On Writing & Confidentiality

Rebecca Walker mentioned in a lecture I attended once that she tries very hard in her writing to be honest, but to do no harm. I struggle with that too and primarily with feeling that so many stories I have to tell are not mine alone and that I am somehow stealing part of another's individual experience. Our lives are all tangled.

Anne Lamott says you have to write as though everyone you are writing about is dead. I can't do that. But having read her work, I don't think she does either. She seems to be careful with people too, though probably more ruthless when commenting on herself.

There is that concept in the law that my rights end where yours begin. This is a problem for a writer. What belongs only to me and no one else? Very little.

I haven't written here in a few weeks because everything I have been wanting to share has involved the intricacies of other people's lives and deaths and I'm hesitant to share other people's stories without their consent. I'm left with only cliches about how life is precious, how the balance of work-family is kicking my ass but I'm enjoying the ride, and that, as O mentioned in last month's magazine, "Parents, I bow to your endurance!"

What I can say is that I'm inspired to write by people like the brilliant Jonathon Safron Foer who has said that he writes the kinds of book he would like to read, but can't find. Lately, I have come across novels that have titles that are exactly the title I would write, in fact much better than anything I could come up with, but inside the cover, it fizzles.

As the weather turns colder, my body reminds me of every broken bone, every muscle tear. Injuries I forgot I ever had, my body remembers. There is a novel called What The Body Remembers (by Shauna Singh Baldwin). It's a lovely book, but not at all what I was looking for and I left it feeling this title could have been cultivated in so many different ways.

The body having a separate memory from consciousness is a concept with endless story telling opportunities. All of our bodies are this way. Infinite possibilities.

When I saw the cover, I instantly thought of my mother begging us as children not to bump into her chair because the jarring sensation made her re-live falling from the attic, through the Pink Panther insulation and hitting the concrete garage floor. She was looking for baby clothes that had been stored away because she had just learned she was pregnant with me.

When my father came into the garage and found her, he knelt down, held her face in his hands, Viet Nam still fresh in his mind, and told her, "You're not going to die." They still can't get through the story today, 30 years later, without a bottle of wine and tears. I remain amazed that through the course of the pregnancy, her broken pelvis healed in time to deliver a 9lb 12 oz baby. The intensity of that trauma is most likely blocked out by the mind. But the body remembers.

Getting Mother's Body (Suzan-Lori Parks) turned out to be a literal title about retrieving the physical body. Now I love Suzan-Lori Parks. I'm excited she won a well deserved McArthur and to hear her talk about studying with James Baldwin is inspiring. She compared his students to flowers, all turning to face his sun and all more radiant in his presence... or something like that. She's amazing and I raced out to buy her book. But the title had a million places to go, and chose only one.

I foresee feeling this way again about a new film Things We Lost In The Fire. What an amazing title. Bret Lott teaches that writing is all about making choices. This title made all of them and none all at once. Damn. It could be anything. And, it should be said, there is a beautiful 2001 album by Low of the same name and I hope they are getting some kick back for coming up with such an amazing phrase.

This title made me think of *Fran, a Southern comfort food cook who now has a low country restaurant. When she showed me a recent grease fire scar, conversation drifted to stories of other fires. She told me that she kept a journal every night of her children's lives for 15 years that was lost in a house fire. Her husband passed when the boys were young and most of her photos of them together were gone. She told me about the pages and what the journal looked like with a hollow expression on her face of loss beyond measure. Watching the news this week, I thought about her and her journal and all of the things lost by each family- the vacuous nature of things lost in such a disintegrating way.

I'll keep writing. Though not about work, or where I live, or confidences shared. It's difficult to leave so much out and get to the root of things, but I have to write. Foer was interviewed about a year ago, when his child was 10 wks old and said:

"How do I put this? I love being a writer, but I don't love writing. An analogy might be, right now, I love having a kid, but man, oh man—it's so hard. Twenty-four hours a day. It's the hardest thing I've ever done. If you were to ask me each step of the way, "Do you feel like doing this?"...

As in: Do you feel like changing a diaper? No. Do you feel like jiggling a kid at four a.m.? No. Do you feel like cleaning barf off your shirt? No. But at the end of the day, if someone said, "Would you have wanted to spend the day any other way?," I'd say that's how I wanted to spend the day. When I write, I don't find it enjoyable page-by-page, but I'm really glad that it's what I do."

Thanks for reading.