• Cris Beam
  • I could only write my memoir…After my mother had died
I could only write my memoir…After my mother had died
Contributor
Written by
Cris Beam
February 2012
Contributor
Written by
Cris Beam
February 2012

I teach a family memoir class at NYU and, year after year, it’s always over-enrolled. The twenty year-olds carry around a limitless store of tales about their parents, their siblings, and the wrongs they’ve been done. But will they publish them? Probably not right away. A public airing of past struggle can be therapeutic in a class, but terrifying in the broader arena of publication—especially when that struggle implicates the living. Relatives, after all, are easily hurt or angered, they can contest your facts, and they can sue. As Samuel Goldwyn famously said, “I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they’re dead.”

            I’m turning 40 next month and I just published my first short memoir, called Mother, Stranger.  I had to wait for my mom to die. But this wasn’t because I was afraid of what she might do or say or even feel; I didn’t write about my mom while she was alive because I didn’t have the separate self to do it. I was too angry, too broken, too enmeshed. Despite the fact that I left my mother’s house at fourteen and never saw her again, the pain I felt about my mother kept her close. Too close to see her as both light and shadow, with edges distinct from my own. Her death gave me my voice.

            In a book review about six years back, Francine Prose wrote,

What the memoir writer knows is what readers of Grimm intuit: the loving parent and the evil stepparent may in reality be the same person viewed at successive moments and in different lights. And so the autobiographer is faced with the daunting challenge of describing the narrow escape from being baked into gingerbread while at the same time attempting to understand, forgive and even love the witch.”

 

Sometimes death provides enough distance for equanimity; it did for me. Suddenly all the unspoken bits of our shared history formed themselves into language, and death gave way to life. I could write a memoir with my mother as a living character, and imagine my way into compassion for both of us.

            I know that for some people, an obituary is the green light to finally release the monsters from the closet, since you can’t libel the dead. But I also know that keeping mum on the monsters doesn’t help anyone. Audre Lorde once said, “your silence will not protect you.” She was right, but still, silence can sometimes serve as an incubator for memoirs too raw or unformed for display. Until one day, maybe after a death in the family, that silence cracks and you’re writing, writing writing, like your own life depended on it. Because it probably does.

 

 

What allowed you to write (or begin) your memoir? One respondent will receive a copy of Mother, Stranger, available at The Atavist. http://atavist.net/mother-stranger/

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Comments
  • Carolyn Barbre

    Thank you Marcie. My journey was the embodiment of the double standard. I feel like the prototype. I'm a big fan of Marion Roach Smith. I've read her book, follow her blog and read her postings on SW. I appreciate your input.

  • Marcie Bridges

    Carolyn, I think your overview sounds wonderful. I do have a question for you to think about: is your memoir actually about the double-standard that exists or is it about your journey? To me, those are two different things.

    Just this past week, Marrion Roach Smith did a series of posts regarding memoir here on SW. Her posts got me thinking about my memoir in ways I hadn't entertained. Might be worth a look-see. :)

  • Heather Marsten

    Thank you, that is my goal, to make my past into something that helps others - to redeem the past.  Have a blessed day.

  • P.Allen Jones

    @Heather, my family didn't see the abuse I endured either because they were blinded by their own experiences. For that reason, I chose to change their names to tell MY story & not theirs. And, to help my children deal with the truth. This gave me freedom to tell my whole story without hurting them. Keep writing Heather, you won't believe how many people you'll help.

  • Heather Marsten

    I am working on my memoir - my parents are dead and my sister and brother are older, and sickly.  I have show my memoir to my brother and he never knew the extent of the abuse I received.  His comment was, "Now I know why Shirley wants to be called Heather."  I have others to think about - three young adult children who do not know the full extent of my life - my abuse, my time in the occult, self-destructive behaviors, etc.  I have to publish, but am thinking if I should publish under maiden name rather than married name - but I have living nieces and nephews who also would be affected.  I'm just writing now, and will decide later - might have to change a few names.  

    I understand the anger at parents who abandon us - and the anger that eats at you.  I had that for years until I could forgive. Not forget - just forgive. I got free of my past when I realized my parents would have to answer to God for their abuse, but I didn't have to carry around their corpses in my present life.

    Have a blessed day.

  • Carolyn Barbre

    I’m struggling right now with writing a platform for my memoir, SHOW-CAUSE: A Bicoastal Kidnapping Custody Battle. I’ve started the overview as follows:

     More than two million women share a shameful secret that engenders perennial heartache but they dare not tell. SHOW-CAUSE exposes the double standard imposed by a society that often views a father who kidnaps his own children as a renegade hero but a mother who does so is branded a crazed bitch. He was rewarded; I was incarcerated.

