Writing About Your Past While Living in the Present with Lisa Lucca

AUTHOR LISA LUCCA IS the author of a new memoir that explores writing about your past while living in the present. Listen in and read along while we discuss that, and so much more.

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Marion: Welcome, Lisa.

Lisa: Well, thank you very much for having me, Marion. I’m very excited.

Marion: I’m excited too. We met online some time ago. I’ve been on your beautiful radio show. I love your memoir, Ashes to Ink, and I want to talk about this. So, let’s set this up for my listeners. They’re writers and if they struggle with anything, and being writers, they struggle with many things, it’s how to write about the past when living in the present. In your case, there was a global shift in our views of gender, sexuality, feminism, and far more, in the time between when in 1974, your father came out as gay, a declaration and reality, that you say shattered your family. And when, many years later, you sat down to write your memoir, Ashes to Ink. So, I want to really dig into how to write about the past from the present. Let’s start with a note that opens your beautiful book. In it you acknowledge that language used in your story “is representative of a time in history when hate speech toward LGBTQ+ wasn’t only tolerated, it was used on network television”. So that reality itself, might be enough to stop some writers. “How are you going to handle that?”, you say to yourself. Let us into the degree of difficulty you saw at the very outset of this. Because of just the way we once referred to the very people you love.

Lisa: Well that’s a great question to start with, thank you. For me because it was the 1970’s, I was in middle America, in the suburbs and my father was openly gay at a time when that was just not the norm. All the language around that was normalized and using what is considered slurs now was just the way it was. And it was very difficult as a girl in eighth grade to navigate anything having to do with sexuality. Even the word homosexual felt like a dirty word. And, when we’re in our sort of adolescent blooming years of trying to understand the world from a view that isn’t just through a filter that our parents has handed us, it was more important to me in writing the book to speak that language openly at the start of the story because that’s the truth of it. And to whitewash it or change it or somehow eliminate those words, because they’re intolerable now felt like it wasn’t fair to the times that I was living it.

Marion: Yeah, it’s a hard decision. I interview people all the time about race and if you write from here about then, whenever then was, we had… I’m not going to say we’re good yet in the category of race or in the category of language of LGBTQ+, but we’ve moved a little. And that it’s very daunting to think of using language which you find repellent now. And yet, I believe you did use historically accurate language, but it must have felt, it must felt like a bit of a challenge. So, what did you do to soothe yourself past that challenge?

Lisa: Well, a couple of things. First of all, I did what I think most writers really need to do, and that is just puke it out. Write the story. You write beautifully about the vomit draft in The Memoir Project and I really puke it out. That’s the first lesson, writer 101 is get the story on the page the way it happened, and don’t worry so much about what your family will think or what words might be wrong or. . .  Even if it’s fully your memory in that moment, just write, write, write, write. Write what you can remember because the memory sort of begets memory as you keep writing. So, in the case of the beginning of the story, and when I talk with friends and even with a counselor that I finally find on my own, I used the words that I heard on television with Archie Bunker talking about fags and using these words that were normalized.

And I felt very clear that I didn’t want to change that. And I did consult with a few people in the LGBTQ family organizations that I am a part of, and we had a really good conversation about how important it is. As I had beta readers throughout the writing of the book, there were a couple of people who were under 40 that really took exception to my use of that language. And I decided that it was worthwhile to use it as long as I was very clear on the very first page of the book, that this is not language I use now or that I condone it in any way.

Marion: It’s so good for you to explain exactly that, because there are so many reasons not to write. And as you go and you seek expertise and as you go and you sit with yourself and you go and you make decisions and you go and you make this beginning note in the book that precedes the prologue, you’re making decisions every minute as a writer. And I think this is how you get through, as you say, to the puke. And I love that. I love that. So I spent, and we were talking offline before we went live, and I said to you that I spent a lot of my time talking to writers and one of the questions I ask every writer I start working with is, “Who’s writing this book?” And 99% of the time they think that I’ve lost my mind because they say things like, “Well, me”. And I say, “Yeah, but which one of you?”

So, staying with this idea of writing from here about there, there’s a long time gap between the mess that becomes your family for a while and the decision to write the book. And while families possess different things at varying levels of wealth and status, the one thing we all possess equally is story. So, how did you release those stories from the anger or in the fear, the terror, because you were told to keep a secret and secret keeping inspires no small amount of terror. And how, instead, did you allow these stories to be something that you could look at more like playing cards in your hands than permanent scars that you could not revisit or change in any significant way?

Lisa: Well, primarily for me, and I used a lot of tools, I went back and I studied photographs of my family from that era and I listened to music from that time and I really put myself in the shoes of that girl at 13, at 16, at 23. I really went there. And that was difficult because I had to really reopen some wounds that had closed over. But, in the writing of it from a very deep place of seeking to understand it, the healing of those wounds was much deeper after the writing.

Marion: That’s so lovely because you argue in this book, in Ashes to Ink, that shimmering clarity can arise from grief and it’s a whopper of an argument and a promise. So, let’s take on that argument and show our writers how you came to it and built a book around it. But let’s lay the groundwork for those listening. I believe that all pieces of nonfiction are an argument, meaning not like a knockdown drag out fight, but that you are merely proving to us with your scenes how you learned what you know after what you’ve been through. This distinguishes memoir from autobiography, which in its purpose is to write a book that covers your life story. Memoir instead argues something. So how many stops along the way argument wise did you make and did you come up with before you really got this shimmering clarity can arise from grief argument?

