Great Draft, Dad. I Have Some Notes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/books/review/writing-about-your-family-dan-kois.html

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From the very beginning my daughter asserted her editorial rights over the memoir I was writing about our family. Early in our yearlong trip around the world, I told Lyra I was including a detail she disagreed with, and she replied, resolutely, “When I edit the book to cut out all the things about me you’re not allowed to write, I’ll change it.”

Allowed to write? I scoffed. That’s not how it works between writers and subjects. Like all journalists, I’d never let someone I was writing about read a piece before publication, much less weigh in on it. Not even when the subjects were grown adults. I certainly wasn’t ceding control of my book — my book! — to a 12-year-old.

But as the stories I was writing about my family got more charged and more challenging, I found myself rethinking my reflexive rejection. Twelve is a tough age for anyone, and Lyra had spent her 12th year uprooted from her comfortable life and forced to follow along on her dad’s notion of a family adventure. The book reflected that: It chronicled her annoyances and our bitter fights, not to mention her three-month guerrilla campaign against what she viewed as a repressive Dutch classroom.

I frequently thank my lucky stars that the internet didn’t exist when I was in middle school, yet here I was committing Lyra’s age-appropriate struggles to the semi-permanence of Google Books search results. Did I owe Lyra more than the typical writer owes a subject? She sure thought so. “It’s not fair for you to write all these things about me,” she said, “without me getting to see them.”

I’m not the first author to balk at showing my work to the people I’m writing about. Mary Karr, in “The Art of Memoir,” attributes my kind of autobiographical intransigence to male authors: Frank Conroy, for example, who said he never showed his family a page of “Stop-Time,” and justified it by saying, “If they’d have disapproved, I wouldn’t have changed a word.” Karr herself asked her mom and sister to respond to her memoir “The Liar’s Club” well before publication, and she maintains 11 rules for “dealing with beloveds.” No. 10: “I’d cut anything that someone just flat-out denies.”

From other authors of memoirs I’ve learned that it’s not uncommon to run passages past family members. Sometimes it’s a simple matter of fact-checking. Michael Chabon wrote in an email that when he reported on his stylish son Abe’s visit to Paris Fashion Week — in an essay that later appeared in his collection “Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces” — Abe gave him “a bunch of notes,” all of them citing “inaccuracies about labels, items of clothing, etc.”

But sometimes the process is more fraught, because the events a writer is chronicling are more fraught. When Karl Ove Knausgaard sent the first volume of “My Struggle” — which includes an account of his father’s slow death from alcoholism — to his uncle Gunnar before publication, Gunnar responded with an email whose vitriol was captured in the subject line: Verbal rape. The email sent Knausgaard into a tailspin as he realized many of his memories of his father’s awful last years were inaccurate. In her memoir “Dreaming,” Carolyn See wrote that she wasn’t sure her first husband loved her even when they got married. Her daughter, the writer Lisa See, remembered her mother calling her, “crying and crying and crying,” after reading the edits she received from the ex-husband: “You’re right, I didn’t,” he wrote in the margin.

More than one memoirist remembered a relative going suddenly silent once the book arrived. Erin Lee Carr shared her manuscript for “All That You Leave Behind” with her twin sister, Meagan, and other relatives. “It was painful,” she remembered. “I got no response. After two weeks I called my twin sister and asked, ‘Whoa, do we have a stinker on our hands?’” “Erin, this is painful, we don’t want to read this, we don’t want this to be out there,” Meagan told her. “But I said, ‘It’s gonna be out there, so it behooves you to look at it.’ So she went in and cut some stuff out. And I took most of her suggestions.”

Carr has experienced the family memoir edit from both sides. Her father David Carr’s “The Night of the Gun,” published in 2008, centered on his attempts to rereport hazy, disturbing memories from his years of addiction. Carr (who died in 2015) wrote the book while staying with Erin, then 19, in a cabin in the Adirondacks, and when he was done, he handed her a copy and said, “This is what it is, please let me know if there’s something that makes you uncomfortable about it.”

Did she have edits? “There was quite a bit about strip clubs,” Erin recalled. “You know, cocaine and strip clubs go hand in hand. And I said, ‘Dad, I love ya, but there does not need to be a ton of strip clubs in this.’” Carr agreed to cut those scenes, but there were darker, tougher moments that Erin said she knew better than to ask him to change. “The most painful stuff was about violence toward women, including my mother. But that’s what the book is about. That made me wildly uncomfortable, but I knew my dad was not going to hide behind comfort.”

Lyra, too, is a writer, and when she finally returned my manuscript to me — after a nerve-racking afternoon during which I heard her laughing in her room but also shouting “Dad, you did a drug!” when she got to the pot-smoking scene — many of her suggestions were purely editorial. “This is the third time you described me as ‘simmering with rage,’” she wrote in the margin, along with a little drawing of herself, in a pot, simmering ragefully. (Great note. I cut the other two.)

But she also requested that I cut a scene of her crying, and identified a larger problem with the way she was portrayed. “With me it’s all arguments and problems,” she said, “and I’m not saying I didn’t cause a lot of problems on the trip, but a lot of the chapters are, like, me being bad, me being bad, me being bad, and then Harper” — her sister, two years younger and not yet ready to read the book — “doing something sweet, and that’s the end.”

Well! That was an astute criticism of a structure I’d apparently employed a few times too often. To my surprise I found myself making significant rewrites based on my tween’s comments, sharpening the relationship between the sisters, looking through my notebooks for more examples of Lyra’s joy to counteract the misery I’d focused on.

The lesson of sharing your work with a family member is that sometimes the story you wrote in private becomes less precious to you when you face the possibility of hurting someone you love with it. “When you’re an author, you’re told that everything should be included,” Carr said. By whom? “By … the machine of writing. The machine of making a memoir. But it shouldn’t!”

Could I give Lyra a little of the story back? Allowing a family member to weigh in on a work can lead to surprising kinds of collaboration. Mary McCarthy’s “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood” (1957) intersperses autobiographical essays she’d written for The New Yorker and other magazines with self-lacerating interludes inspired by an uncle disputing those essays, turning the entire book into a pointed commentary on the fallibility of memory. When John Schwartz, a science reporter for The New York Times, finished his first draft of “Oddly Normal,” his 2012 memoir about his son Joe’s difficult teenage coming-out, he printed it out, sat next to Joe at the dining-room table, and waited while he read every page. Not only did Joe make a half-dozen sharp comments, Schwartz recalled, “it helped him get invested in the book” — to the point that Joe later gave his dad a story and asked if it might fit in somehow. It’s the final chapter.

The journalist Elizabeth Weil also gave her daughter Hannah a chance to respond to her 2017 essay “Raising a Teenage Daughter.” Hannah’s annotations appeared alongside the essay in The California Sunday Magazine. Weil writes, “When Hannah was young, she said why at least a thousand times a day,” and Hannah replies, tartly, “I thought adults knew and understood everything.”

Inspired by Hannah’s annotations, I asked Lyra to write an addendum to “my” book, which was, of course, her book too. I asked her to respond to the question, “What did your dad get wrong about you in the book?” In that addendum, Lyra complains that I made her a “precocious jerk,” but allows that she did not entirely dislike her portrayal. She’s proud of the book now, and proud of me, and that means a lot. I showed her this essay before I filed it, and 15 minutes later she brought the laptop back to me and said: “Great draft, Dad. I had some notes.”