WRITTEN WORD 23 - A Surprising Appearance

Back when my painting was becoming precise, a time just after late-in-life art school, when I was becoming increasingly sure with light and shade, color and form, perspective and anatomy, back at a time when I had moved to Woodstock and thought I would never write again – one day back then I began to draw an imaginary but real seeming lizard-like armored male figure.

Quite real, I thought, for back then, like much of the time now, I feared the overuse of archetypes.

This figure, which I saw with clarity before I started, would be a compilation of what I hated most. A huge black lizard-like man standing in my way, a lizard in slimy titanium skin and filled with hypocrisy and bigotry, bullying and boorishness, sadism and stupid militarism – a lizard who had suddenly appeared on my most familiar path through the wooded area I loved most in what was now my town, Woodstock.
It had started as a suggested therapeutic writing enterprise – clinical therapy more than art – in which I had selected the villain and written towards my conclusion. A moving exercise in which it felt like something was happening. But it was my old style of writing, the writing I had at this time rejected in favor drawing and painting. The kind of writing in which you are always moving towards a pre-determined conclusion. This particular conclusion did not stay in place long even in that kind of writing, and in painting there was almost instant transformation.

I knew, as I formed the conception, that some people would have different ideas about such a chance meeting with some stranger so unlike what they thought of as themselves. Some might think first that such a meeting would really be an encounter with fine, untapped aspects of themselves. Not me. To me it was clear who and what the enemy was.

Then one day I started on a blank 24- by 36-inch canvas to do the lizard-like figure with a sable-hair brush in a black fast-drying kind of oil paint thinned to transparency with turpentine. This figure that in my head was so clear.

But on the canvas what I started quickly became something else. The black bully figure was supplanted by a quite luscious and mysterious woman.

Involuntarily, it seemed, I moved into color, and what seemed to me a huge, strong woman's face and fine bare shoulders appeared in the foreground, and she was surveying a world I did not recall ever having seen.

This world, this landscape stretching out under her mysterious gaze, looked South American to me – maybe the South America that Pizarro and Cortez found – though that was a continent I had never visited.

And I did not know if I hated or liked this woman. And my anger, so carefully directed at greedy, racist, violence-prone right-wingers and other abusers, was becoming something far more profound that, it seemed now, had always been centered on myself.



In this time when I was not writing.

In this time when there was still so much of my life that I had not written about.

This time when I had not approached any conscious knowledge that the strange place in which I had come into life was a matriarchy where there was little room for maneuver – and also a place where I was meant to be exiled beyond locked doors to cold dark streets.

I had, before art school, stopped writing after 30 years of professional writing because I could no longer follow my plans through writing, because I wanted to find out what had happened and what was happening, not put it into some constructed book outline.

I had turned to painting, something I did not remember ever having done, for it was in visual realms now, where I had little control, as opposed to where I had the allusion of control as a professional writer, that the landscape of my life unfolded and changed.




Every once in a while I bring out this painting, look at that full-color, smooth, tanned enigmatic woman whom I'd meant to be an armored, slippery, sharp-clawed poison-fanged man. I look at this woman and the mysterious scene that began to unfold beneath her as long forgotten stories, concrete stories, from early in my life fought their way back into the life I was living in the present. This smooth woman, who made the sharp-edged reptilian man seem tame

I was busy in this time. New friends. New interests. Travel. Art and nature. A life in art. And in the raw material of theology. And I knew whatever was happening – in this step into mystery – it was only just beginning. Knew it at the moment that the planned lizard became something for which I did not yet have words.

It was not so long before I was writing again and all sorts of mysterious actual people and places appeared – though since then my painting has become increasingly more abstract as my writing has become more concrete.

And then I remembered how much had been happening in my writing, not just my painting, even in these years when I no longer thought of myself as a writer and hardly knew I was still putting words on paper.

WRITTEN WORD 22 - Other People

There were plenty of things not to speak about much less write about in the quite rich Connecticut suburb where I lived as a child in fall, winter and spring with my parents and twin brother and Southern grandmother. Things I never considered writing though I sometimes dreamt of being a writer like my honored grandfather up in the White Mountains. I was slow in school and always getting into trouble – hooky and larceny, peeking Tom ventures with other bad kids, explorations of forbidden cliffs and rivers and reservoirs, plus secret trips to city places. And I felt I would never break out of this place I was in, this person I was who was seen as too dumb and bad.

