How to Write a Family Memoir, with Laura Davis

LAURA DAVIS IS THE  author of six nonfiction books including The Courage to Heal for women survivors of child sexual abuse, The Courage to Heal Workbook, Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, and I Thought We’d Never Speak Again: The Road From Estrangement to Reconciliation. Her books are groundbreaking, and we’ll say a lot more about that in a few minutes, but here’s a fine piece of data. Her work has been translated into 11 languages and has sold more than 1.8 million copies. In her career she’s been a columnist, a talk show host, a radio news reporter. She’s a well-known and highly- regarded and beloved writing teacher. She has out a brand new book, thank goodness, just out from Girl Friday Books. The title is The Burning Light of Two Stars. It’s billed as a mother-daughter story. It’s a memoir, and I can tell you it’s as good as it gets. Listen in and read along as we talk about partial reconciliation with family, and how to write a family memoir.

Marion: Welcome, Laura.

Laura: Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Marion: Me, too. I’ve been looking forward to this since you reached out to me and I have a million questions, so we’ll get right into it. In 1988, you and the remarkable writer, Ellen Bass published a book called The Courage to Heal through which you helped everyone with the conversation about recovery from childhood sexual abuse. It’s a masterpiece that weaves together professional knowledge with personal experience. In your family the incest was committed by your grandfather, which had many lifelong repercussions, including, but not limited to extending an already big rift with your mom. So I want to just set this new book up. You and your mom lived together… Lived apart, sorry, for many years, and then eventually kind of reconciled. Then your mother needs long term care and she comes to you. In this new book, The Burning Light of Two Stars, you deal with the micro and the macro.

You ask questions like what makes a beautiful life, a meaningful life? And how we honor the wishes of those whose care is in our hands. So chicken and egg this for me, when you’re writing about family and you also have these big questions, did you make a list of the big life questions you hoped to take on in this book? Or did they occur to you as you were living this, thinking it through or writing? This alone, the big to the small throws so many beginning memoir writers, so help them out, especially how you organize your thoughts, particularly during a very high stakes time of life.

Laura: I think I was certainly thinking about these issues as I was living through them with my mother. I mean she was 80 years old. She was living on the east coast. I had moved 3000 miles away from her on purpose when I was a young adult. I had made my life in California, she was in New Jersey and the reconciliation that we did achieve, which was, I would say partial, I think was possible because of the buffer of that 3000 miles of distance. And then she called and said she was moving to my town for the rest of her life. And so that phone call is the inciting incident until her death. And during those years she was in California I was deeply thinking about these issues. I had to get myself back into therapy. Having her near me and losing the buffer between us and then having her have dementia and watching her decline and the stages of her decline brought up all her most awful qualities that had been so difficult for me when I was young.

So I was triggered all the time. So I was certainly thinking about it. And I think the biggest question for me that I was dealing with is, can I take care of this woman who betrayed me so deeply in the past? I think that’s a question that millions of people face and it doesn’t have to be as severe a betrayal as the one that I experienced. Even smaller betrayals… Caregiving is hard enough and when you are facing a deeply unresolved issue with someone, it just makes it so much harder. So I was thinking about it ahead of time in writing the book, I struggled for years about what was the focal point going to be? I always knew it was a mother daughter story. I mean, I always knew that we were the two characters that this story would pivot around, but what should be in the foreground? What should be in the background? It was incredibly difficult to make those decisions.

Marion: Sure, of course it was. And you just mentioned in the beginning of your answer, this idea of partial reconciliation and this book does run the timeline from estrangement to partial reconciliation, not everything is reconciled. And I think this is another real pothole for writers. I hear this all the time in my work as a memoir coach and memoir editor and you must hear it too. “What if there’s a lot left unresolved?” A writer will say. “What if I can’t tie this all up with a bow, what if it doesn’t have a happy ending?” So what kind of advice do you have when you’re writing about family? Of course it doesn’t have an end stop. And how do you make the choice about how and when a piece of memoir is done?

