How to Interview Your Family When Writing Memoir

MEMOIR WRITERS ARE OFTEN surprised to learn that writing memoir is preceded by some reporting. But you have to know your story before you can write your story, after all, so it stands to reason that you might have some reporting to do, right? But not everyone knows how to do so or what to look for. When Anthony D’Aries set out to write his memoir, The Language of Men, he needed some answers. And he got them. Listen in and read along as we talk about how to interview your family when writing memoir.

Read along as you listen to this episode of QWERTY. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher. (The following transcript has been edited from the original recording).

Marion: My guest today is Anthony D’Aries. He’s the author of The Language of Men, a memoir which received the PEN New England Discovery prize and Forward’s Memoir of the Year award when it was published in 2012. His essays have appeared in Boston Magazine, Solstice, The Good Men Project, Shelf Awareness, The Literary Review, and more. He’s a teacher teaching writing workshops for homeless veterans, and he currently directs the low residency MFA in Creative and Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University. Hi, Anthony, how are you?

Anthony: I’m good, Marion. Thanks for having me here.

Marion: It’s delightful to have you and to be able to talk to you again. When your memoir came out, The Language of Men, it attracted my attention. I remember even writing about it on my memoir project blog. And I did so in no small part because I was fascinated by the door you took into your family, this idea of language. And family is such rich territory that most writers just don’t know how to choose the portal to this array of topics. So how did that theme, the idea of language, come up for you and percolate up as the way to get into this tale?

Anthony:  Yeah, I think I was always fascinated with my father’s voice, the slang that he would use, and he knew all these different kinds of movie quotes and classic rock lyrics. I felt like him and the men in my family often had our own way of communicating that a lot of… I think my mother especially felt kind of left out of.

So early on when I was writing, a lot of my characters just sounded like my father. And then I think as I started to spend more time writing memoir, I wanted to understand where that language came from and sort of what his influences were. So I think that’s where that idea of communication and language and how that really started to form the foundation of the book.

Marion:  Yeah. His language sets him off and makes him an object of great interest, first of all, to you and your family, and then to us as the readers. But it’s a tricky topic, isn’t it?

Anthony: Sure.

Marion:  Since language reveals our biases or prejudices, the time in the life, where in the world, when in the world we’re living, it characterizes us. So how did you navigate that place of fearing merely exposing him with wanting us to understand him? That seems like a really tricky spot for me.

Anthony:  Yeah, and there were moments where I wanted to be sensitive to his background and experiences, and also not to present him in a way that seems like the reader and I are laughing at him or turning him into some kind of clown. And I think it’s a fine line sometimes because I really wanted to kind of capture him in an unfiltered way. But as you’re saying, inherent in that is we don’t always want to be shown or heard in an unfiltered way.

I think what I tried to do as best I could was bring it back to why was I revealing these things at this particular time? Why were these conversations important? And how did they ultimately connect back to me? I think for a while I thought the book was about my father, but I think as I moved along and kind of understood memoir better, I sort of embraced the fact that it was about me. And if I was revealing something about somebody else, it had to be ultimately coming back to something I was trying to say about myself. And I really tried to approach a lot of these scenes from a place of honesty and curiosity. I think if that’s how you’re approaching memoir, in an honest and and curious way rather than in a vindictive or out of spite-

Marion: Revenge, right, as a revenge genre.

Anthony: Revenge, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s only going to cause problems for you. But I feel like it’s hard to argue with someone who is honestly curious about someone they love and trying to figure out how that person influenced them and kind of shaped who they’ve become or I’ve become.

Marion: Yeah, I was just going to say, I would argue that the book isn’t about your him. It really has this strong argument about the language of men, and especially in the way your mother felt so left out. I mean, most women will tell you that we can’t use your language, and we don’t use your language.