The adults seemed to think they themselves were all right. My father commuted into the city each day. By now city commuters owned the majority of the houses. People around me rarely talked about anything seriously wrong out here in what we called the country. There was only one house where, neighbors said, the wife and children were battered.

The father in that house was an unshaven handyman who rarely worked. Alcohol caused him to slur his ungrammatical words. Paint was peeling and boards were buckled on the house's outside walls. None of us ever saw the inside. The front porch was nearly rotted away. The yard was filled with discarded tin cans and old beer and whisky bottles.

The oldest of five children in that house was a slow-moving, sullen though really pretty 13-year-old girl with bad teeth. She of course never wore the tennis whites or the Bermuda shorts other girls in the town wore in summer. For reasons no one knew, she was not in school. We boys went out of our way to pass her dilapidated house, hoping to get glimpses of her in the shorts she did wear, shorts that had been made by cutting the legs off old work pants. She wore them high from the thigh. She was always alone, always sullen and silent. She was never seen without a hunting knife in a belt sheath. Neighbors were not very surprised when this bad girl got pregnant, but they were shocked when the state police came to arrest her battering father for being the one who had impregnated her.

When this was talked about it was always added that nowhere in the town except in that dingy, run-down house could any such thing have happened. We kids tended to go along with this version of events even though we knew more. We knew how much drinking went on in this suburb, and we knew about marriages breaking up, and the boys told each other stories about parents doing the sorts of things outside their marriages that we all wanted to do when we became old enough. Some kids would occasionally show up in school with black and blue marks they may have gotten at home. But even those of us who secretly felt sympathy for the sullen girl in cut-off shorts still tended to go along with the grown-ups' story that this one poor house was the only place in the town where really bad things could take place.

This was at mid-century, when certain things were almost never talked about openly in American towns such as ours. It was as if then there were no battered women in America. There certainly were no battered women's shelters. And you hardly ever heard anyone speak about abused children.

There were no therapists serving as counselors in our schools. One boy, who sometimes acted angry when there was no apparent cause for anger, went for weekly sessions with a psychiatrist, but when he talked about the experience it seemed the point of his therapy was to get him to adjust to what his parents wanted, which was to become a son who would not be out of place in Hotchkiss or Yale.

WRITTEN WORD 21 - Stories Not to Tell

By the time I was in the 8th grade I had also become extremely careful about telling the family anything I knew from the world outside the family.

I didn't tell them about stealing the rowboat and going over a high waterfall in it, or the day I was all the way down in the city in Times Square (looking at the half-man, half-woman in the freak Show at Hubert's Flea Circus) when they thought I was at Compo Beach in Westport, Connecticut, or the two-year blackjack game, spanning 7th and 8th grades, that I was part of – nor the girlie magazines we hid in the barn, nor the time I fell off a cliff, saved by saplings on a lower ledge I nearly passed on the fall down. There was almost nothing I could tell them about safely. I rarely discussed my friends – Jeff Aldrich, whose father lived in a cabin with a porch behind their house and sat on the porch drinking whisky all day and cursing softly, Jeff who I hid in our old chicken coop barn when he ran away from home – or Dan McHenry, who was open and friendly even though he was the school's best athlete, and who had actually more or less fucked with an actual woman, an older girl who he and a friend, he said, stripped and held down (which, despite the impossible dream of actual fucking, seemed to me connected to horrible things Dan did routinely, like torturing and killing frogs and kittens). Or Herman, who carried a concealed revolver. I did not tell them about Jared Delong, who was the one who discovered the principal's secretary didn't call your home until you'd been absent from school for two days in a row, meaning it was safe to play hooky and travel every other day.

I did not tell them these things so I would not get into trouble, but it was also to spare them from too many facts. And sometimes I told them things I did not believe because it would make them more comfortable and on my side. Sometimes at the dinner table at home I told them I found someone outside the family to be stupid, or cranky or clumsy – keeping my hand in family conversation, imitating the way they talked about outsiders – too shy, too alert, too ugly or dumb, too smart or good looking for their own good.