     I have gotten to this place only because I am running out of time. It is important to leave my sons with a better understanding of the forces that shaped their lives, a story of emotional abuse and a need for control that so many of these battles embody.

  • Taneisa Grier

     “your silence will not protect you.”

     

     

    Chris, this resonated with me. I'm not sure why. But you're right. In a very intimate sense, silence doesn't protect you from your own emotions...and speaking, wellll, it may not be the savior either but maybe it can make room for the life you longed to live and the you, you've longed to be free to be. Perhaps finding your voice in your memoir leads you to the sanctuary of permission where all things lost can be found and the hurts can be loosed.

    Thanks for sharing Chris.

  • Irene Bynum

    Excuse me, Cris, not Chris.

  • Irene Bynum

    Chris, thank you for sharing your thoughts on this.  I have been struggling to write my "Memoirs of the Mad Manicurist" because of that very reason.  Most of my inspiration comes from my daily dealings with very colorful clients and when I hear a story that I just have to write about, I get permission from the client and most of the time they gladly give it.

    Family is another story.  As my writing mentor put it very eloquently, "your family will become your biggest censor if you let them!"  I have often thought that I would have to put off writing about these relationships after they pass, but I don't want to wait that long!  I am such a novice at this and have many questions about how I could intertwine family stories as client stories and still keep it as a memoir?  When I write, I sometimes write about myself as if it had happened to a client.  Does this make it not real? 

     

    Again, thanks for sharing.

     

     

  • Linda Wisniewski

    Cris, I started to write about my mom while she was still living, but I wasn't ready to publish anything til after she died, mainly because I still hadn't reached that balance between enmeshment and equanimity, as you so beautifully say. 

    I actually wrote several short memoir pieces before a writing mentor encouraged me to put them together into a book with a common theme - my relationship with my mother! ;-)

    Off Kilter: A Woman's Journey to Peace with Scoliosis, Her Mother and Her Polish Heritage

  • Jeannette LeSure

    My father's death opened the closet of horrible memories and I began to write "ugly" as I called it then. I began to reach for some honesty in my writing as I went through three years of frequent flashbacks--not of HIM, but of another family member. Then my mother died two years later and I really began to write. Two of my three siblings are dead as well. The third? Well, he is gone, but I do not know whether he is alive or dead. I am it. That really DID free me to start writing with serious intent. I had written journals for many, many years, but with some detachment. Now I write with both, and am focusing on looking at each piece and seeing whether or not it has something to offer beyond me and my earlier need to spill it all out. But I also need to have already worked through the pain and horrific ugliness before I wrote with intent. We'll see whether I can write a book that has an application beyond confessions of yet another abused child/woman. Don't want that, though. I want more.

    So it sure does make sense to me that many of us had to wait until people of whom we wanted to write DIED. Another thought. Sometimes I did not remember some profoundly GOOD things until my parents/siblings died as well. I found that interesting. Did that happen for you?

  • Cris Beam

    Wow, what wonderful responses! And what a range. I'm really humbled here, by all the reasons we have for writing--and not writing--until we're ready. I love the image "tight as lace" (yet full of holes!) and the Anne Lamott quote, and the kindness swirling all about here. Mothers are such tricky beasts. I've been reading these responses these past days with real awe and admiration. I'll check back in soon for the giveaway. 

  • Marcie Bridges

    My memoir began as a paper for a senior level English class in college. I remember my professor handing it back to me saying, "If I knew someone in Hollywood, this would make a great transcript!" That was in 1995. More than 10 years later, I met some other wonderful ladies (via our shared love of a YA series) that were aspiring authors, too. They are what pushed me to take my writing more seriously. For me, it's therapy; some paint, others knit, I write.

  • P.Allen Jones

    ps. Not calling my mother a witch, I was quoting your quote from Ms. Prose.

  • P.Allen Jones

    Forgiving the witch is right. Forgiving everyone else was also necessary. My memoir was finished the night I saw my mother die. She died quietly, gently and oddly enough, beautifully. I couldn't write about it, however, for months. When I finally did, with tears running down my face, my book "I Only Cry at Night, living with Sickle Cell Disease" was finished.

  • Sarah Marxer

    I love the idea of silence as an incubator. I'm still at the apprentice stage of memoir writing, so I don't yet have an answer to your question. I look forward to seeing how you handled writing about the trans kids you were involved with.

  • Renee Cassese

    Nicely said. Our mother-daughter attachment is tight as lace, having taken many years to create that intricate design. Hard to unravel ourselves from the connection while Mom is still around. Funn though, I always felt I couldn't write that memoir until Mom was gone and now that she's no longer here I don't remember why I wanted to wait.