I had this conversation with my husband the other day. He was talking about a meeting he was in and somebody said, “Well, we’ll just split the baby.” And I said to him, “There wasn’t a woman in that room, was there?” He looked at me as if to say, “How did you know?” And I said, “Because no woman, first of all, would ever use that expression. And second of all, no woman would put up with that expression. We don’t care if there’s that Biblical reference to it. We’re not splitting any baby, and we’re not even doing it in purely language.”

So I think the character in the book that’s so interesting is the language of men and how extensively you show us the solitudinous response that your mother has to it and the bonding you guys have to it, but also the way it also keeps you all separate. It’s fascinating.

So you interviewed your father extensively for this book. Let’s get to that because that’s how you got this language on the page. And my students very rarely believe me when I say I interview people for memoir. They don’t think they’re going to have to or they don’t know how or they’re afraid or whatever.

For my first book, which chronicles my mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s disease, I interviewed her friends. And in doing so, I found out for instance, that my mother who got sick at 49, and I couldn’t interview her, I found out that when she was a girl, her mother would make her prom dresses for her. And my mother loved her mother very much, but her mother always sewed these rosettes onto the collar of the prom dresses. And my mother used to carry a pair of cuticle scissors and a needle and thread in her evening bag. She’d cut off the rosettes on the way to the prom. She’d sew them back on before she got home. These are the kinds of details that allow us to see the relationships, right?

So, there’s this wonderful thing we get when we interview people, but it’s hard to do. So let’s talk about interviewing your dad. Your have to know how to interview your family when writing memoir. Did you ask him? Did he think about it? I mean, what was that opening foray into this experience?

Anthony:  Yeah, I mean for me, I think a big part of it was he had had a stroke not too long before I really started interviewing him, and he almost lost his ability to talk. So there was this urgency on my part like I need to get a tape recorder, I need to sit down with him, and get his voice on tape. And he was very open to doing it.

We always kind of had these assumptions about his time in the Vietnam War, but no one had actually sat him down and talked to him about it. So I was home for a week once, and every day I just sat him down, and we were talking for two or three hours at a time. He was very open to it, and I think he got excited about it too. I think he felt kind of honored and flattered to have somebody ask him about these experiences that he never really talked about.

So I was surprised because in a lot of other ways he’s not that vocal. He can tell stories and tell jokes and stuff, but sometimes when you sit down for an intense conversation, there isn’t much back and forth, but for this, there was. So I think initially he was open to it. I think as the book started to move along and actually become a real thing, things changed a little bit.

Marion:  Oh, yeah.

Anthony: And I think just the reality of, okay, this is going to go somewhere beyond our living room and a tape recorder.

Marion: The family, right.

Anthony: Yeah, that started to change things a little bit, but-

Marion: Did he get frightened? Did he get defensive? What happened? What do you mean “changed?”

Anthony:  Yeah. Yeah, I think there was a little bit of fear. I think there was a little bit of wondering why it needed to be in a book and not just something that him and I could do. Like why did it have to go beyond just a conversation that we had? Which I think is something a lot of memoirists will ask themselves, and it’s something I definitely asked myself. But I think it’s partly tied to I didn’t really grow up in much of a literary family. There weren’t books around. We weren’t really talking about reading or writing that much. It was more movies and music, which were my earlier influences.

So I think, for me, having spent a lot of time with writers and in a writing community and just understanding that part of what you’re doing is bringing this story to a wider audience because you want that interaction with a wider audience or a larger group of readers. When the book came out and I would read from it, the conversations that would happen because of the book being out there, either with my family coming to events or just strangers who have just read the book for the first time, I think that started to help my father understand kind of what the book or just what any book can do really once it is in the hands of somebody else, and it’s part of a larger conversation.

Marion:  So you talked earlier about assumptions. You had some assumptions about the Vietnam War. We have lots of assumptions about the Vietnam War. And so many people who fought in it were pretty much told, “Don’t wear your uniform home on the plane. Don’t talk about it.”

