How to Write a Difficult Family Memoir, with Rachel Michelberg

RACHEL MICHELBERG IS YOU. She is a person with a story, one that she never thought she would write — that is, until she did. It took years. It took courage. It was written under the pressure of what I refer to as the Bermuda Triangle for writers — when guilt, grief and shame collide in your life, any of which might prevent you from writing down your tale. Instead, Rachel took some writing classes, applied what she knew from her day job of teaching singing and just published Crash: How I Became a Reluctant Caregiver, with She Writes Press. Read along and listen in, and learn how to write a difficult family memoir.

Marion: It’s wonderful to have you here and I’m delighted that you were able to join us. My audience is writers and your book presents some unique and thorny writing issues. So let’s jump right into those with a little setup, in the form of background story. Your marriage is unsteady, you have children together, and your husband is in a plane crash that is nearly fatal, casting you into the role of a reluctant caregiver. Wow. So much of that would have prevented most people from writing a book. At what point did you start considering this as a writing project?

Rachel: It wasn’t until about four years after the crash that it sort of hit me that I had this story. I have no real background as a writer. I had no formal training, I was a professional singer and cantor in a synagogue, opera singer, musical theater. That was my life, that was my passion, in addition, of course, to my family. It just wasn’t even an inkling that I would ever write a book, any kind of a thought, I never had that thought. And yet, as I began to look back at those awful, awful years and those terrible decisions that I had to make, and the situation in my family, I decided that it was a story that really needed to be told because I made a decision that was very unpopular.

And I grappled with that decision, the guilt and feeling like I had let people down, the societal expectations, I grappled with it so much, and I felt so much incredible sorrow and regret for how those decisions affected my family. I really didn’t write it as a means of catharsis, that a lot of people asked me, “Did you do it to process it and to achieve some closure?” That really wasn’t how it started out. It ended up that way, but I just had this kind of crazy story. One of those stories like you don’t make this stuff up. And I also wanted to give people permission to consider their options. So that’s when it happened, not until about four years after.

Marion: That’s interesting. You mentioned that you’re a singer, you’re also a gardener, a cook, a music and voice teacher, and now a writer, and not necessarily in that order maybe anymore. But did any of those inform you did the singing, gardening, cooking, music and voice teaching, is there something that’s sort of stepped forward in your… I mean, I knit, I cook, I garden, I have to always be putting stuff out or I think I might explode. I don’t know, we haven’t tested it yet, but did some of those get kind of behind the project a little bit, in some way, that you could relate to?

Rachel: That’s a great question. I think that one of the most exciting parts of music to me of being a singer is the communication. So many people concentrate on the technique, how you breathe and how you hold your jaw. And all of those are extremely important, don’t get me wrong. However, when I teach voice, the part that I love the most, the part that gets my juices flowing and my heart going a little bit pitter pat, is when a student and I delve into the intention, the motivation of what the message is, what am I trying to say here in this song? Usually it’s only a couple of minutes, which actually you can draw a parallel with a scene in a book. There’s got to be an arc, right? There’s got to be not only an arc in the whole book, but with an exposition, and then a pivotal moment, and a resolution and all that, but within each chapter sometimes, within each scene.

And so I had experience with that from my own performing. And with music, it’s so true. Even within a phrase, even within a note, when a student holds a note, it’s like, “Don’t just let it stay, it needs to move somewhere.” And that really, I believe, influenced my writing a great deal, not so sure about the gardening and the cooking. They were more, my I’m going to take a break now, I’m going to take a break from the computer and go weeding now because with weeding, you pull the weed and it’s done. Whereas when you’re writing, it’s just like, “Ah.” Sometimes you feel like your head is going to explode because, did I say this the right way? Is it clear? Did I use the right word? So there’s an immediate gratification. But I would say definitely my music and my acting experience, being on stage and developing a character, thinking about intonation, thinking about inflection, and so on.