Laura: That’s such a good question. When the final scene in this book happened, I knew that was the end of the book. I mean, there was no way it couldn’t be, it was so dramatic. And I knew that it was going to end with her death. I mean, certainly my relationship with her has continued. She’s been dead for seven years and I’m still sorting it out. And if I was to write the memoir now I would write a different book than the one I finished a few years ago. How to know when it’s done, I think there’s like… We learn so many lessons in life and I just was following the trajectory of several of those lessons to their completion, or as much complete as it could be.

There’s an epigraph I used in the book that I think about all the time, it’s the writer Deborah Fruchey, and she said, “Every time I look in the rear view mirror, the past has changed.” So I couldn’t have written it before, I didn’t have the maturity, I didn’t have the compassion for my mother. I would’ve written a villain hero story, which I didn’t want to do. So I think I needed the maturity to write it and to create two visceral, damaged people striving to love each other so they would be real characters. For me, it was a lot of trial and error. I did not know where this book was going, I just started writing it and that’s probably why it took me 10 years.

Marion: The Deborah Fruchey quote is so wonderful. And it’s with great generosity that you take on the reality of the past seen again and again, as we move further from it, I loved that end note in the book, the idea that we continue to take it with us, but we continue to see it through a different lens. So let’s talk about that lens through which we see things. You say this book took 10 years to write so-

Laura: Yes.

Marion: Give me example of the change of lens you encountered.

Laura: Well, it’s kind of funny actually. I first wrote it as a play. My mother was an actor and I had this idea that it should be on the stage. And so I wrote a whole draft of a play and I took it to a friend who was a director and she read it and she said, “This is not a play.” She said, “This has no dramatic material.” She said, “You don’t know anything about writing a play.” So that was like probably a year and a half. Then I wrote it as an epistolary memoir. As you read the book there’s these letters, this correspondence between my mother and I plays a role in the book and I had this amazing cache of letters, all the letters she had ever written. After she died, I found all the letters she had ever written to me first drafts of the letters she didn’t send, every letter I’d ever written to her and I had kept all the same.

And it ended up being like two feet thick of correspondence and the letter were amazing. I mean I’m a writer and she was actually quite a good writer. And this was way before email and they were touching, they were poignant, they challenged me because they made me realize that the story I had been telling for so many years and repeating for so many years was only part of the truth. And that I had been really wedded to how terrible things were. I would say things like, “We didn’t speak for seven years.” And then I found these letters. We had been corresponding the whole time. So I had to face this habitual story I had been telling, writing, sharing, reinforcing that didn’t tell the whole story.

Marion: This idea of letters comes up again I know. First, just to recap for people under the topic of memoir having consequences, you write very openly about being uninvited, disowned by your own family, after your first book, in which you reveal this family incest. And with every class I teach and every one-on-one I have with a writer, the question comes up of what will my family think? And it’s possible you’re the world’s expert on this. So early in the book you tell us about this being uninvited from this family social circle and so think about the listeners out there who are writing with this great question of what’s my uncle, grandfather, or whomever going to think if I write this.

And then tell us what you told me before we went live, that you wrote a letter to your family before the publication of this book. So maybe you’ve got it on you. You could quote a little bit from it. I just think that is an extraordinary action. And I want people to understand your intent there in telling them that this book is coming out. Could you read us a little, little bit from that letter?

Laura: Yeah, I think the thing I have to say first is that my perspective on this question has evolved over 35 years. I mean, I started writing it 35 years ago. So I was young, I was 28 years old, the book came out when I was 31. I was like a baby. And my attitude then was I have truth on my side, they’re in denial, screw them. And it was very black and white for me. And now all these years later, it’s more complicated for me. I see things from a much more complex lens. And the people who are in this book, well, my mother is dead so I didn’t need her permission, although she gave it as much as she was capable with dementia.