And so, when I interview people, I find the single greatest problem for me is my own intent. The things I want them to say, frequently as a journalist, I used to find that I had an assumption about the story that it was about X, and so I just want people to say stuff that contributes to my argument. Big mistake in an interview because it can go in any direction, and you’ve got to develop the agility to let it.

But interviewing family members, in particular, when you’ve got that pathology of emotion behind that and you want him to fess up about that awful day, or you want him to come clean about his drinking… I’m not talking about your dad, but I’m talking about other people.

Anthony: Right.

Marion: And it doesn’t happen, but suddenly these assumptions get hit with a hammer. How did you feel as the receiving end of those new directions of his own download of his conscious and subconscious mind? I mean, what happened to you as he was talking?

Anthony: Yeah, I think it made me realize how complex some of the things I was asking really were. There were moments where he might give a short answer to something in like a classic stoic way of that’s just the way it was or it was just one of those things, something like that. So there were times where those euphemisms ended up being these kind of red flags for me about, okay, there’s more going on there. There’s more going on there.

Marion: Yeah, I bet.

Anthony: Either he doesn’t have the language for it, or even I don’t have the language for it at the moment because I’m not even sure how complex of these masculinity issues and the economic impact of war and how that… all of these different things that I wasn’t planning on really writing about or thinking about. And then because of my assumptions growing up on Hollywood’s version of the Vietnam War, I did kind of expect that there would be these stories of combat or the more kind of heroic war stories. And that wasn’t my dad’s experience.

There were a lot of stories of him being this bored, confused, 19 year old kid who didn’t really understand why he was there. And so he was kind of living out his… Instead of going to college, he was in Vietnam. So a lot of the things he was doing was kind of similar to what I was doing when I was 19 just drinking and being destructive in other ways. But it was in this kind of like alternate universe of the Vietnam War for him.

And I just remember these pictures of where he was staying in his bunk in Vietnam, and it was all decorated like I would decorate my dorm room. And it was kind of like, wow, there’s this whole sort of other experience that feels so different to mine, and obviously was in so many ways, but there were still just a lot of these young man trying to figure out himself kind of things that I think are universal. So there were those moments of connection that I think helped me get through those weedier parts of the conversation that were a little more complex and it took more to figure out.

Marion: That’s lovely. I love that idea of the euphemisms as red flags. I suspect after you start hearing a couple of them, you start… For me, I start circling things in my notebook. When I interview people, I use a notebook, and I may or may not use a tape recorder, but I always have a notebook in my lap. And then I’ll maybe be making notes about things that I want to go back and make sure we hit harder.

But if you’ve got these euphemistic sort of manhole covers that he’s throwing out and you know there’s a lot below it, did you make a list of them? Did you just start to recognize them for what they were, and then think about it and go back and get them? Did you go back and get them right there on the spot? This is the kind of thing that I think, especially when it’s your parent, if you start recognizing someone’s throwing up red flags via their euphemisms, what do you do? Do you call them on it? Do you not call them on it? It’s your parent after all. So we’re talking about like a Freudian nightmare right now. So what do you do?

Anthony: Exactly, exactly. It was funny because a lot of these phrases were things that I would hear all the time growing up. Like that’s just the way it was or it is what it is was the one that was always just something my father would kind of lean on.

And so I think when I started to pay attention to those and think about when he was saying them, it was often because it was things that didn’t have kind of a a clear cut answer. It was kind of these gray areas that I think ended up… I don’t know. When those started to become more apparent to me, I think that’s when I would start to do more kind of outside research. So if that was his experience about something then what were some of the other factors that were kind of contributing to that or leading up to that?

Marion: Right.

Anthony: I did have a list going, but it definitely was those moments where, okay, I could either press him a little bit harder, and if that doesn’t work then why does this seem to be a sensitive thing? And is it because there’s shame involved? Is it because there’s just time and memory and all of these things that I think memoirs deal with? But yeah, and then I started to realize that my father wasn’t the only one doing that. I think we all do it a lot of the time.