So I relayed what Jared told me about his mother, Rosemary Delong, because I often heard my parents talking, while they were drinking, about what awful drunks the elder Delongs were.

Jared and I had been sitting on a roof of the former wartime chicken house at our place in Weston and Jared was telling with glee what he'd seen the night before at the Aspetuck Club dinner dance. His mother, Rosemary, and his father, also named Jared Delong but called Jerry, had been drunk and fighting and while they were on the dance floor, sometimes dancing, sometimes shouting and waving their arms at each other, Rosemary's dress kept falling down. She was too drunk to stop it – her breasts popping out for everyone to see.

I thought my parents would appreciate the story. I gave a quick version of it at dinner, at the narrow oak table in our drafty, wall-papered dining room. I did not say the word "breasts,” but just that the gown fell down and there was nothing underneath. Mother, listening at the head of the table, with a little bell to ring for dessert, Dad at the other end, still stiff in his city suit, switching from a blended whiskey highball to buttermilk. Dad's face was getting red. Mother was starting to quiver with fury.

Mother exploded.

"That's the worst thing I have ever heard, Frederick.

“That was horrible of your friend Jared.

"What an awful person your friend is.

"Never do anything like that.

"Remember,no one should ever say anything like that about their family."

WRITTEN WORD 20 - Extreme Ghostwriting II

There was the intellectual appeal. It would have been a breeze for me if everything this man who became a cult leader said was stupid.

And it would have been a breeze if I had not felt grateful to him for his help, if I had not in certain times of personal crisis attempted to rely on Robin to the point of clinging. And if he had not done certain very useful things, such as helping me to understand group dynamics, which was something I needed for what had become my life’s work.

With some brilliance Robin followed an influential family systems school of therapy started by a man, since deceased, whom family therapists now read when in training – Murray Bowen, who had worked hard to differentiate himself from his own family (which operated a funeral home in Pennsylvania). Differentiation was the important concept – finding out and becoming who you really are, not what a family says you are. It involved keeping up carefully limited contact with that family to as to be able to work on differentiation.

To do this, according to Bowen, you have to figure out what is really wanted for you in your family. You need to unravel the family’s overall theme, for instance, “nothing good can come of anything.” You must understand that part and also understand the very fixed-in-place roles your family system imposes on each family member – good person or bad person or lost person or caretaker person or shifting combinations of these and quite a few other stock characters. This went way beyond those simple pop psychology systems that give you only three or four set choices for a role.

Then, once you determine the operating principle of your family system, and determine what is supposed to be your role in it, then Robin had an answer that went well beyond anything Bowen came up with – Robin's answer being what seemed to me the real stroke of brilliance. Intellectual brilliance. Pastoral nurture too, I thought back then, when Robin seemed to me a caring and caretaking person.

Now for the most grandiose brilliant-seeming part. Once you have figured out the family system and your ordained role in it, then you move on to what Robin called “interventions.” This he touted as his own contribution to the world of therapy. In a Robin intervention, you tell people in the family exactly what they think they want to hear from you – never such things as that you are happy or fulfilled in work or art or love or that your life is unfolding in wonderful ways. Instead you must say, whether you believe it or not, things that fit with the very worst that they may think of you or want for you - such things as that you are hopelessly confused and worthless and morally reprehensible – give them what they want, no matter how cruel and nonsensical it sounds. And by telling them what they want to hear you have achieved the worthy end of putting the shit back where it belongs, which is not with you but with them. You get them to say what they have kept hidden. And what you yourself may on some level have come to believe. And then you can leave your role and live truly as yourself.

It should have been a warning that he was messing with language as it is commonly used. Words get their meanings from how they are employed. The editors of dictionaries read everything they can get their hands on to see how words are being used by writers. At the time Robin put forth his theory, the generally accepted meaning of “an intervention” had become the act of confronting another person with the fact that that person suffers from an affliction, usually an addiction, and needs help. An intervention in this sense means cofrontation to get that person out of denial. Robin, however, meant “an intervention” as a cunning act designed to elicit information from the person who is the object of that act – the ends justifying the lies and even cruelty that are essential to the means.

