Steve Luxenberg's Blog: About "Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret", page 4
May 29, 2009
Letting Go of Annie's Ghosts
A woman told me that when her husband had a "nervous breakdown" in the 1970s, she didn't tell anyone. He recovered, and then last year, had a second episode. This time, she said, she told everyone. "I needed the support from my friends," she explained. "The first time, I went through it alone. I wasn't going to do that again."
Nor did she think that silence was necess...
May 14, 2009
Connecting to Annie's Ghosts: An Interview and a Review
"A sister no one talked about."
"A half-brother I never knew existed."
"An uncle airbrushed out of family photos."
During an interview Tuesday about Annie's Ghosts on "Midday," Dan Rodricks's public affairs show, listeners jammed the phone lines to talk about the secrets in their own families. We only had time for three calls, unfortunately. Each story was compelling, and each secret was different. Some involved institutionalized relatives, like my aunt Annie, while others involved some other taboo or shame of the generation when the secret was born -- the uncle was gay, the half-brother was from a now-secret previous marriage.
Telling my family's story, and explaining the cultural forces that swirled around my mom as she decided to turn her institutionalized sister into a secret, clearly had resonated with Dan's listeners. It was quite an experience to sit in the studio, earphones on, and hear their stories.
It was also quite an experience to hear this review by Susan McCallum-Smith, which was broadcast Monday on WYPR.
No matter how other reviews turn out, I'll always have this one.
May 13, 2009
Connecting to Annie's Ghosts: An Interview and a Reviewer
"A sister no one talked about."
"A half-brother I never knew existed."
"An uncle airbrushed out of family photos."
During an interview yesterday about Annie's Ghosts on "Midday," Dan Rodricks's public affairs show, listeners jammed the phone lines to talk about the secrets in their own families. We only had time for three calls, unfortunately. Each story was compelling, and each secret was different. Some inv...
May 11, 2009
A Mother's Day Posting About Secrets and Their Keepers
At a discussion/reading/signing of Annie's Ghosts this past Saturday at the Red Canoe Book Store and Café in Baltimore, I asked those in the crowd with a family secret of their own to raise a hand. That brought forth hands from about half the audience. Someone else stole my punch line: “You just don’t know it yet.”
From the crowd, knowing laughs.
Afterward, several people murmured to me as I signed their books, “I’ve love to tell you about my family secret.” Talking about my family’s seems to free others to talk about theirs.
That wouldn’t have happened as readily, or at all, a generation or more ago. In response to a question last night about how my mother managed to keep her friends from finding out about her institutionalized sister Annie, I recounted a scene from the book that involved my mom’s bridge game in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Every week, for more than a decade, the same four women got together to play cards. They smoked cigarettes and swapped stories, but they didn’t talk about Mom’s secret. Later, I learned that all three eventually came to know about Annie, but that Mom never realized it.
One of the bridge players, a woman named Ann, had two relatives with disabilities. She was upset and angry, she told me recently, that my mom had chosen to hide Annie’s existence. But Ann never said anything to Mom.
I asked her why. “It wasn’t my place,” she said. “It wasn’t my secret.”
Instead, the bridge players kept their silence, compelled—by custom, by culture, by circumstance—not to say anything to each other.
Something to think about on this Mother’s Day 2009.
P.S. It felt so good to do my first bookstore signing at the Red Canoe. Not only do authors and readers need to support the independents in this time of consolidation and change in the publishing industry, but it’s within walking distance of my house. How cool is that?
May 9, 2009
Listening to Annie's Ghosts
This week, I began touring and talking about Annie’s Ghosts. I’ve been fascinated to hear how readers react to the book. One book seller told me the other day, “It’s a love story. . . I don’t mean in the usual sense. I mean that there’s so much love in your family, along with all those secrets.”
On Tuesday, when Robert Siegel of NPR’s “All Things Considered” interviewed me for an eight-minute segment that aired that night, he seized on the universal nature of the story. (Listen to the interview.) Siegel asked me to read a passage from the book that he thought particuarly underscored that notion. It was too long for the segment that aired, but I thought readers of this blog might like to see what had captured Siegel’s attention.
