Moment of truth

I suppose I always knew this day would come. But actually, I thought it would be a lot worse.

“Mom, can you just tell me when you’re going to write about me in the newspaper?” Holly implored at dinner last night.

I tried to remember what might have brought this on just now. My most recent Globe stories were about supporting small businesses in West Concord and a portrait gallery in Lexington; my monthly personal essay column in our local newspaper this month is about how great it is to have a reliable coffee maker.

“Heather said at school last week that she read a whole article about me wanting to be taller than you,” Holly said in response to my puzzlement.

Oh, right. That was last month’s newspaper essay.

“Welcome to the rest of your life, kid,” my husband commented with what could be described as grim satisfaction. I think he’s been wondering for years whether the time would eventually arrive when the kids didn’t want their foibles and exploits turned into column fodder anymore. “That’s why I don’t read Mommy’s articles. They’re always about me.”

“Not anymore!” I protested. “They used to be about you! Now they’re always about the kids.”

Both kids looked at me then, and I realized it wasn’t necessarily the most artful response.

My father made a comment twenty years ago to the effect that the best thing about my getting married was that it meant my husband rather than my parents became the butt of most of my satirical writing. And of course it was only a matter of time before the kids became more interesting as writing subjects than either my parents or my husband.

My older child has never particularly minded, though. Not even when I wrote an essay about his approach to a sprint we ran together when he was three: he rounded the bend in the driveway and then stopped to pee in the woods. Of course, he was three; realistically, he probably didn’t read the paper back then and perhaps never knew about that column. But when I wrote an entire memoir about the unique challenges of parenting him and how I attempted to address them by inviting him to go running with me every day for a year, he seemed to think that was just fine. He even submitted to a radio interview about the book.

In the preface to Anne Lamott’s new book about grandparenting, her son, whose own birth inspired Lamott’s earlier memoir, said that her book about his infancy was “the greatest gift anyone has ever given me.” And Anne Lamott certainly has a lot more readers than I do – millions more. So I’d like to think that my children are equally sanguine regarding my essays about them, but it’s a lot to ask, I realize.

For years, readers and friends have asked if the kids mind being treated as characters, and I’ve always said they don’t, but I also always had the feeling I was living on borrowed time with that. And it’s not like Holly issued a cease-and-desist order. She just asked me to forewarn her when the whole town was going to be reading about her latest developmental phase.

It’s a reasonable request, and one I agreed to honor. A couple of years ago when I was taking a writers’ workshop, one of my classmates finished an excerpt of my then-unpublished book and said, “It’s good. And I can’t wait for the sequel.” “Why thank you!” I said, trying to sound modest. “I’m flattered. But a sequel? I’m not sure I’ll be writing another book about parenting.”

“Not by you,” he said with a smirk. “By Tim. The sequel will be his memoir about being parented by you.”

Fair enough. Because in a way, he’s right on a figurative level as much as a literal one: the sequel to everything we do as parents is what our children write about us, whether or not they or we ever actually put pen to paper. And if Tim – or Holly – ever does write that book, or even a newspaper column or two about me, I will do my very best to be as good a sport as they have always been for me. 

On writing essays

Last week on a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, writer Barry Lopez, who won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1986, explained why he wrote a particular essay about himself this way: “I’m just a writer. And the only thing I can do is…[to] say, This happened to me. I know many of you have experienced this. Here's what I've been thinking. What do you think?”

In those few short sentences, Barry Lopez has stated what writing personal essays is all about. It’s something that people ask me sometimes, both in the context of blogging and traditional print journalism, which are both channels of media in which I publish my own personal essays: Why do you, or why does anyone, write personal essays? What is the function of this particular form?

As Lopez said, we write essays to state what happened to us; in the hope that some note in our writing will strike a resonant chord with a reader who will then say “Yes, that’s how things happened for me, too.” But it’s more than just a search for common experience; it’s the wish to open a dialogue about how the experience felt and perhaps what it meant. Or, as Lopez puts it, “Here’s what I’ve been thinking [about this experience]. What do you think [about the similar experience you had]?”

Once in a while, I’m invited into classrooms to talk to students about writing. I always tell them to consider two opposite stances as they cast about for a topic for a personal essay. “First,” I always tell them, “readers are interested in reading about you doing something they too have done, so they can see how your experience was similar to or different from theirs. And second, readers are interested in reading about you doing something they haven’t done, so that they can find out what it was like.” When I visited my son’s fourth grade class several years ago for a day of personal writing, one child wrote about camping. “I used to go camping when I was your age too,” I told him. “I’m curious whether you feel about camping the same way I felt about it.” Another girl wrote an essay that started with a memorable pair of sentences: “Have you ever gone waterskiing in Mykonos? I have!” I most definitely have not, I told her, but I can’t wait to read what it’s like to go waterskiing in Mykonos.

Since I write essays both for our small-town community newspaper and for the Boston Globe, it’s not unusual for me to run into someone who says “You know what essay of yours I really loved, because I knew exactly what you meant?” I usually have a few seconds to try to guess what essay they’re thinking of – and I’m always wrong. Last weekend this happened twice. In one example, the woman was referring to an essay about why it’s fun if you live in the country to vacation in the city; the other reader mentioned an essay about getting bad news from far away while dealing with a hurricane at home. In neither case could I have possibly guessed which essay either woman was thinking of when she said she knew just what I meant.