But the people in my book, my brother, my spouse, my three children, they all gave me permission from the beginning. I mean, I have had the experience of screwing up my relationships with my children in particular by writing about them. And I will never do that again without their permission, because I value my relationship with them far more than something I’m going to publish. So these are not people who’ve wronged me. These are people I love. So they participated, they were enthusiastic, they were encouraging. I didn’t share any of the book with them til very close to the end, but they became beta readers for me. And they gave me amazing feedback. And they also remembered things that I couldn’t remember because they’re young and their brains are pliable and smart and mine is old and tired and I’ve had cancer. And I mean my memory is really poor for a memoirist.

So with them, I had their permission, but the people I was concerned about that were sitting on my shoulder for all the years I was writing this, giving myself this protective bubble that’s said, “You’re just writing this because you need to tell the story. You don’t have to publish it.” I needed to really believe that for many years, because I had actually reconciled with the people who had rejected me after my first book and it had taken 20 years. I didn’t want to lose them again. And these are not people that I am intimate with, it’s not like my immediate family. This is my extended family and my mother’s whole generation has died off so we’re really talking about cousins of mine. And we all shared that same grandfather who had abused me.

Marion: Right. So what did you say in this letter?

Laura: Okay, so this is what I said, this is a quote from it. I said, “I realize my decision to revisit this story publicly may be difficult for some of you, bringing back feelings we’ve put to rest for several decades now. This is not a choice I made lightly. I deeply value the healing we’ve been able to achieve in recent decades and the family connection we have enjoyed and shared. I respect and love you and I’m sorry some of you may be hurt by my choices. The last time I wrote about my grandfather, it took some of us more than a decade to find our way back to each other. I truly hope that’s not the case this time. We don’t have that much time and I don’t want to lose you. While I may not make choices regarding my writing that you would prefer, please know that I struggle with these decisions and try to balance my genuine love and respect for my family with my own identity as a storyteller and writer.”

Marion: So generous, so informed, so helpful to others. And I want to move from that to the question of what we’re asking people to do when we ask them to go and step back into a story, particularly a story of trauma. Are we asking them to reanimate it? Are we asking them to just illustrate it? Are we asking them to relive it? How do you define this process? What is the obligation of the writer? What are they actually… Do you have a word for it when you go back and look?

Laura: I think of excavation, is the term that comes to mind. This came up in a class I just taught this morning. And there was a woman writing about a really traumatic experience where her parents committed her to some… I don’t even know what’s going to happen, but I think to an asylum or when she was a young girl and she was writing that scene, it was one of the most compelling things I’ve ever heard. And after she read it, she just said, “I’m falling apart writing this.” And we talked a lot about her resources, her inner and outer resources and what grounds her. And I gave her some suggestions of writing prompts she could use after she works on this scene. Something like the ground beneath my feet, or what gives me strength, or a time I showed courage so that she could use writing not just to unpack and excavate, but also to ground herself.

My own experience is to write those really, really tough scenes, I have had to go back into them. If I try to write it from a distance, they don’t have that compelling grit that makes the reader feel it. And I also think there’s times when we don’t have the strength to do it. And I’ve recommended for some people to just set it aside because they don’t have of the resources, they don’t have the support internally or externally, and they’re not able to enter that space and come out of it and go back into their contemporary life.

And I think there’s a lot of tricks that people can use, creating a ritual to get into it, setting a timer so that you go in for like an hour and then you’re going to come out and you’re going to go walking because for you walking grounds, you. There’s just a lot of things people can do. But I think it’s a very difficult process. And I haven’t found a way to write that kind of material without feeling it again. And I think what I’ve had to remember is that I’m just remembering it, it’s not actually happening now.

Marion: Yeah.

Laura: It feels like it sometimes.

Marion: And as you’re… Yeah, it does feel like it sometimes, of course it does. And you use the word excavation and you’ve got this idea of feeling it. And what we’re then doing is we’re choosing amid the detail of our lives, of our stories, we’re curating. And I sometimes explain this to writers as imagine yourself standing on the shore of a calm lake. You pick up a flat stone, you skim it across the top of the water, because we don’t want the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, version of your life. We want you to hit down here, here, here, here and there on this subject of betrayal or on the subject of reconciliation, we don’t want every day. And so it’s hard because people don’t think in jump cuts the way we see it in the movie.