Here’s the passage, from pages 47-48 of Annie’s Ghosts:
Without really trying, I have become a collector of other families’ secrets. Whenever I tell anyone about my detective work, the first question is invariably something like this: “Can you tell me the secret?” Sure, I say. The next question often is: “Want to hear my family’s secret?”There’s no shortage of heirlooms in this attic: Hidden affairs, of course, but also hidden marriages, hidden divorces, hidden crimes, even hidden families. I have heard so many secrets that I started a list. One of the most memorable: A man who learned, as a teenager, that his father was leading a double life—two wives, two houses, two sets of children, all two miles apart in a Detroit suburb. Perhaps it’s a testament to the insular nature of suburban life that this master of deception managed to straddle these skew lines for more than a decade before his double life came crashing down around him.
Even when secrets do emerge, the reasons for the secrecy often stay buried. Families never learn the motivations, the circumstances and the pressures that compel people to choose deceit rather than honesty. In this shroud of silence, the secret takes on the characteristics of an artifact—interesting to examine and exotic to behold, but mysterious and often impossible to fathom.
Families need not live their lives as open books, for anyone to read. Just as a cure can be worse than the disease, revelation can be more devastating than reticence. That’s the fear that drives many of us to embrace silence or deception. But too often, I think, we’re just telling one more lie, this one to ourselves.
Now that Annie was no longer a secret, now that Mom wasn’t here, the revelation had lost its power to hurt anyone. Or had it? Would understanding Mom’s reasons make me wish that I, too, had left well enough alone?
Siegel said on the air that the book had “different levels of discovery.” As I continue my conversations with readers at my coming events, I’m betting that their reactions to Annie’s Ghosts will reveal new levels that I hadn’t discovered.
Read the rest of NPR’s coverage of Annie's Ghosts here.
Listening to Annie’s Ghosts
This week, I began touring and talking about Annie’s Ghosts. I’ve been fascinated to hear how readers react to the book. One book seller told me the other day, “It’s a love story. . . I don’t mean in the usual sense. I mean that there’s so much love in your family, along with all those secrets.”
On Tuesday, when Robert Siegel of NPR’s “All Things Considered” interviewed me for an eight-minute segment that aired that night, he seized on the universal nature of the story. (Listen to the interview.) Siegel asked me to read a passage from the book that he thought particuarly underscored that notion. It was too long for the segment that aired, but I thought readers of this blog might like to see what had captured Siegel’s attention.
Here’s the passage, from pages 47-48 of Annie’s Ghosts:
Without really trying, I have become a collector of other families’ secrets. Whenever I tell anyone about my detective work, the first question is invariably something like this: “Can you tell me the secret?” Sure, I say. The next question often is: “Want to hear my family’s secret?”There’s no shortage of heirlooms in this attic: Hidden affairs, of course, but also hidden marriages, hidden divorces, hidden crimes, even hidden families. I have heard so many secrets that I started a list. One of the most memorable: A man who learned, as a teenager, that his father was leading a double life—two wives, two houses, two sets of children, all two miles apart in a Detroit suburb. Perhaps it’s a testament to the insular nature of suburban life that this master of deception managed to straddle these skew lines for more than a decade before his double life came crashing down around him.
Even when secrets do emerge, the reasons for the secrecy often stay buried. Families never learn the motivations, the circumstances and the pressures that compel people to choose deceit rather than honesty. In this shroud of silence, the secret takes on the characteristics of an artifact—interesting to examine and exotic to behold, but mysterious and often impossible to fathom.
Families need not live their lives as open books, for anyone to read. Just as a cure can be worse than the disease, revelation can be more devastating than reticence. That’s the fear that drives many of us to embrace silence or deception. But too often, I think, we’re just telling one more lie, this one to ourselves.
Now that Annie was no longer a secret, now that Mom wasn’t here, the revelation had lost its power to hurt anyone. Or had it? Would understanding Mom’s reasons make me wish that I, too, had left well enough alone?
Siegel said on the air that the book had “different levels of discovery.” As I continue my conversations with readers at my coming events, I’m betting that their reactions to Annie’s Ghosts will reveal new levels that I hadn’t discovered.
Read the rest of NPR’s coverage of Annie's Ghosts here.
April 2, 2009
Annie's Ghosts: The website
For those curious about the story behind Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secrets, check out steveluxenberg.com, my new website.
It offers something for everyone, both those who haven't read the book and those who have. It has photos and documents not in the book, as well as suggested book club questions and an interview (a real one, not one in which I create both the questions and the answers). There's also a forum to discuss the nature and power of family secrets, and you can send me e-mail through the Contact page.