Marion: Oh, yes.

Anthony: Especially in casual conversations. So I started to pay attention to when I would do that. It’s kind of like when I work with students and you see certain cliches pop up. Oftentimes those cliches are like you said, are those kind of like manhole cover for something that’s going on deeper there that we’re not aware of, or the writer is still figuring out, or the writer is protecting.

So yeah, there is kind of this interesting thing of like during an interview, figuring out where those kind of trap doors are. But then also as you’re writing, when am I using those euphemisms or cliches that are… I’m trying to bridge these two things, and I don’t know how to get there yet. So it’s often in rewriting and revision where I start to pick apart my own language that I lean on, or I’m using it as kind of a shortcut.

Marion: Well, I always say to people writing memoir is the single greatest portal to self-discovery. But what you’re telling us here is that writing this piece, starting with the interviewing, well, starting with the very conception of it, which fascinates me, this idea that the language of men is what it is, this really bonded you more definitively to your dad. I mean, how else could you have ever shared anything about the Vietnam War, and specifically, the idea that his bunk looked like your college room, theoretically at least, that you found similarity there? It’s really quite poignant and very, very wonderful.

And you wrote in a piece I read of yours, you wrote about ourselves and about writing about ourselves and family. And you said that there came a point when you had to consider yourself and the people in your book as characters. That fascinated me. It’s advice I give to people when they’re writing from trauma, sex abuse, from neglect. That I’m not asking them ever to go back and re-experience or relive the trauma. What I’m asking them to do is quite different from that. It’s really get that distance, that discernment out and use it so they can have a look this time. But talk to us about that idea of turning yourself and others into characters.

Anthony: Yeah. I think it helped a lot to think of it that way because, just as when you’re creating characters in fiction, you want to create these complex, often contradictory characters that are real and honest. So I think when you’re doing that in memoir, I would just think about my own motivations as a character. Why am I telling this story? Why do I want to include these details or these characteristics?

And the same thing when I was writing other characters who were my family was kind of am I presenting them in a way that feels fully developed for the reader, and I’m not just going on what my assumptions are about these people? And how am I bringing the reader into this intimate relationship that I have with these people? But also, I don’t know, kind of giving my family members some space to be people and not just family members, you know?

Marion: Yes.

Anthony: Yeah, right. And I think that was a big part of the entire experience too, is I think for a lot of memoirs too are coming of age stories. A big part of it is accepting that the people in your family are first people, and they had these whole lives before you were there. So I think trying to honor that while also presenting myself as this kind of curious, slightly impressionable young kid, I think kind of filtering it through that helped me not present them in a way that felt, yeah, hurtful or attacking in any way, but as realistic and complex as I could. So I wanted to make sure that I was showing-

Marion: Including yourself, right?

Anthony: Right, exactly.

Marion: Including looking at yourself that way.

Anthony: Yep. And that was interesting too.

Marion: That’s a hard assignment.

Anthony: Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest kind of eyeopening reactions I had about the book was my parents weren’t really concerned so much about what was being said about them, but they were concerned about how much I was revealing about myself, which was really fascinating to me. I think as a writer, I didn’t really care about myself that much. I was kind of like, well, of course I’m going to reveal things about myself. That’s what I signed on for. I know what I’m revealing about myself. So there’s no real element of surprise there. But I think to hear a parent show that concern about their kid who’s a writer, I think was really fascinating to me.

Marion: It is fascinating.

Anthony: So there has been many moments like that where you’re surprised by the way people are responding to the book. I sometimes have students who are working on memoirs talk about people might be offended or something like that, but we often overlook those moments of people being really honored to be in the book, or it opening up these conversations that you didn’t expect, and even if you have to go through that rough patch of people being kind of a little scared about what you might be revealing about them. I think oftentimes, especially with family, you move beyond that and you get to this place where you’re having conversations that you wouldn’t have had before.