You see the guy in bed, he opens his eyes, and the next thing we see one second later is he’s in his office. I don’t need to see him brush his teeth, change out of his pajamas. But it’s hard when it’s your life. So you have an extraordinary eye. There are scenes here where I said to my self, “I feel like I’m sitting on her shoulder and I am seeing this with her.” And there was no distance in some particularly breathtaking scenes. And I don’t want to give away my favorite scene because I want everyone listening to this to buy the book so they can get to the end like I did and go, “Oh my God, that’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever read.” Honestly, that’s what I said out loud. So with that in mind, choosing the details, give us some guidance on choosing which details, especially in this hot button story that lives in every family.

Laura: My technique is to write it all down. So I have the messy first draft and I think I had like 140,000 words, which was way too much. And then the first draft, just everything comes out, every detail, I’m just trying to get into the sensory experience and pouring it out on the page. And then I start when I’m editing it’s a whole different process then I’m looking for what is the detail that best describes the emotional experience here? I was telling students this morning that I love working with objects. I think objects are incredibly powerful in writing. And one of the objects… I worked with a coach and he had me make a list of the positive connections with my mother, which I thought, oh, well, there weren’t very many.

And I ended up with a list of 30 things and they were really simple things like my mother and I loved to play cards together. We both loved Streetcar Named Desire. We loved to cook certain things together. I knew that she was a closet smoker so some of them were like secrets between us and the cards were the one thing that I used. And it was a very… They appeared in the book. And then when I was layering in more of the final versions, I made sure that we were playing cards when I was a little girl and at the end of her life and at all these different points in between. And it might just be like a few sentences. Like as I dealt out the third hand of 500 Rummy, I said… And those cards become very significant because it shows, it’s an intimate connection in a very troubled relationship.

It’s the one time we sit down and just relax together and I still feel that way when I play cards. But then at the end of the book, as her dementia develops, I use the cards to demonstrate her decline. So I’m not saying she declined, I’m showing that suddenly she’s not protecting her cards from me, she doesn’t have the concept of holding your cards and not showing it to someone else. And it’s such a perfect symbolic detail. And there’s one line where I just say, “I’d stop keeping score long ago.” So it’s all around this deck of cards. So that was a really conscious choice and I think as you go deeper into a story, you have to get rid of all the other extraneous details. I think a lot of writing teachers or a lot of beginner writers think, well, I just need a lot of details, but actually you need details that are slanted into the emotions of the scene.

Marion: Absolutely. I frequently tell people that if you take a legal pad sized sheet of paper and divide it vertically and on the left side, put the action and on the right side, put the emotional content. The left side is the what you did, the right side is what you did with it. You can understand that we don’t need 12 scenes that do the same thing for us emotionally. So by choosing that card device, we are able to watch her go in this familiar milieu of this card game that you have, this common thing you have and losing that is as important as losing communication. It’s a stage of grief, it’s beautifully done. You have another device that I really like and device is a word sometimes that throws people when I say it, I don’t know, maybe it’s to define it as quirky personal touches or something, I don’t know.

But you must see as many devices as I do in your writing teaching. Some people love to use lists. Some people like to… Well, the cards make a nice device, but you’ve got this great device in the subtitles of each chapter. You use numbers and you count, and it’s very specific to the story. So can you just explain that? So kind of giving people permission to think up a device or whatever you call it and how you made the at decision and how you utilized it through the book.

Laura: I was really challenged because there’s kind of the main storyline is from my mother’s… She’s 80 till her death. So that’s kind of the main story, but there also was a lot of… I had more than your typical amount of backstory because in order for the reader to understand the depth of the enmity between these two women, you had to know what had happened in the past. So there were all these scenes from the past and they weren’t just little flashbacks, they were full on scenes. And then I also had a third element, which was in the future and it was through the discovery of these letters after her death. And that’s much more of these kind of reflective moments where I’m really looking truthfully at the truth of this relationship and how I’ve lied to myself about it for decades.

