Where’s the line between telling the truth and violating the privacy of your loved ones? It’s a question non-fiction (and to some degree, fiction) writers struggle with and one Julia McKenzie Munemo explores in this craft essay.
Early in my MFA program, a fellow student advised me not to discuss my children with the director. She’d overheard me telling him about the soccer camp or the Shakespeare camp or the “dad camp” they were attending while I was at my first residency and admonished me. “He’ll never take you seriously as a writer if your whole identity is mother.” I felt scolded, and assumed she knew what she was talking about. She was older than I was, her children older than mine, she was published and therefore must know this world I was trying to enter. So I listened. I never spoke to the director about my children again.
Two years later, I was chosen by the faculty to give a commencement address. As I stepped off the stage, the director high-fived me in his nerdy, hipster way, and said, “You knocked that out of the park.” I had, and was proud, and proud he’d noticed. But more than anything, what I registered was his look of surprise. He had not expected a good speech, or a good delivery. He had underestimated me because he didn’t know me at all.
What I’m saying is that if I censor myself in this particular way, if I don’t talk about my children, you can’t know me. And why do we write, if not to be known?
* * *
I’m a mother. I am also a wife and a daughter and a sister and a writer and a colleague and a friend. I am a person with an anxiety disorder who has struggled with depression and a survivor of a father’s suicide and a worrier. A traveler and a hiker and an animal lover and, it turns out, a pretty good public speaker. I am a student and a teacher and a reader and someone who loves fiercely and who sometimes can’t let go. I’m empathetic and a good listener and a giver of wise counsel. A lover and a fighter. But if this were a Venn diagram, the whole thing would be surrounded by a circle labeled Mother.
In Directions to Myself, Heidi Julavits tells a story about a famous male writer who announced that every child represents one book never written. She critiqued his math, wondered about the children this man didn’t have so that he could have his books, about his wife and what it was like to be married to such an asshole. I may have known since I was little that I wanted to be a writer, but if I’d had no children, I would have zero books. Zero essays. The children are the whole point.
* * *
My elder son’s heart was first broken in 9th grade. He’d started dating a quiet white girl in the fall, and when she dumped him just before Valentine’s Day, Julius couldn’t go to school for a few days. At first I pushed—you’ve got to face this, move on—but then he said something that swayed me. “I was in a dark forest before, but I didn’t know it was dark. She showed me there was light. I don’t know how to go back to the dark now that I know there is light.”
Melodramatic? Of course. But he was fifteen and name someone whose first heartbreak wasn’t. Plus, it’s exactly true. What else does loving someone do but show us there is light in this dark world? All my life before, I was waiting for my children to be born so they could show me the light. I don’t know the point of this experiment without them. So, as they’ve grown and struggled, I’ve turned to my craft to help me understand. It’s what writers do.
* * *
Midway through my MFA program, another student—another mother—announced that the Great Abigail Thomas had proclaimed memoirists must refrain from writing about their children. The implication was you should feel no guilt when writing about your mother and father, your siblings or spouses, or—as another great memoirist, Mary Karr, once said—anyone at all who has mistreated you because if they didn’t want to be written about unfavorably, they should have treated you better. But apparently Abigail Thomas said children were off limits. This made sense to me, and a combination of these wise words from my foremothers in memoir guided early drafts of my master’s thesis. Until my mentor asked where the children were. “It seems the whole story is about them, and yet they do not appear.”
Gasp! The Great Abigail Thomas Said I Can’t!
One night at dinner once the thesis was morphing into a memoir: “Hey boys, I wonder how you would feel if I wrote about you a little in my book? Anything I write, you could read and tell me if it’s okay to include.” They were ten and thirteen. Still, it seemed possible they would read it and find a way to give me their notes.
“You made us, Mom,” Julius said. “You can write about anything you want.”
George laughed and agreed. “Yeah! You made us!”
When I reported this development to the mother-writer who’d announced that Thomas says we can’t, she said: “This is great! And anyway, apparently she doesn’t remember saying that.” Wait. If Thomas doesn’t remember making this decree, did I still need to consider it? Who decides the rules? Are there rules?