Language aside, what he put forth might still have continued to make a good deal of sense to me – if only he had stopped there. But then he went way too far and began to dictate the exact words he expected people to use.

And anyway, in the end I really learned nothing I did not know already. I learned nothing important by Robin-instigated baiting of my brother and others (both parents were dead by then) to say what they really thought. Sometimes the responses I got would be unintentionally funny, sometimes quite horrible. But nothing really new to me, for by the time I met Robin I had few illusions about why I had carefully and consciously left home young. And, moreover, at that point I had been going through a long and intense search for my most true stories – for what had happened way back in time and why and how it affected me in the present as well. Probably the most enlightening part came through writing, real writing that had no input from Robin, in which I sought to recreate the scenes of the past – in other words, real writing, the sort that rises to the level of art. Also of great use to me was telling stories from the past in a group - not a group run by Robin - of people angry about the past and determined to live full lives, and of further great use was literally stepping into settings from the past, including trips into the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the physical setting for my family’s most important longings. In addition, for limited but useful periods I had worked with a therapist who was ready to accompany me on the parts of this voyage that involved mental probing and feeling, an empathetic therapist who did not try to take the journey over. And sometimes I learned the most by being alert in even the briefest of intimate relationships in the present to how in these relationships I could be in thrall to dark matters from the deep past.

But if in Robin's method for cracking open family systems I learned nothing big that I did not know, there were still some intriguing surprises – as in my brother, hearing my fake confessions, suggesting I leave everything I loved in my life, including my home and my work and my studies, and send my cat Gracie to the SPCA (he said shelters do not kill cats) so that not even Gracie the cat could keep me from leaving. He also advised me to stay away any girlfriend who was not, he said, too old for sex. And he thought I should move to some very cheap place in the south (he sent me a guide to such places), but be ready to come north to look after aging and dying relatives.This was fascinating, and it did pinpoint matters of use and concern to me - and my fake confessions seemed to make my brother furious. But this version of what family members thought should be my fate was not news to me. And I wondered if my brother’s reaction would have been different if my "interventions" had not been so complete and so fake – if my brother had not trusted me, and I had not entrapped him in the manner of an overzealous cop. And maybe,I thought later, the information I was getting was sometimes as unreliable as information interrogators get when using torture.

Still, even if nothing really new, the information I was getting this way was interesting enough, and maybe enlightening enough, for me to keep on with Robin. And then one day I realized that I was letting him direct me much as he had directed his unusually dependent clients – most of whom had not left home as I had with good reason when young, and had not, before Robin, gone through anything like what I had gone through much later in deeply examining their lives and their family legacy and their past and present relationships.

And at a crucial point that almost slipped by unnoticed by me I found myself doing what all of his other clients were doing and I thought I would never do. I began letting him dictate to me, word by word, and have me read it back to make certain my dictation was accurate, word for word the intervention version of my story that I would then put in the mail to my brother.

Ghost writing as perversity. Robin would sometimes hint that the version he dictated was what the client really believed deep down but could not see, and so should be freed from. Sometimes he had it right. Sometimes, too, there was clever irony in these dictated stories, and grim humor in the hurt they could do to the person receiving the stories. And I did get emotionally entangled in this interventions, which was an indication I had not resolved thes matters fully. But as he heard the words he dictated read back to him there would be a knowing and satisfied smile on his round face. It haunts me still.

I came to believe that what Robin was really after was the thing that writers and other artists, and all people everywhere, should realize promotes the death of something sacred – someone else defining a person’s memory, someone else dictating, literally or subtly, a version of a person’s own story.

WRITTEN WORD 19 - Extreme Ghostwriting I

Cults are much on my mind these days as my wife goes public with her beautifully intense memoir of 10 years spent in a burgeoning yogic enterprise.

Families often operate like cults, as my wife says, even though families are supposed to want to keep their members outside cults. You would think all therapists would feel that way too. There was a time, though when I had all too much firsthand experience of a therapist himself morphing into cult leader.

Robin seemed to me the last person who would be a cult leader – and maybe he was more legitimate when I first met him. Maybe he changed over the years.