There are long, complicated ways to describe the writing process, but what appeals to me about Barry Lopez’s words is their simplicity. “This is what happened to me. You might have experienced the same thing. Here’s how I feel about it. What about you?"

Exactly. That’s all we’re doing when we write essays. My experiences are a lot different from Barry Lopez’s – only starting with the fact that he has received a National Book Award and I have not. But both of us write in hopes of striking a resonant chord with a reader. Essay – the word comes from the French verb essayer, “to try.” That’s just it: we’re trying. And sometime we succeed.

 

What's an essayist to do when a family member puts her foot down?

My 7-year-old and I were heading out to meet the school bus this morning when a question floated out in her sweet, musical, little-girl voice. So innocuous was its tone that not until I was sitting alone at my desk later in the day did its import begin to seep through to me.

“Mommy, you know that Christmas card you send people every year? With the picture of us on it?’

“Yes!” I said, hoping she might have a clever idea for how we should arrange our family photo this year.

“Well, you know the thing you write that goes with it? The poem?”

Again I said yes. It’s a tradition I began the year Rick and I got married, writing a multi-stanza poem in rhyming iambic pentameter to sum up the year’s events, with a heavy dosage of satire poured over the corny word plays. Although the holiday newsletters that triumph every family accomplishment seem like they’ve been mocked enough over the past ten years to be relegated to anachronism, we actually still receive plenty: two-page, single-spaced accounts of what every family member has won awards for, who is solving world hunger and who is saving the whales. (The habit I find most irksome, and I know of at least two holiday newsletter writers who commit this affront yearly, is to include a child’s boyfriend or girlfriend in the account of Who Has Done Which Great Things. Spouses, okay; but college girlfriends? Gosh, doesn’t she have her own mom to write about her accomplishments?)

So I parody our lives and I do it in rhyme. It means I still get to update everyone on our list about what’s new without making it seem like I take any of this too seriously.

Holly went on. “Yes, the poem. Could you not write about me playing, this year?”

Holly’s universe of imaginary friends has figured into the holiday poem for the last two years. In 2007, Holly had a pretend husband and children; in 2008 she’d ditched the family but ran a pretend school. Other 7-year-olds go to dance class or soccer practice after school; Holly hurries upstairs to teach her imaginary class.

I thought for a moment and then answered carefully. “I won’t write about that if you don’t want me to.”

“I don’t,” she confirmed.

“I can write about other things you do instead, like how you learned to swim and ride a bike this year,” I said quickly, hoping to assure her that her accomplishments mattered to me just as much as the entertainment factor of her fantasy life.

“No, don’t write about that either.”

“How about if I check with you when I’m actually working on the card?” I asked her. She seemed to think that would be okay, and then her bus arrived, ending the conversation.

But I was left with the ominous feeling that what people have long warned me about was finally happening: I, an essayist and chronicler of family life, finally had a family member who was going to put her foot down.

And there was something particularly poignant about the timing of Holly’s question. It’s mid-November; we haven’t engaged in any holiday preparations yet, nor have we discussed a Christmas card for this year. For her to bring it up, it had to be something that was on her mind irrespective of external clues. So I know she was serious about it.

People ask me all the time how my children feel about appearing in my essays, and until now, neither child has ever expressed any concern, but this was a moment that nearly every essayist must face at some point. If anything, I was often surprised that I’d gotten a free ride as long as I had – not so much from Holly but from my 11-year-old son Tim. True, the essay about toilet-training and the one about his love of his stuffed frog were published when he was too young to read, but he was in fourth grade by the time I wrote about his fascination with his new protective athletic cup and his refusal to consider wearing anything but a red t-shirt emblazoned with an image of a ketchup bottle. He always seemed to just take it for granted that he would feature prominently in my essays about family life. And I’m lucky he was so accepting of the situation, since in time I would go on to write a full-length memoir about a year in his life, as he and I took on the challenge of a daily run together.

No doubt innumerable essayists, especially those who are mothers, have contemplated the subject of their family members’ reactions to being represented in print. I know of one nationally syndicated columnist who struck a deal with her teenagers that they had power of veto over anything she wanted to write about them. Another essayist whose work I followed for years wrote frequently about one of her two adult daughters and almost never about the other. Though some readers might have inferred favoritism, I suspected that one daughter had issued an edict against depicting her in print. And another writer I know once told me, though this is strictly hearsay, that when author Joyce Maynard was writing her “Domestic Affairs” column, her husband insisted he not be included. That precaution not withstanding, they’re no longer married.

I have no illusions that Holly will change her mind. This may be the beginning for her of a lifetime of not wanting me to turn her into fodder for my writing, and if so, I’ll do all I can to respect that. But I’m hoping she changes her mind for the Christmas card. Because although she didn’t save any whales or feed any hungry this year, I’d love to brag about how she learned to ride a bike.