Marion: That’s wonderful. I think it’ll help people who are thinking about a book, who have never yet written a book, about where you can pull from, where you can annotate from. And in this case, it’s just so important because if there’s a Bermuda Triangle for writers, it’s the combo of guilt, grief and shame, all which might’ve prevented another writer from going into this tale. But you sailed right into that damn Bermuda Triangle. And I don’t think this is a plot-driven book, so I can say that you do leave, the marriage does break up and he doesn’t fully recover before it does. It’s not that, it’s not that story. So I want to talk about how much trepidation you might have felt sailing into such a Bermuda Triangle. It’s really worth helping others who might be saying, “Oh, well, I can’t write about that.” Well, you have the trifecta there, of the reasons that people might not tell their tale. So how much trepidation and what was it that allowed you to mitigate that? I’m assuming there has to have been trepidation.

Rachel: Oh yes, of course. I liken my story and a lot of memoirs that I’ve read, and people that write very honestly about their trauma, to stripping naked and standing there, and saying, “Okay everybody, now judge me,” because it really is like pivoting slowly and saying okay. And that’s what’s going to happen next week when my book is published. And I’m revealing major flaws about myself that I’m going to get judged for, but that’s what makes a story interesting. And I didn’t write it because it was interesting, I wrote it because it was my truth, and there was shame at the time, but there isn’t shame anymore.

Marion: Good.

Rachel: And that’s an important journey. And all the time that I was writing it, I think I had in the back of my mind that I wanted to publish it, but I just didn’t believe that anybody would really be interested in publishing. I didn’t know, I just didn’t know. I just did my best to write the best story that I could. And so I am nervous and there are some antagonists in my book who are still very much alive, who may be not so happy that I wrote about them, and some pretty horrible things that they did to me. And so there’s that nervousness too, and yet I felt, I’m a child of the sixties and seventies, I was brought up in California with that I did the EST Training and I was just sort of taught from the time I was tiny that unless you’re telling your truth and unless you’re being open and honest, then you’re hiding something.

And so I think that’s always been in my nature to be pretty direct and pretty open. I actually had to learn as an adult boundaries and filters, and how not to share everything all the time. That isn’t always productive. But as a writer, it can be very productive. And so that’s where I went.

Marion: Yeah, and perfectly so. And in the story, in your life and learning about the boundaries of caregiving, I think it’s very, very important. It’s a great lesson, that boundaries thing. So let’s talk about the reporting process for this book. Taking notes can be an absolute lifesaver. I’ve stood in some fairly terrible places in my life, and including my own reluctance step into being a longterm caregiver. But with that notebook in my hand, I can endure almost anything. I don’t know why. I mean, you keep your head down, you write it down, you see the act of you writing it down. Maybe it relieves some of the sting, but that’s me. What about you? As you were reporting this process, as you were going back and reclaiming those interactions with the doctors, and with the lawyers, and with your family, was the reporting providing you some distance, some perspective on looking at it? As you said, it was four years after the accident, but it wasn’t four years after everything. You were still reliving some of the horror of all of this. How about the reporting? What kind of perspective did it allow you to have?

Rachel: Well, sometimes it was much more than four years because the entire process took me about 11 years. It took me a very long time to write it. I was a brand new writer, didn’t really know what I was doing, and I was raising two children. And I wish that I had had a notebook, I wish that I had kept a journal and written down all of the feelings that I had during that time, just to process, but I didn’t. And so I had to rely on my memory. I went to two people in the “the scenes” that I imagined, that I visualized in my memory, and I asked them directly, “Do you remember when we talked about this? Do you remember? Do you have any recollection of what the room looked like?” Because adding sensory details, I learned, is such an important part of writing. What we said, how you felt during that time.

And there were some wonderful, wonderful memories that people were able to share with me and the rest of it, of course, I had to re-imagine, which was a skill in of itself, as writing a scene based on truth, but of course not remembering every word that was said. I did look at some of the transcripts of depositions I had done in some of the lawsuits. And I did reach out to the lawyers and the doctors, but of course, with HIPAA, you cannot get medical information. So I needed to call doctor friends of mine and say, “In this kind of a situation, would this procedure have been done?” And so on.

