Rewriting the Archive

I was just going back and forth with another site member about how we wished we had asked questions of our grandmothers When They Were Still Alive...and how we got interested later in life in their lives and their time of life. For me, it was seeing one grandmother's photos from when she was young. I had only known her as a fairly angry, bitter older woman. Seeing her young and happy was like an ice-cream cone on forehead moment: oh, she wasn't Always Old or Unhappy. What happened??? That question was what motivated writing my book...and made me horrified as I was doing research about the collosal Lack of curiosity I had had about her life until I was in my late 40s and she was long gone. Anyone else gone through this? How did you start getting interested? What have you found? Has it affected you in any way?

So, when deciding how to write about my grandmothers, I realized there was a lot I didn't know. I was about to research and find out some information, but could not know their internal spaces. So, I made a decision to speak as them, in the first person, which instantly made what could have been considered non-fiction into fiction. Or did it? There is now something called speculative non-fiction, which can include what I chose to do. An excellent book that discusses the blur between fiction and non-fiction is David Shields' Reality Hunger. I highly recommend giving this a look-see if you are working on the edge of memoir-biography-fiction, which according to him we all are all the time anyway, since so much of memory is fictional anyway and family stories are just those: stories ... What do you think?

I love this quote from Kennedy Fraser from her book Ornament and Silence and have it posted above my computer: "To a woman writer, exposing family secrets can seem perilously close to going mad. Men have had the support of the culture as they recognized their own experience and laid claim to it by writing it down. On the whole, they have been able, without inhibition to feed their creative ambitions with the details of other people's lives. Men had a mandate, after all, to inform the public about the nature of life. Things have not been--are not--so simple for a woman. Women have often withheld their stories, because honesty about emotions and about the family feels to many women like a sin. It means drawing aside the curtain, lifting lids. It means renouncing the role of good girl and ceasing to be ladylike. It may mean expressing anger and being brave enough to watch loved ones be angry. Women must set aside the bowl they have used to beg for approval and praise. George Eliot was not free as an artist until her respectable family had cast her out. Only a community larger than family, only powers greater than lovers or husbands, can sustain women writers when they start asking the big questions: Who am I? Who made me? What is my place in this world?" When writing The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick and Jani, I had to look at this many times and tell myself: it's OK that I am telling these stories. I am allowed. Any thoughts on this?