So it was very hard to figure out how to juggle all those things. And the first readers I had, I always ask the beta readers, would you have kept reading this if you hadn’t promised? And at first they all said, no, like it just was too confusing. It was just like there was too much going on. And it was like they just couldn’t figure out what was up. So I struggled and struggled and struggled with how to weave these threads together. And the idea for the countdown, which it’s a countdown to my mother’s death. And the countdown begins the day she calls me and says she’s coming to California. And it’s like some thousand days, I don’t remember what the numbers… 2,179 days and while people listening to this podcast will now know, but most readers, these numbers show up and it’s like, what’s that? And over-

Marion: What’s that?

Laura: And over time it starts… You suddenly go like, “Oh my God, this is counting down to her death,” but you might not realize that till you’re a third of the way through the book or something. So that helped me identify, those were the… That’s that through line. And every time you see that device, you know that it’s a story about her decline. And then the other ones that jump all over time, I used her name, my name, and our ages and the location. But I experimented with a lot of things and it gave me so much trouble. That was probably the hardest thing for me. And the idea of the countdown came from my coach, Joshua Townshend, who was such an interesting choice of someone to work with, because I worked with several editors and Joshua is a theater director and an actor. And he’s not an editor at all. He never read my book, but he understood storytelling in the most profound way. And if this is a really compelling story, I really am incredibly grateful to him for what he taught me.

Marion: Oh, I love that. Thank you for telling us that. That’s great, the outside, who do you bring in? And it was a rueful laugh before. I want you to know that when you said that everyone said, “No, no, I wouldn’t have read it if I had known that.” The reality of our lives is that a lot. Which leads to me to the whole concept of support. You tell us in this book that some years ago you were at the height of your success, four books in, close to 2 million sold, when you made a huge decision to stop. You write that your story was quote no longer raw, vulnerable or alive. The story from the first, the story of the incest and that fascinated me. I had a very similar experience. I was very young, I was in my twenties when I published a book that introduced this subject of Alzheimer’s disease to people, no one had written about it before.

And at one point years later, I had been on the road for years talking about Alzheimer’s. I realized that the story and I had parted ways and I didn’t want to embody it anymore. And I can’t think of anyone else I can talk about this with. So I want to talk about this. This is a real experience when what we most want to write about, to view to the conversation on, to publish on brings us a certain success, but then becomes something else and it’s not cutesy. See, it’s not like, “Oh, I got so tired of being on the Today Show, I just can’t tell you.” It’s not that. I think in terms of the stages of the stories we carry with us, first we recognize that we might have one, then maybe we labor under it. Then maybe we get some purchase on it and we say, “I want to share this.”

Then the writing begins. And with all that astonishing illumination that comes about ourselves and others, but it’s a tricky traveling companion, our stories. And when you’re on the Today Show or whatever our common currency of success is, it’s hard to get the support for how wearing your own story can be. So tell us a little bit, please. What kind of support did you have? Your family has disowned you, but during your heyday of those fine books, what kind of support did you have and what kind of support did you need to turn away to something else?

Laura: Well I co-authored The Courage to Heal with Ellen Bass, who we have been dear friends now for over 40 years. So I had her support with… And she wanted to return to poetry. So I think we both had a similar experience of wanting to return to something else. And for me it was, she’s not an incest survivor and I am so for me it was the way I describe it and this came from someone I actually interviewed for The Courage to Heal was that it felt like a sweater that had become too small and it started to chafe. Because I wasn’t talking about… You were talking about a subject that wasn’t you, but this was my life. I was telling my story on stages all over the country and women would come on buses to hear me speak.

And then everywhere I went, this is what people wanted to talk to me about. I mean, at the height of the success of The Courage to Heal or the popularity of that book, I would go to the movies. I would go into a bathroom stall and someone would be waiting for me outside of the bathroom stall because they wanted to tell me their incest story. And I felt incredible empathy. I cared for every person that was touched by that book, but it became overwhelming for me. And I also, I did enough healing that I didn’t want to be identified with this anymore. I wanted to find out who am I without this being the cause? Not that everything is a result of the fact that I had this trauma in my childhood, who can I become now? And I didn’t feel like I could do that if I was traveling around the country, talking about incest.