I welcome any feedback, either here or there.
March 27, 2009
A starred review in Kirkus for Annie's Ghosts
For the most part, I see this blog as a place to discuss reporting, writing, books and those subjects that fascinate and engage readers of books. I'm calling time out today so that I can share a portion of the review that appears in the April 1 issue of Kirkus Reviews.
* ANNIE'S GHOSTS
A Journey into a Family Secret
A family secret leads Washington Post senior editor Luxenberg to reinterpret his family history.
In 1995, the author learned that his aging mother had a sister she had never mentioned. It came up during a visit to the doctor; her parents had institutionalized their disabled two-year-old when she was four, she said, and she never saw her sister again. Since his mother was facing severe medical problems, Luxenberg felt this wasn't the time to pursue the details. After his mother's death a few years later, he learned that the sister's name was Annie and she was buried with his grandparents in Michigan.
Determined to discover the truth about Annie, he began his investigation with an endless list of difficult questions. . . As Luxenberg slowly uncovers Annie's story, he realizes that by exposing one ghost, he exposes thousands; by discovering one secret, he discovers those of his entire family. The author calls on his investigative reporting skills not just to uncover the facts, but to explore what happens when lies or omissions become truth, exposing the contradictions, contrasts and parallels that exist within every life, every relationship and every family.
Beautifully complex, raw and revealing.
##
Apart from the praise (wonderful, of course), this is a review that makes a writer feel understood as well as appreciated.
March 11, 2009
The challenge of memory, Part 2
This news story in today's Washington Post is a delightful example of the difficulty of reconstructing past events.
A brief summary for those who don't want to click on the "news story" link above: In 1861, Jonathan Dillon was a watchmaker at a shop near the White House. He was repairing President Lincoln's pocket watch on the day of the attack on Fort Sumter. Four decades later, he told a New York Times reporter that he had etched the following inside the watch: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try."
His story remained unconfirmed until yesterday (March 10, 2009) when Smithsonian opened the watch's inner workings and discovered a slightly different commentary: "Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels on the above date thank God we have a government."
The essence of Dillon's story was true. He had etched a pro-Union message into the watch. But he hadn't mentioned slavery and he hadn't praised Lincoln. Did he intentionally inflate the content of his message?
I don't know, of course, but I would argue: No, not intentionally. Based on my recent experience in researching Annie's Ghosts, I'm betting that Dillon was certain that he had written those loftier words. Over the course of 40 years, as Lincoln's reputation grew and the Civil War had become identified as the war that ended slavery, Dillon's memory of his words incorporated those ideas. Essentially, I'm suggesting, he remembered his message in light of everything that had happened in his lifetime.
There's a scene in Annie's Ghosts when I'm interviewing a cousin about her argument with my mother over the secret that stands at the center of the book. Just as my cousin is recounting a climatic moment in this 50-year-old argument, we're interrupted by the waitress's offer of coffee. After the waitress leaves, my cousin resumes her account — and offers a different (and more dramatic) version of the key moment she had described only seconds before.
As in the case of the watchmaker, the crux of her story was true. I knew, after all, that my mom had kept the secret and that something had caused the two of them to have a falling out. But if I wanted an "accurate" version of their conversation, I was out of luck. My cousin was giving me the version that reflected years of thinking about that moment, that reflected her feelings as much as her memory.
"The nuances lie beyond my reach," I write in the book. "Fifty years later, this is the best my cousin can do."
March 4, 2009
The art of memoir, the challenge of memory
On a Facebook discussion the other day, the question came up: How far should memoir writers go in reconstructing scenes and dialogue?
The answer might seem obvious, but I suspect it confounds most writers who don't want to just pretend that we all have infallible memories. Some writers have gone beyond reconstructed dialogue, arguing that invention (based on memory, of course) is legitimate — because truth, in a sense, is in the eye of the beholder anyway.
I draw a harder line than most. I favor the rough edges of memory over neat and pretty reconstructions. (More interesting, usually.) Invention? As I wrote in the Facebook discussion, that's why we have novels.
Readers, I think, are smart. They know that most writers don't have notes or documents to back up dialogue from long ago. So what's the problem? In a word: Credibility. As a writer, I want readers to grant me some license to tell my story. But if I present lengthy dialogue as fact, I risk losing their trust — and their interest. Bad deal for me.
What are your thoughts?
