When I was younger, I wrote to expose hypocrisies, tear structures down, show the world in all its ugliness.
“Your family is your work,” my friend Lizzie Skurnick, also a writer, told me, but I was too busy condemning my lack of discipline to hear her. Meanwhile, and 23andMe kept pulling me in. I worked on my novel draft, often diligently, and sometimes it was good, but the part taken and disguised from my life too often felt inert and didactic. It seemed important to involve my imagination, as if changing various facts and transmuting my life into fiction might result in some magical truth for the reader and, I can see in hindsight, for myself. But back then, as I obsessively researched my family history on multiple lines over many years, I chastised myself for wasting time on genealogy sites rather than doing what I thought of as my “real work”: writing the semi-autobiographical novel that I never seemed to be finishing. I wanted to write about things I didn’t know or understand yet-and of course memoir allows for this, as I knew at some level from many years of reading and enjoying people’s books about their own lives, and as I know much more intimately now. But I imagined that writing a book of pure autobiography would feel like being locked in a tiny room with my past: probably boring, possibly injurious, absolutely depressing. I’d written personal essays, and I’ve always been a candid writer. It wasn’t that I shrank from the idea of sharing the truth of my experience. And sure, I grew up in a weird family, an extreme family, a difficult and sometimes abusive family, but I couldn’t envision writing an entire book about it without a great deal of distance from my experience, without the freewheeling transformative tools of fiction. Like many writers from troubled families, I was often congratulated for “the material” of my life and urged to write it all down.
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