An elderly relative is trying to gather as many stories and connections from that side of the family as possible, because her generation is disappearing fast, and we young sprogs don’t know all the details of family history. It isn’t really for publication, just a loose batch of tales, pedigrees, and other things of limited interest to anyone outside the [redacted] family. She wants to make a spiral-bound booklet for all of us who are interested.
I love and fear family histories and the like. I love them because of the rich stories, the historic details they provide, and the glimpses into other worlds that you can get. I fear reading another headline about an author who gets sued by angry family members for how he or she is portrayed, or how the author changed/twisted/revised what everyone else remembers. Look up the on-going strife within the family featured in The Blind Side for depressing details.
Most of us focus on fiction, although some of us have written family histories, accounts of events, and even history books and biographies. Fiction is generally safe, because the odds of, oh, someone from the region sort of described in The Language of the Dragon showing up on Margaret Ball’s doorstep with a lawyer for defamation based on her depiction of the region in her novels is … low. Really low. Or a woman suing Sarah Hoyt because “Sarah copied me to create Athena! I’m the real Athena, and she didn’t ask me for permission.” (If someone thinks she is Athena Hera Sinestra … Ohhhhh boy.)
So, what are some of the pitfalls of memoirs, fictionalized and otherwise? I’m not going to spend much if any time on fiction that is passed off as memoir, marketed as being true events, and so on. Those books tend to get national media coverage, and not in a positive way. Pretty soon the author has other problems. Don’t be that person. Likewise, if you have signed non-disclosure forms and “Run any books and stories past us OR ELSE,” then do as agreed. Or you may well be a different sort of headline.
The big concern for the average memoir writer is other people taking offense at how they are shown. Aunt Maggie might feel that the author exaggerated to the point of libel, or Uncle Bob might prefer not to have the rest of the world know about the little home-brew incident back in ’84. They may have considered themselves a loving if strict element in the family, while the writer shows them as cold, brutal, manipulative, or otherwise negative force in his life. At best, this leads to great unhappiness, angry phone calls and texts, and being shut out of family events. At worst, lawsuits or even physical assault. In a milder situation, what the writer considers humorous or only a mild flaw might be seen by the other people involved as deeply hurtful or something not to be aired in public.
(Interestingly, this occasionally arises also in the case of biographies, where the subject is well known and has living family members and associates. They might object to how he or she is shown, or what the researcher turns up while looking at documents and records. Not everyone is thrilled to discover a deep, long-lost family secret.)
Accuracy of memory vs. events is another area of difficulty. How one person recalls things is very different from what someone else remembers. Which is right? Which do you include in the book? Is there an outside source that might help (birth record, legal documents, newspaper accounts that have dates or locations if it was something of more than family interest)? I have a relative who was vehement that a certain event happened in a certain year, and that her father was X years old when he died. He was actually X+5 years older, and the event happened before she was born. That was pretty minor, and could be sorted out gracefully. A fellow historian never did confirm when her grandfather was born, because he’d given five dates, and was born in a country that no longer exists, so records are … spotty. Another variation the case where one relative considered the former in-law to have been a delightful person and a great addition to the family, while a different relative thought the gal was sleezy and a total waste of air. Is it best to say that, “Cousin [Lilac]’s personal style left an impression on everyone at the Christmas gathering that year,” and then tap dance away?
My immediate family and I are pretty mellow about the nuts on our family trees. Everyone has them, after all, and after 150-200 years, the scandalous becomes entertaining in many cases. On the other hand, sib-in-law’s family is careful not to shake some of the branches too hard, because they still feel safer not knowing some information. It is rather unusual, but they come from a group that was persecuted pretty much from the Reformation until well into the early 1900s, which is why they are here, and closed-mouthed. Go back a century or so, and it would have been flat-out dangerous for them to do much family research, lest it attract the attention of authorities in the Old Countries.
And then you have people like the writer Brent Olson, who discovered that his family are peasant farmers all the way back to the first recorded ancestor. Nary a Viking or adventurer in the lot, until someone starved enough in the 1800s to come to Minnesota. Oh well.
Image: Mila del Monte Thanks for your recognition • Donations ♡ welcome from Pixabay
Mad Genius Club 
16 responses to “The Perils of Memoirs”
It attacks denial. That can really make families blow up.
It’s why I listen respectfully to the various family history projects in my family and carefully avoid getting involved. Getting the details as straight as possible is not worth the hassle it’s likely to cause.
One of the very few things I’ve actually had published was a series of memoir-like articles about the cars I’ve owned on a medium-sized car website. Since the subject was machines and machines have no feelings I didn’t really have any of the worries listed here.
However, where I work it’s no mystery that I like writing stories and my background as an ESL teacher has made me the go-to for email or newsletter proofreading. My coworkers have also enthusiastically urged me to write a story about our office, because our office has characters! Imagine a story about this zany guy!
…except I don’t find them all that interesting or compelling, and if I were to attempt a story about our office it would absolutely offend the delicate sensibilities of everyone here. If I ever sit down to write a memoir it will not be about work. Work is boring and I’m only here because I have to be. Maybe I’ll just keep writing memoir(-style piece)s about my cars. They don’t care at all about the words I use to describe them.
Thomas Sowell observed there are only two ways memoirs can be published honestly: anonymously and posthumously.
