How to Write About Your Relatives – Both Dead & Alive

SHE WAS ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE in high school who said things like, “Well, I’m sure someone will dance with you if you wear that dress.” She ended the quote with the kind of broad smile that looked like scenery more than it resembled reality, but you were young and vulnerable and were too busy changing your dress to think it through. And it is from her that I have learned what I need to know about how to write about relatives. Let me share them. 

Now she has grown up to be one of your relatives, and she’s still at it, and sometimes you still scurry to change your clothes and tamp down your feelings on her responses to you. But then one day, running off to do so, you stopped and wondered why.

And now you want to write about her.

How to do so when the relative you’ve got is the best example of one of the worst types of personalities – the passive aggressive, who you have watched perform what I call the clever damage that only families can inflict? How do you do so when anyone is any one thing in the extreme and you need to put her in your work because she has created some kind of navigational marker for you, and without her x would never have occurred?

In a phrase: Quote her. Perform no armchair psychoanalysis. Use no labels. Do not assign yourself the task of revenge. Let her do the work for you and quote her. And for sake of goodness and accuracy, do not pipe those quotes. Do not make anything up. In cases like this, less is more.

Maybe on seeing you in a bathing suit for the first time she said, “Oh my goodness, I could have sworn you were thinner than that. You hide it really well.” Maybe on your wedding day she never mentioned your dress but spent a whole lot of your time complaining about hers. Maybe though she never showed up and never called when your husband had cancer, and you were home alone with your baby, she visits months later for his birthday, and when she embraces you and is forced to meet those people who did show up and did help while your husband was sick, she whispers in your ear, “I thought it was going to be just family.”

Just quote her.

We’ll get it.

We always do.

And if she recognizes herself? Send me the $150 you were about to invest on a therapist. After all, you didn’t think you had a beneficial relationship with this person, now did you?

But those are only concerns if she’s alive. Has she gone off to her great reward? Well, you can’t libel the dead.

One way or the other – write it. Let’s see what you’ve got before you talk yourself out of writing a good tale.