Telling the Truth Is Painful, or Why washing family laundry in a public memoir is not easy
Anyone writing a memoir must face the challenge of how to tell the painful truth of his or her story at the same time as one does not want to cause harm or pain — but may have to.
While I have written elsewhere about telling the truth in a memoir. Those previous posts have been more on the objective level — the theory of telling the truth.
In writing A Sugary Frosting, the memoir of my deceased wife from notes she left, I have been brought face to face — personally — with the challenge of telling the truth about her life and about her family — as I believe she would have told it.
I’m not a great fan of “silly me thinking I knew how to tell the truth before I had to face the challenge!” so this is not going there. No, this piece is simply an application of what I already knew and have written about.
A Sugary Frosting
A Sugary Frosting is a book that I co-authored with Martha Blowen, my deceased spouse. The title to the book came from Martha’s journals. There was an entry in which she referred to her childhood as being a sugary frosting with every part of life “having to be sweet and sticky.” This mandate to be positive and optimistic — which Martha often expressed to be crushing — was definitely part of the truth the memoir had to tell if I was to be loyal to Martha. In so doing, I had to be disloyal to other people.
Martha died on August 18, 2008. At the time, she had written parts of her memoir, and I picked her manuscript up and finished it. There was no title to the book, and it was I who provided A Sugary Frosting. (The phrase had come up so many times as she described her family that I could not ignore it.)
Martha felt very strongly that the emotional tone of her childhood had created much difficulty in her life. These difficulties, she sometimes mused, may have contributed to her illness and death.
That, of course, is an idea that cannot be verified. But, it definitely was a thought that Martha believed in and shared with me on many occasions. She felt that her childhood, smothered with sugary emotional frosting and the insistence that everything be “nice,” had long led to a difficulty in perceiving truths about life.
I go into that in the sequel to A Sugary Frosting which I call My Eye Fell Into the Soup .
Her childhood was one in which she had been taught to deny reality in favor of making every conversation, every interaction, EVERYTHING be pleasant and positive and — especially —nice.
This was a painful experience for her as it only sometimes reflected how she understood her life. Too often, she either had to suppress any negative reaction or suffer the put down of “Why be negative?”
It was a painful observation for me to convey, but one which I felt I would have betrayed Martha’s trust not to do so.
My perspective
As son-in-law, I, too, experienced this compulsory reframing of what was happening as I interacted with her parents — especially with her mother.
- If one expressed something negative, she was likely to say, “But, you don’t really feel that way!”
- If she wanted you to do something, she would not ask you to do it. She would say, “You will want to do this, I know”.
- If one did very ordinary actions — like parallel parking, or return a damaged product to a store — she might say, “Oh, you do that so well!”
One was oddly left with the impression that she somehow did not approve of what one had just done or that one had just committed a faux pas.
Martha often felt that her cancer snuck up on her because she had learned to mistrust her own intuition. Whether this is true or not I don’t know. I do know that I myself often experienced doubt about myself when I was in my mother-in-law’s presence. I would have to stop and ask myself, “How do I really feel?”
So in writing A Sugary Frosting, I felt I had no choice but to place this observation — the painful truth — into the text. I knew that this was the reality of Martha’s childhood. At the same time, my own sense of affection for Martha’s mother led me to feel conflicted about telling the painful truth that is so essential to understanding Martha.
What was the truth about her mother?
Martha’s mother was a woman of considerable talent and accomplishments (e.g., she had the equivalent of an MA, had served on several state and national boards), and she had been very kind to Martha and to me. Our children grew up next to their grandmother who was always so generous in childcare.
This special person was also the woman that I knew to be real. She was not just the emotionally handicapped — one could even say “crippled” — person that is occasionally described in A Sugary Frosting but she was also a multifaceted, complicated woman who is also present in the book.
My quandary
I found it challenging to promote for A Sugary Frosting because of this conflict between how to tell the painful truth and honoring a relationship. The complication is all the greater both because of my deep relationship to Martha and wanting to honor the truth of her life as she saw it and because of my real affection for her parents, especially her mother.
But, how could I tell the truth of Martha’s story without telling the painful truth. Painful because it is critical of her mother.
I appreciate the time you spent with me.
~ For excerpts from A Sugary Frosting, click here.
~ For another Medium post on telling the truth, click here.
~ For just plain wanting to write better memoir, click here.
Have you had a difficult experience of telling the truth in your memoir writing? Leave your comment below.
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