* * *
I’m not sure that You made us, Mom, you can write about anything you want still holds, now that they’re nineteen and twenty-two, but it allowed for the first draft of my second book—a memoir about motherhood, race, and anxiety—to come into existence. They have now read that first draft and given their blessings. But two years ago, when an early excerpt was accepted for publication, I asked them to read it before I signed the contract and Julius promised he would and George said, “Julius will tell me if there’s anything in there I wouldn’t want published,” and my husband made a joke about Julius being George’s lawyer. But a week passed—and then another—and Julius didn’t read it. Eventually, the deadline to sign the contract arrived and I pestered him again. I sometimes wonder what I’d have done if he vetoed the piece. Of course I would have stopped publication, of course I wouldn’t have continued with the project. But as Carl Jung told us so long ago, and as my therapist reminds me so often, “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.” How would my unwritten book weigh on them later? Or is it simpler than all that: Maybe I could only write it in the first place because I knew somehow they hadn’t changed much on this score. Julius told me to go ahead and sign—I could write anything I want, like he’d said all those years ago.
But still, I worried. From my office at work the day it came out, I read the essay six times trying to anticipate how it would feel to them to read before putting the link in the family thread. George (as far as I know) ignored it. But one hot summer afternoon a few days later, I came home from work to Julius sitting at the dining room table with his laptop open.
“Hey, I read your essay!” he said. “I fucking love it.”
“You do?” I asked. “I was worried it might hit a little close to the bone.”
By which I meant that we’d never explicitly talked about the main topic of the essay before: the differences in my mixed-race Black children’s complexions. Until I wrote that essay, it was the elephant in our house. Of course we saw them both, we knew one was fairer than the other. We even knew that meant he felt unseen for who he really is. But it seemed like talking about all that would bring any pain of it to the surface. (As it turns out, it’s possible to write a whole book about the damage of perceived family secrets, as I did in my first memoir, and to simultaneously keep quiet on other important topics.) So I wasn’t sure how Julius would feel, having my words published about how he—my fairer skinned son—is perceived.
But Julius is, has been since the moment he could speak, a teller of hard, important stories. A talented writer in his own right. “Everything worth writing hits close to the bone,” he said.
Did that moment guarantee he would feel the same when he read the whole manuscript? No such possibility, of course. And, of course, the larger manuscript goes into far more private things than phenotype.
“You name medications they’re on,” an early reader noted.
I do. I also discuss their journeys with therapists and doctors and some other things you wouldn’t know from just looking at them. Though I would counter, I mainly discuss my observations and anxieties and responses to these things. Perhaps Vivian Gornick, author of The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, would agree that the children are my situation, “the context or circumstance” about which I write, though that makes me sound quite cold and I trust you know that context and circumstance can live and breathe. My point here is that the story—“the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say”—is my own. The story is mine. And every true story requires context and circumstance, characters and drama and dialogue, just like fiction, and these are the people I share my life with. These are the situations I know. I write to understand them, and in understanding them, I am sometimes able to build them into stories. I do this because I think it matters to speak truth into the air and let others hear and respond. It’s whale calls underwater across oceans: I am here. Are you there?
* * *
In her essay “The Ethics of Writing Hard Things in Family Memoir,” Kelly McMasters discusses sitting on a panel of mother-writers who had “come together to talk about issues of exposure and protection, particularly of our children, in our pages.” She describes looking out the conference room window onto a construction site covered in plastic sheets “like the slimy shower curtains in my old high school gym, never big enough to afford actual privacy,” and asks: “How do we, as mothers and writers, pull the plastic sheet so that it covers enough? And who, more importantly, determines when it is, in fact, enough? The children? The reader? The writer herself?”
It’s a question every writer must answer for herself. For my part, I started by writing, and then I asked my children to read. I gave them veto power over all of it. Had I censored myself, assuming my chosen arbiters would seek more coverage from the plastic sheet, I’d create nothing more meaningful than an Instagram post in my lifetime. McMasters reminds us there is violence in the creation of anything—a spring flower bursting open, a new building rising up, an essay—or, I would add, a baby—being born “requires the breaking of something. … At our best, memoirists hope it is silence we are breaking, and not another person. At our worst, we create anyway, knowing it will.”
After the publication of my first memoir, I worried I hadn’t foreseen every outcome, and that the unforeseen would end my marriage. I believed it was possible that—despite the fact that Ngoni had given his blessing—one day he would wake up and decide he couldn’t be married to someone who would expose our family as I had in those pages. The Book Keeper: A Memoir of Race, Love, and Legacy tells the story of my writer-father who, I learned decades after his death, made his living writing pornographic novels set during slavery. Each one was more dependent than the last on racist tropes that build the taboo about interracial sex, a taboo my white father exploited to sell books. The irony at the center of my memoir is that after he died, I grew up and married a Black man, lived for a time on the continent my dad only traveled to in his imagination, and that the truth of the multi-racial family as I lived it, as I depicted it in my book, was starkly different from my father’s racist imaginings of the same in his books. That was a lot for my husband to hold, and as Czeslaw Milosz famously warned, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” You can imagine I worried a great deal about what happens when a writer co-creates the family, and later writes about it so directly.