I did a memoir – a rather limited one, focusing on how my brothers and sisters and I grew up in what is now seen as halcyon decades at mid-last-century. Most of the bits I had already posted to positive comment to readers on the then-blog, so I finally strung them all together and published it through one of the digital printing houses. My parents read it, and thought that I had made them seem rather more dynamic and interesting than they thought they were, my sister was a bit miffed because I misnamed her pet rabbit, and my brothers weren’t interested at all. The family otherwise doesn’t think much of my books, dismissing my writing as only a weird obsession/hobby of mine. (Profit, honor, home-town, et cetera.)
I did change the name of the romantic involvement who treated me rather badly, later on – and didn’t put in anything that might make him identifiable, so I was considering how writing the unvarnished truth might have made a bad situation worse by getting entangled in legalities.
:laughing, but sits down:
About the only way I’ve seen for family stories to not get… er… harmonized, is to actively TRY to collect as many versions as possible.
And even then, we end up with things like the widowed niece-in-law who has decided that someone REALLY had a completely different legal name, based on… the census where every single other detail was wrong.
But this one was right!
The thing to remember about memoirs is this:
Like History is written by the winners,
Memoirs are written by the whiners.
Happy people don’t write memoirs because they don’t have anything to complain about. Social histories can often fall into this category too, as they rehash every slight to some group of people. But if you weren’t slighted, you were, if not happy, you were content.
Unless you’ve done something dramatic, like ridden across the American West, solo, and struggled every foot of the way with weather, critters, and danger all around, there’s not much story in most lives.
Bad feelings about family and friends for being flawed humans, yes. You’ll always get that.
Closest I’ve come is doing my dad’s eulogy. I called my mom and brothers to get stories to include beforehand. Didn’t run the final past anyone yet, started off with a disclaimer that it’s how I remember him, and what I got out of the family members stories. His friends found it entertaining, my mom was happy, at least a couple of family members had a sour look on their faces – guess they didn’t like the reminder of how differently they are living compared to Grandpa. Oh well.
An ‘important’ writer, whose name will be omitted, wrote a book that was supposed to be a memoir his time at school. In this book he mentioned a prize giving incident, where someone had won prize after prize after prize. The ‘important’ writer said it was ‘So-and-so’ who won all those prizes. It was actually my father, who had been roommates with ‘So-and-so.’ My father protested, both then and later, when ‘So-and-so’ wrote his own memoir and included the incident. ‘So-and-so’ gave himself credit by quoting ‘important’ writer – “as it says in XYZ book by ‘important’ writer.” The school in question refused to correct the record publicly, though it will send a list of the NINE prizes that my father won, to his relatives, only. ‘So-and-so’ made his reputation writing about someone, to whom my father had introduced him. I’ve been suspicious about memoirs and big names, ever since.
Just about the only thing I can say about family histories, memoirs, whatever, is to make sure you keep track of who has them collected. Or else you lose 200+ years of history the way my family did. Seriously, my aunt traced the family back to a village along the Rhine in the old Palatinate, hundreds of pages and years of hard work — and after she died, within a year no one remembered where it was or who had it.
Dad Red’s family lost at least a century of work in Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The person got out, but the house was flooded to the ceiling. All we have are some notes and two small booklets that were made and passed out before the deluge.
I’m sorry to hear it.
I had the unsettling experience of looking up some relatives I’d never met to inform them of a woman’s death… to find that they’d written up said woman’s mother’s obituary without mentioning the woman as a surviving offspring.
…They’d left in her older sister, who died of crib death.
I don’t know what happened there, and I don’t want to find out.
I wish my deceased relatives and ancestors had written up more things that happened to them . . . except I never got into the few things they did keep. So maybe it doesn’t matter that I can’t trust my own memories about what my mother heard from her grandmother . . . and never wrote it down . . .
Pity really.
On the other hand, my younger sister lived one of those lives that really isn’t believable in a work of fiction, and wrote it all. She died of a heart attack several years ago, and I don’t know if I hope her husband kept the unpublished manuscript . . . or not. It’s got stuff that stuff that would be best off not published for another century.
My mother collected the stories and the genealogy of both sides of the family obsessively.
I never knew she was married for about a year and divorced before she met Dad. Not until we found her wedding book and information a month after she died. (Dad knew that she had “been in a relationship” but not more than that.)
On Dad’s side…there isn’t much family. One uncle and Dad left, a few cousins that I haven’t seen since the first Bush presidency at the latest. I’m looking at some of the apps that allow for stories to be collected, so that Dad and my remaining uncle can tell those stories.
Mom’s side? One uncle that might never be found if he shows up here. One aunt who is…on the best of days a very nice person but I feel a great wave of pity for her therapist. One aunt who snaked grandfather’s estate out from the rest of the family and has been slow-rolling the money from it-and doing the same with one uncle who died alone in his apartment. And one aunt who I can’t even call a Karen because she’s loud and in charge out of love.
Families have all sorts of stories. I’m just lucky most of mine are happy ones.
The sound of gunfire and banjos is the song of my people.
Mine is the first generation of my family where not every young man went to jail. We come from a long line of horse, cattle and sheep rustlers. I had relatives hanged as deserters and thieves on both sides of the Civil War. Our ancestors were border reivers, rounded up and sentenced to the Welsh coal mines, later exiled to the American coal mines, later escaped to the promised land of Midwestia, where they carried on with making moonshine, stealing and racing fast cars, and smuggling. An embarrassingly large proportion of family members fell off the family tree because they were sent to orphanages as older children when their mothers no longer wanted them.