Marion: That’s lovely. I also read in that piece that you wrote, you had this great quote. And in it you say, “I had to realize that it wasn’t my job as a memoirist to pause my life. Even though the book ends, life continues.”

Anthony: It’s true.

Marion: And I thought, “What a wonderful thing to understand,” that memoir goes from here to there. It just goes from here, when you didn’t know something, to there, when you did, or from here, when you have to change something, to there, when you did. And so you seemed to inherently understood that you sort of punch into your timeline of your life and you get this thing. You got this sort of accumulated knowledge of what the language of men does in a family, the havoc it wreaks, the bonding it brings, and the confusion that can result somewhere between the two.

And so, when life continued after you wrote this book, I would love to know a little bit about how you felt at the end of the experience. Are you still sort of taking notes in your head when you go home for Thanksgiving dinner, or have you been able to sort of shed the role that must’ve been pretty consuming in order to produce this book?

Anthony: Yeah, it was consuming for a long time. And I think I’ve moved on to… I’ve been working mostly on fiction right now. I just finished a novel. And I think I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I hadn’t spent so much time writing memoir. I’ve talked to other memoirists about this too, who have moved from memoir to fiction, and I think there was a lot of just kind of things I need to figure out about myself. I needed to kind of get a better grasp on why I think the way I think and how I’ve come to think the way I think, and just do some of that kind of self analysis before moving on to creating a character from scratch.

So yeah, it’s still a weird process too because when the book came out, and I’m at that point, I’d been done with it for almost six months or so, so I already feel this distance from it. But then everybody reading it, it’s so fresh in their minds, so in some ways they’re kind of closer to the material than I am. And so we would get into these Q and A’s at events and stuff, and they’d be bringing up parts of the book and I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I kind of forgot that was in there.” So I’d have to reconnect with my book in some way.

Marion: That was my life.

Anthony: Right, exactly.

Marion: Right.

Anthony: And yeah, I think for a while there was this kind of feeling in my family of we better not say too much around him because he might copy it all down and then do something with it.

Marion: Right, right.

Anthony: But I don’t feel that any way. I don’t feel like a spy in my own family anymore. I kind of felt that way for a little bit.

Marion: That’s what I was getting at, yes.

Anthony: Yeah. I mean, I kind of liked that role for a little while because I think growing up, that’s kind of what I was doing anyway growing up. I was a pretty shy kid. I was always listening. I had a tape recorder when I was little, and I was always recording conversations, and having my own radio shows and stuff like that. So I think I kind of tapped into just that idea of listening and kind of being an observer to other people’s stories. So there was some enjoyment in that. But I think after a while, we kind of just all moved on. And we’ll talk about the book every once in a while, but it’s not like a sore subject. It’s not as raw as it used to be.

Marion:  Good.

Anthony: But it depends. One of the first things my dad asked me about the novel that I was working on is whether or not he was a character in it. And I was like, “No, no. You’re safe. You’re not in this one.” But it’s funny in that way too because if you write a memoir, people are worried about how you’re portraying them as real people. If you write a novel, people will assume that you’re writing some fictionalized version of them. So you can never kind of escape that is this based on your real life kind of thing.

Anthony: But it’s been a lot of moments of feeling really close to my family about it, a lot of times feeling kind of this is me doing my own thing. But I think part of it was kind of figuring out my own independence too, so that was a part of the book as well. So I think that it kind of made sense that that’s how it felt publishing it and what things were like after.

Marion: Of course. Well, I could talk to you all day about this, but I think you’ve really helped a lot of the memoirists out there who are thinking about how they’re going to intersect, interact, and escape at the end of the experience from that feeling like a spy in the house of love.

So thank you, Anthony. I so appreciate you coming along today to talk to us. And that is Anthony D’Aries. His book is The Language of Men, a memoir, pick it up wherever books are sold.

I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to QWERTY, subscribe wherever podcasts are available. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach.com and take a class with me. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go.