little bit extreme. After Holly spent several weeks this fall dictating a chapter book of her own invention to me, I was faced with the decision about what to do with the final, 11,000-word, 72-page, 19-chapter opus. I decided to self-publish it on Lulu.com. Giving copies of her newly published – and absolutely professional-looking – novel to librarians, teachers, friends and family this month was surely a thrilling experience for Holly, and I admit that I looked on with plenty of pride of my own. But I also have to admit that in some ways, I feel like this makes me the biggest helicopter parent ever. Holly made up some stories, like lots of kids do. But I paid money to have her stories cooked into a professionally produced book, and in all honesty it does feel a little weird.

Primarily, I wonder if it gives her the wrong idea about what it means to write a book. I’ve been writing stories since I was her age and have been a professional journalist and copywriter for nearly twenty years – and I still don’t have a published book to my credit, though I’m working hard at it and so’s my agent. But in a way, that’s why it feels all the more duplicitous. I spent two years writing and revising a book, signed with a terrific literary agent, and am still seeking a publisher – whereas Holly wrote a book and two weeks after finishing it had a box of ten beautifully styled copies arrive in the mail. We cheated, I sometimes feel like telling her. It’s not really that easy.

And I can’t help but wonder if some of the other kids who have seen her book – or their parents – wonder at our ethics. In an informal discussion recently about the popular second-grade trend of eraser trading, her teacher referred to the “haves and the have-nots,” and I have to admit those words are echoing in my head as Holly proudly wraps and distributes copies of her new book. The cost really wasn’t much – with shipping, it comes out to about $8 per copy – but the fact remains that this was something we were able to pay for; we paid for the opportunity to have our child feel like a published author, where other parents possibly couldn’t spend money on that particular luxury.

In the end, my defense is that I’m rewarding not Holly’s talent but her effort and her commitment to this project. Lots of kids write stories – in my experience, just about all kids her age like to write stories – but not many are able to stick with one (albeit loosely formed) plot and one set of (albeit highly derivate) characters for two months as the nineteen chapters unfolded. And true, not every seven-year-old has a mom willing to sit at her desk night after night taking dictation, but the whole process was so delightful for me – I have a glass desk, and Holly lay on her back under it, staring up at me and letting the narrative bubble forth so that I had to type my fastest to keep up with her dialogue and plot turns – that I know I’ll remember those evenings for a long, long time.

Yes, it’s a charming but not brilliantly crafted book. As my twelve-year-old niece, a budding book critic in her own right, pointed out, the main character wishes she had a dog on the first page, doesn’t say a word about dogs for the next 71 pages, and then gets a dog on the last page. And those familiar with children’s literature will probably be able to guess with a significant degree of accuracy what three books Holly read most recently before she started writing “Louise and Mindy” (Did I already say ‘highly derivative’?).

But I think in the end, it’s okay. Holly has started her next book, but not with the same passion; we work on it a couple of times a week, not every night, and I doubt we’ll turn it into a published masterpiece when we’re done. In fact, we might never self-publish another work of hers. But this time it was worth it. For one thing, I’ve been casually investigating the idea of writing a commemorative volume for a corporate client, and it was useful for me to learn how to work with Lulu.com. Holly has a keepsake to remind her of fall of the year she was seven, and so do ten of her closest relatives, friends, teachers and librarians. Self-publishing is controversial in the literary world for these very reasons: in some respects it bestows professional status on a work that hasn’t earned that status, although in many contexts it certainly has an appropriate role. But for Holly, I’d like to think it’s a taste of things to come. Someday maybe she’ll get published for real, and if that happens, my hope is that she’ll look back and see this as at least part of her motivation for reaching that milestone.