He was a sometimes twinkly, cherubic little bald psychotherapist who was bright and quick and funny. And the years did slip away until a point when I could no longer ignore that he was working, consciously or not, to keep his followers right where they were, imprisoned by the past he had convinced them he could help them escape. Keep them right there where he could find them and dominate them.

While it was true he did help some to split off from abusive families, and got some others to leave a seminary they had entered too young, he also pushed them all to leave all their deepest relationships, including marriages, even though in his minister role he conducted weddings, sometimes, as I can tell you, more than once for the same client. Eventually it seemed clear to me that he was out to get his clients to leave all relationships that took precedence over their relationship with him.

The often inevitable problems that come up in relationships made for great cover. It could seem that Robin was out to help people to be their true selves, while actually, while helping them run from other relationships, he was implanting false selves - selves that were more Robin than the client.

Not that leaving relationships cannot have its healthy side. That was why it was so hard to see what Robin was up to. At one point I left a brief unhappy marriage that I had hoped would work but was not working. Robin, who had performed the marriage ceremony, told me later that although he had remained silent he had known it would not work. And when the separation at last took place,in a time of anger and sorrow, he said that this was a happy event for now there would be nothing in the way of work he and I would do together. Not me and my wife with Robin. Just me and Robin alone.

And he said the same thiing again whenever I parted from a girlfriend. Later on, he came up against a brick wall when he tried hard to break up my marriage with the love of my life. Unlike the last time, this marriage of deeply connected lovers was thriving. His instincts failed him. As so often happens with dictators who outlive their time, he went too far.

Robin had not suggested I not get into that earlier brief and troubled marriage. But he eventually got quite nasty about other relationships,and not just those that were between lovers. He was sarcastic about the relationship I had with my spiritual director, who is a widely loved and admired figure in liberal Catholic circles.

But Robin was quick and bright, which was a big part of his appeal. Another part had to with how he portrayed himself as a living legend. He could be inspiring, but he was worse than he sounded - as someone once said about grandiose Wagner music. To my discredit, it was a long time before I took seriously enough for action what I knew about the legend part. The legend had, for instance, Robin starting out as a young and brilliant and far-left part-time Methodist preacher who became a major sixties figure. He talked of his role in the networks of well-known Vietnam-era war protesters, one of whom had been a fugitive whom he said he had helped to hide from the FBI. But I talked once with that former fugitive, and later I became good friends with another famous sixties figure with whom Robin claimed a connection, and neither had ever heard of him.

Still, I kept keeping such evidence tucked away. What I was learning could not be what I thought I was learning. For the man was indeed perceptive. And I, much like a devotee of a charming ego-maniac guru, continued to push evidence aside. After all, Robin was my ally. I could lean on him in hard times. When financial disaster struck, he waived his fees.He understood me. Maybe there were some connections in my life that were not what Robin thought they were, but maybe they were just a blip on the screen. I told myself that certain evidence did not matter in light of his overall work.

If it has been less extreme I might have caught on immediately. Where it was most extreme, however, it was connected with a certain kind of intensely personal and fake kind of what struck me as something very much like ghostwriting – a form of writing books in which the real writer, a professional, is not the writer whose name is on the story.

Ghostwriters in the book world sometimes disappear behind words that sound a lot like the author's words. And sometimes they take over and distort what is on the mind of the author. Robin would often tell his clients precisely, word for word, what they should say - pretending these were their own words - when they wrote, at his suggestion, to family and loved ones.

This was quite aside from how awful Robin's own writing was. Although the legend had him as an important poet, what he put on paper was either oblique pretentious nonsense or stories about his family and former wives, portraying them all in ways that kept the stories forever set in place – pieces of carefully worked out analysis that were so dead they could never change, could never grow as art can grow– and the stories were larded with often conventional theological statements that sounded better than they were.

But as cult leader his own writing was not the writing that seemed to me key to Robin's story. I was strangely willing to try to believe that I liked it. And anyway what he did with own stories was overshadowed by what he did with other people’s stories.