Marion: That’s a great answer because I think people think either you were taking notes or you have an immaculate memory, and neither is true most of the time. So you went back and you did the reporting, and that’s just so helpful to people. I so appreciate the honesty there. And the way you portray yourself, I also really appreciate. In memoir, we’ve got to define ourselves in terms of this one story we’re telling, and it does you no good to give us your height, weight, body type, description. But one of the things you do nicely is swear, right there on the page. It’s great. We get to know you, it makes us trust you. You’re human. You report to us that the doctor who is asking you how you are knows that you’re just being perfunctory, when you say, “I’m okay,” and he knows, as you say, that that’s just horseshit.

I love that. And it’s very early in the book and it, and we have to trust you because you don’t stay in the marriage. And I thought that was a brilliant thing to seed into the beginning of the book. At what point were you comfortable writing the word “horseshit,” right? Writing who you are as you actually speak? And were you conscious of the fact that we had to trust you enormously for us to go through this book?

Rachel: I was not conscious of that fact. At the beginning, I learned to be conscious of it, through my writing classes. And learning that that is an important factor in when you’re creating your voice, when you’re in the throws of writing, to develop a voice. I didn’t even know about that before. I was an avid reader, but I didn’t know anything about voice, which is interesting because I’m a singer. So it was very interesting because I’m always telling my singers, “Don’t copy the recording. Don’t copy Barbara Streisand, or Frank Sinatra, or whoever. You’ve got to sing it your way.” And there you go, kind of a universal truth. As far as really being direct with the language, one of the first writing classes I took, she brought up the work of Natalie Goldberg, in Writing Down the Bones.

And the advice was just write, just let it out. Don’t stop, don’t judge, don’t edit. Just write, write, write, write, write. And when I was doing that, that’s what came out because I try to use my swear words judiciously, so they have a greater impact in my own personal, unlike some young people these days. I try not to overuse them. And I just, that’s how I think. So I wrote how I think.

Marion: That’s good. And it helps because we do have to trust you. It’s very, very, very important. And I’m fascinated by the opening scene, and we do trust you right from the beginning. The one you settle on is dramatic and I’m not going to give it away because I want people to go by book and read it. But the opening scene has nothing to do with a plane crash or caregiving, instead gets at the central theme of the book, because this book is not about the plane crash. It’s about what? Let us into how you chose the opening scene, and when and how that clarified for you what this book is really about.

Rachel: So I have a great editor. That was not my original choice for opening scene, it was somewhere deep in the middle of the book. In the process of looking at the arc and understanding that hook is very important, and something dramatic. For example, when Cheryl Strayed’s boot falls down the cliff in Wild, that’s the very first thing that happens. And yet it actually in time, it happens in the middle of her story, or maybe even closer to the end. But it is such a pivotal moment because it represented for her the ludicrousness of what she was doing, in taking that hike. And so in my opening scene, I hope it’s a symbol, it’s a metaphor, for my being unwilling and/or unable to make the choice to remain my husband’s full-time caregiver, to stay in the marriage, to take on that role that had been thrust upon me.

Marion: Yeah, yeah. It just brings us full focus into what we think, “Oh my goodness, what’s this going to be about?” I loved that. So you chose to write this book in vignette, small, powerful scenes, separated within each chapter by dotted lines. And the result is the feeling that you have a deck of cards in your hand, and you’re laying them out on a table in front of us, one at a time, kind of like a tarot reading. I found it very effective and utterly lacking in the interstitial. You didn’t give us the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, version of the story, thank goodness. You gave it to us in these card-like, slapping them down on the table. And this connects one piece to the other, and we cannot look away because we might miss something. Really good decision. Can you talk about how you made that decision to present the material the way you did?

