Sometimes, I am Flat Out Wrong...

On the importance of fact-checking with family before publishing something

Tool:

The generous and patient attention of people who remember things better than I do, and who are willing to look over and discuss events and correct my flawed memories.

The Story:

When I was twelves, we moved to Indiana, Pennsylvania because Dad got a new job. A lot about that move was difficult for all of us, and when that job was over, there wasn’t really any question about whether or not we’d move back to Huntington… of course we would.

I’m writing about that time now because, among other difficulties, it was the first time anyone had ever suggested to me that I might not be Jewish because my maternal grandmother wasn’t Jewish. As a weird kid in a new town without any extended family for the first time in my life, being a part of the Jewish community was really important to me. I joined BBYO, I went to afterschool Hebrew lessons even though there were no plans for me to have a Bat Mitzvah, and my first friends in junior high were people I met at the synagogue. So this had a big impact on me, and I was certain that I remembered the story of it correctly.

Reader, I did not. Mom just torpedoed my whole narrative with a few important facts that change everything.

So now I have a polished essay (in theory, due to my editor on Monday, but thank goodness that’s a soft deadline) centered entirely around events that I both misremembered and misunderstood at the time.

I’ve heard advice to memoirists and essayists that suggests you shouldn’t let the people in your work fact-check your work, because your memories are your own and they are what matter. And that may be true for certain kinds of work. It is certainly true when those people have reason to lie to you in order to elide their own bad behavior. But this isn’t that kind of book. It is, in fact, not a book about my memories but about my place in the world as a member of a family of Jewish immigrants who settled in, and helped build, parts of Appalachia. For a work of collective memory, privileging my own flawed recollections over the expertise of other family members doesn’t make sense.

I’ve been careful to do research into all the family stories and histories that I knew I didn’t know, but am discovering just how much of what I thought I did know also should have been more carefully researched.

For those of you writing similar work, what do you do when something you feel certain you know turns out to be untrue, or only partially true? Do you ask the people in your work to fact check it? How do you decide when to rely on memory and when to seek corroboration? Asking for a friend with an essay to entirely rewrite.