Some of his followers had been with him for twenty years and more, some since they were teenagers. I did stay too long, but Robin and his groups were not the absolute center of my life - nothing like the Authentic Writing program. And anyway I was a very long way from literal early youth when I met him, and I was older than he was. And I already was so deep into my own stories that there was nothing basic he could tell me - though he was good at playing up certain details - which would appear in responses that came when he got his clients to tell big lies to people who might not always have their interests at heart but trusted them not to lie.

A very big part of Robin's appeal was that he could read people at a glance – know where they were strong and where weak, and where they lied and where they didn’t lie, where they came from and what they wanted. And when he had no idea what was going on with you he would give a sharp look – rather like Rod Steiger playing a tough but shrewd and kindly Southern sheriff – that could convince you he knew more about what was going on with you than you yourself could ever know. This ability to read people, so useful to a therapist who wants to help people, so dangerous in the hands of a cult leader who wants to both help and enslave people. And this pretense that he knew things he could not know so very dangerous to his followers.

This therapist cult figure – who decided to literally write people’s stories for them – write mine for me. How I came to hate him. This place of tyranny masked as a place of caring - so like the Pharaoh's ancient Egypt slave state.

WRITTEN WORD 18 - The How-to-Write Industry

I suspected the marriage did not stand much of a chance when my then wife thought it was great that my stepson was so pleased with his poetry writing class, which was centered around keeping control of your work by always writing the last line first, then filling in whatever needs to be filled in so that you can get to that last line and nowhere else.

But I can understand the appeal, for if the ending is there before you begin you can pretty well dispense with the anything precarious that might appear while in the writing process. In effect, you have thrown out process. If you already have the ending in place, then nothing bad can happen. And nothing will ever change.



There is a vast industry that tends to silence real artists and that I believe is based on fear. I call it the How-to-Write Industry. It is something like what Leonard Bernstein called “the music appreciation racket.” Non-artists take over, promote criticism above creativity, and set up rules and limits to what artists can or should do. And thus art, including the art of writing, becomes something so safe it threatens no fossilized ideas.

The How-to-Write industry can make itself felt in academic writing programs, starting with English 101, where silly rules often come in and the silliness of such things as learning rhetorical modes. Its rules are often felt in back-biting M.F.A. programs in Creative Writing, in many of the commercial writing workshops and the huge number of on-line writing courses a web search turns up, as well as in writing magazines for the public and little writing journals for the academics. In all these areas there are sympathetic, empathetic teachers that one would be fortunate to encounter. But there are many more teachers who exalt criticism at the expense of art and do not welcome real stories. In many of these courses, as in a majority of books about writing, it is as if nothing is real, everything is an exercise or a system for writing-to-order. And writing is meant to be such an ordeal that there are programs that use the word “boot camp” in their titles or promotional materials.

But though writing can be hard, the pure-ordeal notion cannot be taken seriously by a writer who is actually writing from what that writer knows, sees, feels and finds inside herself or himself. In fact, in the Authentic Writing workshops and in our private client sessions it often seems that the very best writing comes in ways that feel natural and even easy. It is the falsification involved in the writing-to-order kind of writing – in writing meant to fit someone else’s version of reality – that causes anguish and blockage – like a time during dark days I tried to turn a searing family story into a happy story for a book editor, or write about State Department people as if I admired them – myself then like all those people who will not admit that what they are trying to write has nothing to do with what they believe or who they are.



The How-to-Write industry keeps coming up with new techniques to stop writing from going anywhere unexpected, anywhere that would cause anxiety to those in power. This industry is like a religion that finds death more appealing than life.

As in a cult, there are How-to-Write laws rooted in dubious scholarship
such as the rules, based on Latin, not English, to never start a sentence with a conjunction, never split an infinitive, never end a sentence with a preposition. These rules are calls to stop doing things that all the best writers constantly do when they allow the writing itself to take over. And there are other rules constantly violated in major literature that, if followed to the letter, are just as bad – such as "Avoid the passive voice" or "Adhere strictly to your outline." These are things that at best might be somewhat helpful as fixed rules if your only ambition were to write catalog blurbs or small appliance assembly instructions.



One thing my brother did as my writing was taking off again was sign me up, forging my signature, in the Writer’s Digest Book Club. And just then the Writer’s Digest magazine’s special memoir issue came out. It was filled with advice for writing memoir by writing only about people you had known, really interesting people, rather than about yourself.