Rachel: Oh, if you could see my smile right now because I didn’t make that. I never made that decision. I’m just grinning from ear to ear because it’s just so it’s so interesting that you look at it that way. Not being a skilled writer, I didn’t think, “Oh, this is going to be my structure.” The way that I started is, referring back to what we were discussing earlier, I remembered scenes that were important. The scene with the social worker, the scene where the doctor tells me what the prognosis is, and so on. And I wrote down the scenes, I just wrote them down, on an 8.5″ by 11″ sheet of paper, because that’s how I still work most of the time, I want to do the scene with the doctor, I want to do the scene where I decided that my kids needed therapy.

There were things, pivotal moments, that were playing like a movie in my mind. And then the challenge was how do I connect them? How do I make it more of a narrative? I’m glad to hear that it worked because I thought, “Oh, maybe my transitions aren’t very good.” And I think that the scene writing was the easiest part for me. The hardest part was the transitions, the marrying them together and knitting them together to make a more cohesive narrative. And I’m glad to hear that it worked the way it did because there were times when I just didn’t know. I’m going to confess. I didn’t know. I didn’t think the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday thing was important, that we did this, and then we went here, and then we did this. It was only important if it moved the story along.

Marion: There you go. It’s only important if it moves the story along.

Rachel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marion: Yeah, no, absolutely.

Rachel: Yeah.

Marion: And I think it really worked well. You have a couple of other devices that you use. You have this very amusing device that you use throughout, which is to show us your expertise on the two very important topics, medicine and law, that come into play in the accident, and the attendant lawsuits via pop culture. Specifically, the television shows that you watch. You say, “I watched a lot of “ER” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” and so I know what he’s coding means.” And later on, when we get to the part where there’s a trial, you talk about watching “Ally McBeal.” And I just, I really have to say, I loved you for it. I thought it’s a rare person that admits that my knowledge begins and ends here, and I’m proud of it. So I felt also in that, that it was very endearing. And I wondered, if you were uncomfortable at first, or comfortable right from the start, because you knew the characterization of you, again, was so important, that one was really charming. How did you come up with that kind of admission?

Rachel: Well, my goal was again, to be honest, and that did occur to me that when I was in the hospital, I think it was a means of coping, is that I remember sitting in the waiting room thinking of the ICU, and when he was coding, and thinking does these images of ER flashing through my head? And so when I was remembering, when I was re-imagining that scene, I just, it popped up and I wanted humor. See, I never meant for it to be, “I don’t have any knowledge about medicine or law.” What I really wanted to say was it was kind of poking fun at myself in that, “Aren’t I amazing? I have this knowledge that came from television.” So it was really being a little bit self-deprecating, which I’ve been told from.

Marion: Works.

Rachel: Yeah, I’ve been told works, and they’re all true. I did watch those shows and I think there’s a part of us that thinks we have some kind of knowledge and we’re somehow informed when we really aren’t.

Marion: Well, I think we are in terms of a little bit, and that’s what you were saying. And I think again, when I try to teach people how to do self characterization, it’s complicated. They always want to give me their eye color, their height, their weight, what college they went to, their father’s salary, whatever. And none of that mostly relates to the story at hand. And this is a great little piece of characterization. The other device that I found really endearing and charming, and also very curious, is your child, both of your children. Your daughter’s school journal entries, which really give us this sort of flyover of the level of stress in the house, and your son, who slips notes and letters under your door and puts them places.

A lot of people come to me with that kind of material, “I’ve got my daughter’s journal or I’ve got my son’s emails that he sent me,” and you’ve got to curate them. You’ve got to really only pull from them what we need to know. It’s too easy to defer and let somebody else tell the story. You’re like, “Well, just read this, you’ll get it.” No, no, no. So curating other people’s material, especially your children, really begins with permission. So getting permission from your kids, did they understand? I mean, I saw in the acknowledgements, you thanked them, and as you should. But just talk a little bit about asking them for that material or did they offer that material? How did that go?