I think one of the things that really supported me is I had really good friends and my friends really didn’t care that I was famous in this weird kind of narrow way. They just cared about all the other parts of my life. So I had… I mean, I’m not a super famous person by any means, but when I hear people who are really, really famous, they say that they really rely on the people they knew before. And I’ve been with Karen, my spouse for over 30 years and I would come home and it would be like, do the dishes, put your hands in the sink and do the dishes-

Marion: The great equalizer.

Laura: We had children and it was like, “Okay, I’ve been taking care of the kids for two weeks while you’re on the road, you’re on.” So I think I had a family that really helped, I had children, I had a lot of ordinary things in my life and I really wanted those things. I wanted to have a normal life because for some of the early years, when I was dealing with the sexual abuse, I believed I was too damaged to have those things. And I had healed enough that I did have those things and I really wanted to enjoy them, but it was hard to walk away from that success. And my publisher, they just wanted more and more books on the same subject.

And I have watched some of my peers who had kind of a similar trajectory and they are still writing about the same topic decades later. And I just didn’t want to do that. And it was like jumping off a cliff because I was successful doing it. And I didn’t have a plan of what I was going to do next, but I felt like there was more in me that I wanted to discover. And I just, I didn’t want to be associated with this worst thing that had ever happened to me anymore. I wanted it to be in the background of my life. I didn’t want it to be in the foreground anymore.

Marion: Good. That’s lovely. I relate to that and I think that’s very helpful. I think we grow out of some of our stories and I think you’ve also made a very strong point that nobody should do this alone and that the ordinary, the dishes, the kids, are actually really, really helpful in times of writing about the tough stuff. So as we wrap this up, I want to point out that your publisher is Girl Friday Books, a hybrid publisher, and I’m fascinated by them. I’ve read everything, I’ve read through their whole website and I’ll put the link here. And you’ve been a big mega bestselling author and you know about publishing. So talk to me about your decision this time to go with a hybrid, why you did that and what the experience was like. Maybe also just to bring people up to date on what a hybrid publisher is, but I would love you to talk about this publishing experience, because they did a gorgeous job and I suspect you had a good time with them. So can you talk about that a little bit?

Laura: A hybrid publisher basically is you have someone who does a lot of the publication pieces of the book, like creating the cover, making sure it’s distributed in stores. I really wanted a physical book, I didn’t just want a digital book. They do all the stuff a publisher would do, but you pay for it. You pay for every single bit of it. That’s how it works and for that, you have a lot more control. I was very much a part of creating this cover, the first few iterations of the cover horrified me. And if you’re with a traditional publisher, you may just have to eat it on that.

Marion: Oh yeah.

Laura: There was a lot of back and forth. I mean, it’s not over yet. The book is so brand new, but I really liked having much more control over the process and basically they were working for me. And also I think that in the future of the book, I have so much more control over it than I would if it was another publish… They can’t just like take it out of print. I mean, I make all these decisions. So I think it’s a risky choice, but it’s also a choice that can be very empowering. I think that’s what I would say.

Marion: Yeah, yeah. And I love that and I think that’s exactly it. It’s not self-publishing, it’s not what we think of as the Big Five. It is literally a hybrid, but they work for you and that is a perfect way to describe it. Thank you. And thank you, Laura. This has been a wonderful conversation and I’m delighted it to get to know you a little bit. I wish you every happiness, success, and fulfillment with this book. I think it’s… Well, I think it’s perfect. So thank you.

Laura: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you. I hope we get to do it in person someday.

Marion: I hope so too. The writer is Laura Davis, author of the new book, The Burning Light of Two Stars, just out from Girl Friday books. See more on her at Laura Davis dot net. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Overit Studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit Marion Roach dot com where I offer online classes 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.