Much in the manner of those prissy grade school teachers who ban the use of “I” –for who would be interested in such as you?

WRITTEN WORD 17 - Bad News in the Family

All writers should be warned that real writing – writing that goes beyond predictable matters, or pure genre hokum, or fluffy, teddy bear stories – real writing invariably means war.

It is almost never good news to a family that a family member is writing. It is terrible news that someone may go public with, among other things, his or her version of events in the family or some other cult in which he or she once lived.

It is not just the possibility that family members might be portrayed as less than heroic characters – it is also that the entire surface world as they know it – everything seen as good and moral and everything that could be seen as deserving protection – might turn out to be nothing more than clever theater designed to solidify and enhance and enforce whatever the position of the family’s most triumphal members.

When I was 36 and I got a contract and advance money from a major publisher to complete a novel, my brother let it be known I was behaving in really bad taste because I was celebrating the contract with Don Perignan and Beluga caviar. Our family had not had a writer since my grandfather, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1917, and I – more innocent than I was ready to admit – thought that my success would please them. But it was just the opposite. The family already had its writer. It was presumptuous for anyone to try.

I wrote off my twin’s reaction to jealousy, he being the good twin who was expected to be rewarded for being good. I found it sad and touching that he was telling people I should not have gotten such a contract because I had done all the wrong things in life, most notably never having had the benefit of graduate school.

My father’s reaction was just as negative, even though he was a publisher, or maybe because he was a publisher. He took me to lunch at the staid old Century Club to tell me I had become the family’s number-one problem since I did not have a proper job. I had thought the lunch was to celebrate my triumph. And as for a job, I had my book advance.

“Your grandfather never took a cent until the book was in print,” my father said. As a writer I was around writers and publishing people for years and I never heard of any other case of a writer refusing a book advance until after the book was done. Maybe it was because my grandfather, unlike me and most writers, had an independent income. But I don’t really think that explains it – so here is yet something more about this strange family to explore.

This opposition to writing from my family was especially blunt and blatant – but in kinder, gentler families than mine it is also common that the opposition is there. Whether it comes in the form of “please write something inspirational ” or “Go back to school for your teaching certificate, or “Better go get your real estate license.”

Recently I made the mistake of showing my brother what I had written about that time during the war when they forgot about us in Florida, and although he stayed at the beach hotel and got credit for looking at the fourth grade textbooks, I became a bleached hair scraggly swamp rat, roaming the jungles and finding ways to get coins to play the slot machines at Max’s tavern, where at the age of nine I was a regular. I thought it portrayed his position as much more difficult than mine, he being called upon to be the perfect child while I was, in comparison, free in my family scapegoat role.

I showed the story to my brother – about the mildest story I had ever written in which he appeared – I showed if even though I knew better.

“I can see that writing memoir is a real struggle for you,” he said. “And I deeply resent your writing this Florida story this way.”

There was another way I could and should have written, he said. I should have written that he too played the slot machines at Max’s and roamed the jungles and got into rotten citrus fruit fights with local urchins. That he was more than just the trapped good little boy I had portrayed. And now he was angry, repeating his put-down, “A real struggle for you.”

And he sent me a letter, now not in anger, saying that in any case memoir is not the proper course. The problem with memoir, he said, is that you cannot resolve people’s stories if you stick only to what actually happened. In memoir there are no proper endings.


I showed him my little story even though I knew enough by now never to show anything I wrote to a relative. I had seen it happen over and over – the reaction that nearly always means trouble. Sometimes it comes as something said sweetly,
such as you should be commended for trying even though it proves to be too much of a struggle. Sometimes the reaction is fierce, as in how can you say such things about me or your mother (or father or brother or, sister or grandparents or country or cult leader)? – the way critics were upset that the McCourt brothers did not depict their mother as if she were a mummified saint.

I have seen people from our workshops yanked away to another part of the country to keep them from writing. Or maybe, out of the blue, it time to have another child, or maybe this is the moment to turn your life over to caring for dying relatives, which is what my brother wanted me to do, or time to take a course in something decent like children’s literature or technical writing – anything except writing about your life.