But my first book didn’t break my marriage; I believe it made it deeper. More honest. Czeslaw Milosz also, perhaps less famously, said, “Literature is born out of a desire to be truthful—not to hide anything and not to present oneself as somebody else.” My book allowed me—sometimes forced me—to do that. I learned that telling the truth—pulling McMasters’s too-small plastic curtain back entirely—allows me, the mother and the sister and the wife and the friend, to hold myself accountable to who I really am, to be honest in hard moments that I once would have skimmed over. So yes, McMasters is right, at our worst, we create anyway, but I would amend her ending. We create knowing it might hurt, but that the truth will not destroy.
So rest easy, dear reader: my kids were not broken by my second book, currently still in manuscript form. For now. There are no guarantees that feeling will hold, and I would never presume they will feel as they feel today for the rest of their lives. But today is all we have, and so today—because they’ve agreed—I’ve started shopping that manuscript around, the one in which I pull back the plastic sheet to show what it’s really like to send adult children out into an ugly world, how it affects the mothers. We all spend so much time pretending (on Instagram, at dinner, hiking in the woods) that they’re all fine and we’re all fine and everything will be fine. Sometimes we’re not fine, but if we’re lucky, we find a way to muddle on. I think it matters to show that part, too—to each other, and to the readers who are going through it in their own way.
Plus, my children know I’m a writer. I believe they are strong enough and smart enough to see that the truths in my manuscript are my own, that the story is mine and that it may not necessarily be theirs. What’s more, people of my generation worked quite hard to remove stigmas around mental health struggles, antidepressant and antianxiety medications, and self-care. Perhaps my children said, when they read the pages I’ve been working on since the beginning of COVID—when all our struggles turned technicolor—that we succeeded. That they don’t care who knows how hard they work to stay healthy because—as my therapist reminds me all the time—it’s hard work to stay healthy in this society, and because we taught them not to be ashamed of doing that work.
* * *
A few weeks ago, I finally read the Great Abigail Thomas. I’m not sure what stopped me from reading her before—I knew she was great. But I don’t always seek out white writers who aren’t explicitly writing about race or politics. Also, I am sometimes intimidated by greatness. Anyway, by the time I was reading Safekeeping, her memoir about—among other things—the death of her first husband, I wasn’t looking for her wisdom or guidance or a rule saying I couldn’t or permission to write about my kids. By the time I read it, I was deep into this second memoir and writing about my kids was simply what was happening. Imagine my delight when, towards the end, I came upon this admonishment from Thomas’s sister—a regular interlocutor throughout her pages:
Where are the kids, my sister wants to know.
I can’t write about the kids, I say uneasily.
But they are part of this, she says. Their lives.
Their lives are their own, I say.
They are wonderful, my sister says, I love your kids.
I know, I say. They are the nicest people I know.
But I don’t see them in here very much, my sister says.
This is not about that, I say.
Not about what, she asks.
Not about holding them up to the light, I say.
They should be here.
But they are everywhere, I say, they are on every page. Don’t you see?
See what?
They are the whole point.
Could this page have been the source of the rule my MFA classmate announced? Could this page—which I interpret so differently—be the reason I felt I was not allowed to write about my kids in my MFA workshops? Could the whole thing have been a misunderstanding?
I’m not the first writer to say the children are the whole point, or to put them on every page. My pages reveal that truth more explicitly than Thomas’s, but I believe no mother-writer leaves the children behind. No mother-writer can choose which hat to wear when; we’re always, always wearing both.
Julius and George would be on every page even if I tried to excise them, but you would be wrong to think I put them there blithely, without concern for their futures, or for unforeseen repercussions. Nothing we do is without consequence, and, as I’ve said, I’m a lover and a fighter. The memoir I hope you will one day hold in your hands is how I show you whom I love, what I fight for. I wrote it because I know you’re out there, fighting for, loving, yours. It’s my whale call to you. I’ll be listening for yours back.
by Julia McKenzie Munemo
Julia McKenzie Munemo’s first book, The Book Keeper: A Memoir of Race, Love, and Legacy, explores how, decades after her father’s suicide, she—a white woman married to a Black man and raising mixed-race children—learned that her dad wrote interracial pornography under pseudonym in the ‘70s. She is working on her second book, a memoir about race, mid motherhood, and mental illness. Her work has appeared in Solstice Literary Magazine, Electric Literature, Public Seminar, and Inside Higher Ed. She directs the Williams College Writing Center and splits her time between western Massachusetts, central New York, and New York City.