risk and truth-telling
On Shame and the Mundane Stories That Change Our Lives
Last week, I hit SEND on Permission, my fourth book, which is coming out in early 2025.
When I started writing it — my notes and essays for it date back to 2016, written while I was on tour for Treyf, my second book — I could not have predicted its level of emotional complexity; I assumed that it would simply be an outgrowth of the memoir workshops I teach every year, and for the most part, it was.
During my writing Permission, which was announced in April 2022, I had Covid twice, and was still living with long Covid from back in 2020. Other issues: infrequent and spotty income. The Me First-ism that social media seems to engender, and which I truly suck at. The aging dog with dementia. The mother two hours away with mild dementia and for whom I am primary caregiver, but who is still grasping with bloody fingertips to the Norma Desmondian life raft that allows her to pull the wool over the eyes of her many providers, who believe her to be totally compos mentis and fit as a fiddle except for when she calls to ask me whether she can eat three-week-old chicken, what overdraft means, and who, exactly, keeps ringing her doorbell in the middle of the night. (Thank you in advance: no advice, please. It’s an extraordinarily complicated situation requiring many hours a day of fire-extinguishing.)
I was writing a book inherently about shame, what it does to the creative psyche, how to climb out of its pit and shake off its grasp, how very desperately people cling fast to the act of shaming others as a way to maintain hierarchy and stasis connected to dominance and submission.
But a big part of the complexities surrounding the writing of Permission, beyond the whack-a-mole-like manner in which my wife and I have been living over the last few years, has nothing to do with schedule, or an elderly parent, medical issues, or the vagaries of life in a modern world. It has everything to do with the realization that I was writing a book inherently about shame, what it does to the creative psyche, how to climb out of its pit and shake off its grasp, how very desperately people cling to the act of shaming others as a way to maintain hierarchy and stasis connected to dominance and submission, and how the bravest thing that any person can do is cut that cord even as tears run down their face.
Another problem: it’s shame-inducing to write about shame. That’s an innate part of its complexity and why those who wield it like a scimitar know exactly what they’re doing. Think in terms of Me Too, or diocesan issues, or the story of Barry Lopez and his mother’s friend: it’s rarely the perpetrator who is tortured by the shame of his act, but the victim/survivor of it, who is humiliated and mortified and instructed never to tell for the shame they will certainly bring upon their own family and community. This is where honor killings come from. The general belief is: if you’ve had a shameful thing done to you, then who the hell do you think you are to go ahead and write about it for all the world to see, even if the story is unequivocally yours to tell? If you do, the burden of shame inevitably falls on your shoulders, as opposed to the perpetrator’s.
But are the stories we are told never to tell always heavy with the weight of the unthinkable? The salacious? The lewd? Is that a given? Are fingers always pointed at the person our narrator once was with the implied Well what did you do to deserve it? You must have done SOMETHING. If only it was that clear. Storytelling is a moving target. It is the mundane story that is riskiest because we will just never know, going in, if that story we must write will somehow untie the nice neat little bow wrapped around the tidy package that is, for example, intergenerational perfectionism and the contract that everyone inadvertently signed swearing to it.
It’s shame-inducing to write about shame.
God forbid you tell the truth: that great Aunt Esther who was a beloved pillar of her community and church but maybe beat her youngest child senseless every day after school before the rest of the family came home; or that Uncle Ted, president of the local bank and the Kiwanis, moved his family six times in four years because he gambled away the mortgage money, leaving the narrator to grow up sleeping in the backseat of the family Chrysler; or that in a small family of three — mother, father, child — there is a simple, perceptible absence of love. In an essay about Charles D’Ambrosio’s stunning collection, Loitering, Trisha Ready writes
What I mean is what we inherit—the secrets, the symbols, the synaptic lapses that happen around emotionally turbulent silences—and how we make sense of all that. We run the risk of being wrecked by chaotic legacies that arrive in us unopened.
I once wrote an essay about how every childhood pet I grew up with tried to take its own life. A Schnauzer with a tendency to run into oncoming traffic. A goldfish who flung itself out of our fish tank and flapped its way across the linoleum to our front door before being scooped up by my grandmother and deposited back into the water. Tommy, my turtle who, fed up with his life in a plastic lagoon with a plastic rock and a plastic palm tree, crawled up and out of his little universe and disappeared; my mother found him a day later on his back, in shock, underneath our black silk sofa. She returned him to his ersatz tropical home where he lived for another week until my father packed him up with his food and his palm tree and left him at the local playground with a note glued to a popsicle stick that said Good Turtle. Free.
You should be ashamed of yourself, my mother said, when I told her what I’d written. I was in my fifties, and my mother, her eighties. I loved that turtle, and I was good to it. She was furious, and horrified. And if you’d told me five years ago that she’d respond with more rage to my story of our suicidal turtle than to the one of her not knowing she was pregnant with me for six months, as I wrote in Motherland, I never would have believed you.
Everything we write will touch someone, somewhere, in a way we have not intended.
All of which is to say: one person’s mundane is another person’s shame. You will never know, and you can never guess. The writing of memoir is wrapped around risk; all art-making is. I write in Permission that Everything we write will touch someone, somewhere, in a way we have not intended.
Every one of us who walks upright has the right to tell our own story how we wish it to be known. Every one of us is responsible for our own narratives both interior and exterior. And every one of us who tells our own story the way we wish it to be known must also be able to live with the fallout – benign or extreme; ridiculous or not -- because, whoever we are, there will be fallout and we cannot predict or control what it will be. This is part of the risk, and when we write memoir, we stare this risk squarely in the face. Fallout is a growling tiger in a cage: unavoidable, and as much a part of the process of writing memoir as cold is to snow. In one of my books, I wrote about my father drinking Sanka out of a melamine cup every morning; a distant relative wrote me an angry letter, expressing shame over the fact that melamine was a cheap alternative to porcelain or stoneware. The world, she said, would focus not on the story, but on our obvious financial situation.
It was her shame, though, not mine, although — as mundane as it was — I bore the risk. And yet, in the words of the late poet John O’Donohue, Risk might be our greatest ally. To live a truly creative life, we always need to cast a critical look at where we presently are, attempting always to discern where we have become stagnant and where a new beginning might be ripening.
Your words are so true. My father's father committed suicide when my dad was only 9. It was during the depression, they lived in a small southern town, he had been accused of fraud. I never knew about this until after my father died and my brother and I discovered it in the headlines of the local paper (from 1933) online. My father lived his whole life with secrets/shame. He feared the world and craved safety, for himself and for us, more than anything else. It breaks my heart.
It took a long time, I knew my mother was difficult, but I know now, I was raised by a covert narcissist, and unfortunately a Dad who was tested late in life by my stepmother's insistence, and diagnosed as being on the spectrum. My growing up was slowed down, I was immature and anxiously unaware for too long which happens I guess when you don't have a guiding hand to help you navigate through childhood. Shaming, even over little things, seems to come naturally from those who have a prescribed vision of exactly how their children should orbit around their challenging personalities; but of course, they AREN'T the ones with the behavioral problem, it's always the kid. I admire so much that you write about how your life is impacted by a difficult parent, it takes courage to wade through needless shame. I'm so sorry your health has taken a hit from what you've unfairly endured, but so grateful your books, your art, have carried you through it all.