Rachel: Well, it was a little bit like the swearing. I put it in not knowing if I was going to use it because it was so heart-wrenching, and it gave me chills. When I went, I remembered that they had these school journals and there were various things that I had kept from them, various pieces of art and drawings. And I went back and looked at them and just, I thought this is, a picture’s worth a thousand words. I don’t know, in this case, it was these words are worth so much more than any words that I could put into their mouths. They wrote these as 6, 7, 8, 9, 10-year-olds, and it really showed their state of mind during that time, so much more than I could.

So I did not ask their permission then, I asked it later. And luckily, they gave it to me. My daughter still has not read the book. She is a very sensitive, very emotional person, and understands that she just doesn’t have the capacity yet. And she’s 24. Now, my son has read it and they’re both very proud of me. But I have to be honest, I did not ask their permission at the time because they were too young, when I read that section. I just didn’t think that they were going to be able to understand the ramifications of those words being published and in print. And so I’m just so grateful that they gave me their permission.

Marion: It’s clearly a good example of not waiting to write. I say to people frequently, “Just write it, let’s see what you’ve got.” And then we can go and we can show it to just the people who need to see it, tell the people who need to know this is coming out that it’s coming out. But people have so many reasons not to write. And this book, well, I don’t know, I can’t think of one recently that I’ve read that has more obstacles to its writing. And I think that it’s better to just get it down, don’t share it with anybody or share it with a small group of dedicated people who are committed to your confidentiality, and then you can go and ask the permission. Let’s see what you’ve got first. And I felt that also very strongly reading one of the scenes in the book when it comes to reporting the absolutely hardest topic of all, which I think is shame.

You do this very direct thing that you’ve got down on the page, in basically two pages, which I found really fascinating. And it’s not about your kids, so this is a bit of a jog off of that topic. But I really admired the fact that you are coming right to the, it’s called coming to a head, you show us the moment where you admit to a therapist, not only do you not want to care for your husband, but you don’t think you can. And that you do not love him anymore, and that you are recognizing your own limitations. It’s all done in two explosive pages. It all is set in a therapist’s office. It’s tight, it’s true, it’s intimate. But it is you telling us this core truth. And I think done as it is in the therapist’s office was a really smart idea, that we know that you were protected as you came into this.

But it also must have been another one of those scenes that could have prevented you from ever writing this book. So can you talk about just giving yourself the permission to get that? I mean, your kids gave their permission for their work, but how did you give yourself the permission to just take the tourniquet off and bleed, all over those two pages?

Rachel: I could hardly breathe, I was crying so hard through that whole session with the therapist. And when the gut is just spilling out of you, the kishkes, I like to say, are just, are so raw, that’s when the truth is present. And that’s what the whole book is about, is my uncomfortableness, and by my terror, actually, to go further with it, in admitting that this is my truth and that I have to go there, or I will not be able to care for my children, care for myself. It would have been a life of, I would dread the rest of my life. And that, in turn, would have effected everyone around me, especially my children and my husband. So there was never a question in my mind that I had to go there. I had to go to that place of rawness, of exposure. And it was, you asked me before about the reporting, I didn’t write notes, but I did go to a lot of therapy and that’s where I was able to process all of this. And so I was able to recreate that scene.

Marion: Well, we’re very glad you did Rachel. And I thank you for the book. I thank you for the effort, and I thank you here for the instruction, because I know that so many people listening to this have so many reasons not to write, and I think you just gently, and kindly, and very generously, took on most of them. So thank you, I so appreciate you coming along today, Rachel. Thank you so much.

Rachel: Well, thank you so much. Everyone has a story to tell and I want to encourage everyone out there, tell your story.

Marion Roach Smith: The author is Rachel Michelberg, whose new book Crash: How I Became a Reluctant Caregiver, is just out from She Writes Press. See more on her at rachel michelberg author dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith and you are listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont, our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com and take a class with me on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to Qwerty and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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