First Book Dilemma: How to Write About Those You Love and Those You Don’t Love Anymore
In 2011, when my first book of poems, A Hymn That Meanders, was about to be published, I was hit with a gust of bliss. No, I was drifting through a rose ether. I, Maria Nazos, could finally call myself an author!
Then, gravity yanked me back down to earth.
What would my family say? The book was due out any day, and I’d not shown my loved ones the proofs. I’d written about my family in the same manner that I did everything in life: unabashedly. I’d written about my familial alcoholism, my sea captain father, and my wayward 20s.
On top of it, I’d written about ex-lovers, many of whom I had to make an effort to get away from, most of whom I don’t think much of when I do think of them at all, and that’s putting it diplomatically.
To top that off, at the time, I lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a town of 3,500 people. I bumped into these former lovers more often than I would have liked.
This worry led me to my next searing question. How do I write about those I love and those I don’t love anymore, when they may confront me with my own words?
I contacted my beloved mentor, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, for advice. Laure-Anne responded:
“My answer to you is this: speak to those you love and respect that your book will speak of TRUTHS that are yours and yours alone. It is art. Not journalism. But it is also an art so few follow -- so cousin Fred or uncle Joe don't risk much. Tell your family that yes, you are sorry that some will be hurt and that it is out of hurt that you write most of your work. I believe it was Bill Kittredge who once said, ‘If you're not pissing your family off, you're not writing, well!’”
Wow, I thought, I wish I could be so fierce. But I needed some more footholds on this slippery terrain. As if by magic, She Writes, the all-female web forum and publisher, was holding a radio discussion titled, “How to Write about Those We Love and Those We Don’t Love Anymore.”
“Hi, this is Maria Nazos calling,” I stammered as I called into the show. “I’m publishing my first book of poems, and I KNOW for a fact that the people I’ve written most about are going to read the book…because they’re my immediate family.”
The panel chuckled.
The panelists echoed Laure-Anne. Write your truth, and yes, there is more than one. Yes, my loved ones had as much of a right to respond to my work as I had to write about them. My loved ones were entitled to say that I’m wrong, inexact, cruel, obscene, repugnant, that I used my family and friends as a confessional Kleenex.
Annie Dillard believed that a writer should never write about another individual unless that other person has his/her own platform from which to respond. I respectfully disagree. I elected to become a writer to make sense of the chaos that was my life, just as much as writing chose me.
On the She Writes radio show, one caller shared a positive experience: she’d written about her philanthropist parents. Her parents read the first draft of the book and said, “We don’t agree with everything, but we know that you can make this more truthful.” So, the woman took the book back and revised it. The book became a bestseller.
On the darker end of the spectrum, another caller described how she’d written about her family and gotten terrible reviews from family and critics alike. She’d never written again.
Rosanna Warren was visiting at the time, during my 2011 fellowship at Vermont Studio Center. I asked her what she thought about this matter. Rosanna felt that as we grow as writers, there are varying angles from which we can examine our subject matter. For example, in one group of poems, she’d written about caring for her dying father.
“But in one poem, I found myself taking a drastically different stance,” said Rosanna. “I found myself writing about metaphorically gorging myself on spoonfuls of my father’s illness. That poem was symbolic for my guilt that I felt while writing about him.”
Rosanna also maintained that an important step is to be aware that the invasion of others' privacy is a serious question, and one must find a way to incorporate that question into the structure of one's own writing.
At the Vermont Studio Center, I read aloud one of my personal essays about intergenerational alcoholism. I was so nervous, the wine I had consumed was seeping from my underarms.
“What do you think?” I asked my peers.
One woman said, “Are you kidding? I’d be proud if I were your family. They had such a tragic, lovely life.”
Then it hit me: not only is there more than one truth, but also hopefully, my writing is good enough to where it speaks numerous truths. I’m not demonizing my family, but depicting them as flawed, graceful individuals. Many audiences might even find the story of my family and parents—a young rebellious woman of the ’60s, who abandoned reason to sail the world with my Greek sea captain father—to be a tragic and exotic story.
I feel very lucky. I’ve gotten to hear some diverse opinions. It’s now 2020, and I’m still awaiting my family’s response to the book. Since then, I’ve heard from the other people I’ve written about and welcomed or cringed from their reactions.
Two years later, when I began my first year in the Creative Writing Ph.D. program at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, who was on the faculty at the time, paid my first collection mixed praise.
“It’s a remarkable accomplishment, and its energy never lets up for an instant, cover to cover, as if there were a blue flame burning under all of it. As Emerson wrote to Whitman, ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”
Well, I could have died right then as a happy woman, but then he delivered the criticism:
“As to your family: I’d guess [they] feel exposed and defenseless. Had I been your mentor, I would have advised you to hold [some of the poems] back and would have cautioned you against some of the descriptions of [familial] drinking in some of the other poems. Though you and I might disagree about degrees of propriety, no poem is important enough to risk hurting someone else’s feelings.”
The letter is dated back to 2013. I still have Ted’s response framed above my desk because to this very day, I remain as conflicted about his advice as I am about that first book. Yes, as writers we ought to err on the side of compassion. No, we shouldn’t sit down and intend to break someone else’s heart, but what if they broke ours, over and over? Should we be forced into silence because our experience wasn’t pleasant? Do we then sign a vow of secrecy, a refusal to acknowledge our suffering, too?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I think they’re important ones to ask, ones that to this day, hang like icicles above me.
I understand that I made a deliberate choice to publish that book without even sending my family the proofs, for godsakes.
I also contend, however, that I’m a poet, not a babysitter. I refuse to sit in watchful passivity over my subjects’ emotions. However, I also do have a responsibility to care for my subjects as I write about them. But in this world where “reality” TV and, for four nightmarish years, Donald Trump served as sources of “truth,” now more than ever, I feel an even bigger responsibility to speak my own.
This essay originally appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review