    Renee

    www.renneiswriting.blogspot.com

  • Georgia M Downer

    Aging has changed my viewpoint about many things. It's helped me to recognize that I will never know exactly what caused my mother to be so distant and unhappy. I stopped looking for the answer. That freed me to write about what I knew.

  • Barbara Hales, M.D.

    Sorrow descends to read how you were never able to have close discussions with your Mom and could only release your inner stories when she was gone.

    Perhaps your manuscript could have been a jumping off point to a frank discussion and closure between the two of you.  Unfortunately, you will never know.

  • Carol Hand

    I have a whole lot to write regarding the journeys of my adult life up until this 34 year-old point. However, a lot of it revolves around a marriage from hell. We are at the tail-end of a divorce, but we have kids, and I still associate with my in-laws, so I'm hesitant to write it now. I don't think I can wait until the man is dead, but at least until my kids are older.

    Since I left him, I have been writing here and there, mainly at the recommendation of counselors - writing for therapy. I journal, but I write bits and pieces of creative stuff that the inner muse drives me to write too. I just signed up for this site not long ago. I don't even know where to begin. I bought some books on creative writing, and how to get started. Since I have a long ways to go before my kids are older, and I think mine and his family can handle my story, I'm thinking of getting my feet wet with some sort of nonfiction.

  • Jessica Rachel

    I just published a memoir about growing up with a progressive, terminal illness that was supposed to claim my life before the age of ten. I think what allowed me to finally share my story with others was my mom sharing her diary with me. Her move was probably unintentional - she gave me stack upon stack of childhood medical records, but tucked in between the lab results and hospital admission papers and surgery bills were little gems, snippets of her life raising a child with an incurable illness. I knew that I wanted to write about some of the more significant parts of my journey (including my diagnosis at the age of twenty-two months), but I was not cognizant of some of those times in a way that would have allowed for the words to flow and engage. When I read my mom's words, written in 1983, about her "child who doesn't have a future," I knew her openness would finally allow me to find my voice. It was less about wanting to avoid libel and more about being willing to share things that my own family didn't know (such as my struggle with an eating disorder after a kidney transplant) once the precedent was set that it was okay to cry. (www.rollerskatingwithrickets.com/blog/)

  • Julie Golden

    "Write as if your parents are dead." –Anne Lamott.

    This quote, which applies to much more that my parents, has set me free to write from the heart.

  • Barbara H. Horter

    Your post Mother, Stranger, struck such a chord with me. I was a writer from the age of eight when i won a PTA writing contest for a short story that was chosen to be printed in our local newspaper. Years later I was a correspondent for that same newspaper, simply because i loved to write and told tthe editor he should hire me because I wrote a darned good story.

    All my life was spent writing poetry, short stories, and finally when in my fifties I was hired to compile a chapter and write for the New Twentieth Century History Book of Beaver County, my name actually was acknowledged with my biography in that book. It satisfied me that my parents saw my name connected with something so concrete.

    Mom would never read my poetry because she just did not care for poetry. My dad, on the other hand, read everything I ever wrote and was  my best critc for my writing and my art work.

    Mom always said to wait till she died before writing a book about the family. She was thrilled when I won a Christmas short story contest and I gave the article rolled up with a ribbon as a gift to my parents that year.

    I wish I could tell mom face to face how much alike we two were but didn't realize it. She studied the Bible as I did but we were not aware of each others' activity, although I taught Sunday School for years and we attended church together.

    After she passed away i found her threadbare Bible so full of notes and question marks. We could have been discussing all the questions she had for i had the same ones.

    Thank you for your wonderful article and write on. I know i will too.

  • Caryl

    I'm in the process of writing mine and am a little stuck because most of my story revolves around my son. I don't want to embarrass him. I certainly can't wait for him to die, so I suppose I'll have to force myself to carry on and then decide what to do with it.

  • Deidre Ann Banville

    I feel your pain as I had the same experience but very different circumstances. I was born with a veil, as was my mother. Being a caulbearer to this day is a very deep dark secret, I wrote my book, BORN WITH A VEIL, NOW WHAT?, after my mother died also. It seemed to me that she spiritually handed me over the reins (I am a horse person) and told me to run with it. What she was afraid to tell the world is now coming out in my new book next month. I would love to read your book because it surely must parallel our emotions if not our humanities. My mother and I were very close but as far as her gifts went she let me learn them all by myself. Sometimes I want to scream, well sometimes I do scream, "thanks a lot MOTHER" and then I laugh. Her message could not be louder to me and was the driving force behind my book. I often say I wish I knew then what I know now. How smart would I be now at 70 years of age? You would not have learned all you know now, what you write in your book, while you were younger. It takes time to gather wisdom and faith, your time is now.