Jennifer Lauck's new memoir, Found (Seal Press, March 2011)  is available for pre-order on Amazon.  She is the New York Times Bestselling author of Blackbird, Still Waters, and Show Me the Way.  Follow her musings each week as she stares down her pub date, creatively engages the community, and embarks on the quest to spread the word.

It’s the night before my birthday and I lie in bed, next to my eight-year-old daughter who is falling asleep after a long day of practicing her spelling, reading books and learning her times tables. Between us is one of her teddy bears with a heart built inside. Jo has one hand on my arm and the other around her bear. She is tired tonight but not so tired to ask me questions about tomorrow. “What kind of cake do you want?” “What do you want for your birthday dinner?” “Are you excited to open presents?”

For most people, a birthday is fun and a time to celebrate. I am the first person to make a very big deal of birthdays—for other people. But when it comes to my own birthday, a storm of melancholy takes over and I just feel tired.

I used to tell myself I felt so lost this time of year because my father, a man named Bud Lauck, had a heart attack on December 4th, 1973 (eleven days before my 9th birthday). In fact, I told myself this story for a long time, hoping I could just “snap” out my birthday funks but the annual sadness never went away.

Years later, I realized my sadness came from a much deeper place.

On my birth day, the very first one, I lost the love of my birth mother and all connection to my ancestry.  As an infant, I was relinquished—against my mother’s will—and forced against my will to enter a new family wholly unfamiliar to me. The transition from the mother who carried me to the mother who would adopt me lasted several horrible days as I lay in a plastic bassinette at St. Mary’s Hospital.  The records show I cried non-stop.

That’s a pretty bad birth day, if you ask me.

Found, my fourth memoir, details the depths of how it felt to live apart from my original family—depths that were largely unknown even to me until I was forty years old.

In the publication process, we are now at the point of bringing the book to press.  We have gone through wave after wave of editing.  There were the first pass pages, second pass and even third. At the third pass, there was little more that could be done to the book because the pages were designed and type set. Only the smallest changes were being allowed.

It is at this stage that I have very strong feeling that I need to invite one of the people, featured in the book, to take a look. It was a last minute decision and a complicated one because this person wasn’t pivotal to the story but still I had a gut sense.  A few days, my intuition was rewarded. The person I wrote about was furious. Changes were demanded. This person was sure I didn’t have my own story right and went ahead to make pages worth of edits including dialogue. My story was now the property of another person’s agenda. They felt they had the right, no the duty, to tell my story. For the good of all involved, this person explained.

At the final hour of possible change, a scramble took place. My agent, my editor and I worked to figure out what to do and how to do it. Decisions were made, I arranged childcare and set myself down for hours and hours of precision editing.

Did I incorporate the changes the person demanded?

Of course not.

Rather, I removed this person, in total, from the pages of my book.

This is one of the hardest (and most interesting) aspects of writing memoir. The people in our lives, who are inevitably going to end up in the lines, will have a different view of the experiences we write about. Depending how evolved people are, they will react strongly or not at all.  Some will care. Others will not. Most often I have found that if a person is positively portrayed in a book, they are delighted.  If they are complex on the page, the reaction can be quite negative.

In the case of the person in question, I did not portray them negatively at all, in fact I portrayed them accurately based on own perception and consciousness at the time.  But, this person required my perception and consciousness to be changed.  And that is simply unacceptable.  No one has the right to rewrite a memoirist’s book.  Memoir defined is a story about the writer's experience and what she does with her experience in order to grow, even evolve as a human being.  A memoir is the point of view of the writer because it is about her life and her perception of an experience.  That is what a reader expects from a memoir and that is what a good memoir produces. To allow another, relatively minor character, in your memoir to alter your truth for the sake of their continued friendship or even love is no friendship and no love. That is not relationship. That is occupation.

Having been an adopted child, required to adapt to circumstances out of my control since the day I was born, I have a heightened sensitivity to compromises. To bend my truth to fit the view of another is a compromise of the Self and thus the soul. I won’t have it.

Thankfully, Seal Press was in agreement and the changes were allowed.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I read the revised pages and found no evidence of this person in my manuscript. Not one.

Will the story suffer? No. Not at all.

This is the process of writing memoir. Rewriting never seems to end.

Jo is asleep, finally. She has rolled to her side, leaving me the bear with the heart on the inside. I kiss against her cheek and tuck the bear closer to her arm, just in case she needs some comfort in the night.

I make my way to my own bed, done with another day. Tomorrow I will wake up to be a year older and one day closer to the publication of this book.  

Have you faced a situation where you were pushed, subtly or not so subtly, to change your story or alter your truth? 

Jennifer Lauck lives in Portland, Oregon with her two kids, thirteen-year-old Spencer and eight-year-old Josephine. She mentors, teaches memoir writing and is just wrapping her MFA with Pacific Lutheran University. 

Connect with Jennifer at her SW profile page, via Twitter , or Facebook.