Tools:
I’m lucky, in that I’m writing the story of a happy family. I often say, and this is not an exaggeration, that my childhood was all birthday cake and ponies. (It is, then, a wonder I’m a writer.) I not only had loving parents, but a large family of aunts, uncles, and cousins who were unfailingly nurturing and kind to all the children in the family. This means I’m able to reach out to them and ask them to vet my memories and the stories I remember of events from before my birth. I understand that people with more difficult family stories might not be able to do this. For my current project, though, their cooperation and generosity are all that make the work possible. For this reason, I share any post that retells a family story with the people who are central to it. In this case, I’m sending the post to my mother. To show you how this works, I’ll label any changes she requests as redacted or corrected.
There are things I know I’ve gotten wrong about events in my childhood or stories about things that happened before I was born. For instance, I was an adult before I learned that the family called my great-grandfather’s second wife “Aunt Ann.” I’d grown up thinking she was “Ann-Ann,” because I knew she was my great-grandfather’s wife so not an aunt, and also had a brother we called John-John, so it wasn’t unprecedented. If I were writing a memoir, I’d feel free to call her Ann-Ann. This is not a memoir, but instead a collection of essays talking about shared family history. And because this history belongs to all of us, I feel honor-bound to vet my claims about it.
The Story:
The above photo was taken at my Aunt Josie’s wedding. (Josie is actually my great aunt, but we don’t bother with the “greats” in our family except for grandparents.) It was an elegant affair. Mostly what I know about it is that she married my Uncle Bernard, who was perhaps the kindest man to ever have lived. When I was dating, the highest compliment my mother could pay a boyfriend was “he reminds me of Uncle Bernard.”
Here is a story I may or may not get to keep in this post. My mother will decide:
She is wearing a plain brown dress and white high-top “baby” shoes. Next to her, our cousin Annette is wearing a velvet dress and patent leather Mary Janes. I grew up knowing about both the dresses and the shoes; some old wounds heal slowly.
Also in this photo [Redacted]
What I’m saying is that while this is a book about our family history, it’s not necessarily one about our family secrets.
Sharing a collective story means respecting the collective memory of it. Where there are disputes, I expect to write both stories. For instance, my great-grandmother (Lake Sr.’s first wife) Bertha once gave away her meat grinder because it had become unkashered. In my mother’s telling, one of my grandfather’s brothers bled on it. In my cousin Marilyn’s telling, one of them simply let a neighbor use it to make sausage out of meat that wasn’t kosher. This tension between versions is part of capturing family stories, because I’m playing a game of telephone with history. Ultimately, the truth that Bertha kept a kosher home doesn’t depend on which version of the story is true. And that’s the bit that matters as I ask questions about my own Jewishness.
I hope this is helpful to some of you. I often see advice to other writers not to vet things with the people we’re writing about, and I think that’s fair advice for memoir. But family history isn’t just about the writer’s life, it’s about the history of the whole. And if you have the luxury, as I do, of a loving and supportive family, it makes sense to honor that by allowing people some control over how they, and their stories, are represented on the page.