Lisa: Well, first of all, I didn’t begin writing the actual story until after my father had passed. And that was a real choice all along in part because I knew that he would not agree with a lot of my recollection. And, I also knew that I needed to be on the other side of still trying to heal the relationship with him to write about it. So, that was the first part. And I didn’t really begin it until probably a year after he passed. So that grief wasn’t as acute when I began writing. And I did start with the prologue, which began as an essay that was part of it. And the other piece was that I felt like there was a conversation that I could have in my head with my father and we had a very complicated, challenging relationship that was safer after he was gone because in my grief, I really came to appreciate him in a very different way. In the reflection of who he had become in his last few years of life and how we had come to a very fragile piece in which we accepted one another in part by keeping things fairly light and on the surface. And that really did become okay with me.

Marion: It’s a lovely, remarkable reality. It’s not a concept, it is much more than a promise. It is a reality. And I find that to be very generous of. . . Thank you, that was very generous of you. And you mention in that answer, your prologue and prologues are very difficult to teach. As a writing teacher and as a coach, I see so many times writers tell me, “I spent six months writing my prologue, now I’m ready to write my book.”  And I say, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear you did that,” because you can spend months writing a draft and then struggle to fit the arc of the story to that predetermined outline. And I always argue against writing the prologue or the intro first and merely taking notes while you’re writing the first draft on that prologue, then writing the prologue and then editing the book to be about that.

Why? Because you learn about yourself while writing memoir. And in many ways you’ve touched on that in your answers and you learn a lot if you’re digging deeply. But your prologue, and I absolutely mean this, your prologue is perfect. It sets us up and that’s what a book set up is supposed to do for the plot, the impact of that plot and the signaling of your transcendence. And we come up for air after those, and I even did a word count, 875 words, we come up for air wondering how did she get to that transcendence? And that’s all you have to do to a reader because then you have them hooked. And I said to myself the first time I read it, and the second time I read it perfect, I said aloud. So, let’s talk about prologues. You don’t need to agree with my dictum of how and when to write one. I’d love to just know how and when you wrote yours and how is yours constructed and under what pressures? I mean, it is a whopper of an assignment. Everyone thinks, “Oh, I’ll just, I’ll tell them a whole plot of the story. It’ll be fine.” It’s like, “Don’t do that.” So talk to us about writing that beautiful prologue, please.

Lisa: Well, thank you very much for your kind words and the first draft of the prologue, which was somewhat different, although the first line was always the same. “I’ll take his brains and heart, I whispered to my sister”.

Marion: I loved that.

Lisa: When-

Marion: I’ll take his brains and heart, I whispered to my sister. Yeah, that works. Go ahead.

Lisa: I was actually at a writing retreat at Esalen in Big Sur, and it just sort of came out of a writing. Wasn’t even so much a prompt, but just a go off and write, looking over the ocean kind of moment. And I knew that I wanted to share the story from the moment of loss because I knew that the whole story coming from the very beginning, starting when I was young, that really didn’t feel right. I wanted to start from the place where he was already gone and I had already healed a bunch of things with him, so that the reader isn’t overwhelmed because the beginning of the story when I’m so young, it’s a lot. It’s a lot to go back and relive that. And I wasn’t even ready to write that part yet. So for me, the prologue began with my family in a funeral home and the concept of taking away what are his brains and heart to me and going home and decorating the box and kind of coming to the terms of my father’s personality and how as a decorating diva, there was no way he was going to be in this plain box for six months.

To me, just writing it was almost magical. I have to say it, it came out about 80% of what’s in the book now. And over the time of writing the entire book, it morphed a bit. I became a better writer and rewrote it a few times, but to be honest, it really came out almost fully formed.

Marion: That’s wonderful. And to be clear, we’re talking about the ashes, you’re talking about the theoretical brains and heart of your father-

Lisa: Yes, yes.

Marion: And you’re taking. . . Just in case anyone’s lying on the floor right now going, wait a minute, hold on a second.

Lisa: The metaphorical brains and heart. What his love and his intelligence brought to my life.

Marion: There you go. It’s a stunning place to place the opening of a book. It’s a perfect quote. It makes us deeply curious about you. It reassures us that there’s a connection, we find quickly into the story that this connection was really, as you say, shattered. And then we find that there’s this transcendence. And so in that, you’ve mentioned a couple of things that you did to do research. You listened to music for instance, and I want to ask you what other kinds of research you did. It’s research for me means calling my sister and asking her the name of the dog that bit me when I was a kid, but it’s also going through high school yearbooks. Or you listen to music, I love that. I get it totally. If you want to get your disco days back, just go to Apple Play and get that disco playlist. But what else did you do research-wise? I think a lot of memoirists think they don’t have to do research. And I say to them all the time, “Oh, no”. So, what did you do?

Lisa: Oh, absolutely need research. I looked back at different periods of time. For an example when we were in Oak Park, I went back and looked at maps of the neighborhood, how far did I actually walk to the Marshall Fields.

Marion: Yeah.

Lisa: Just trying to really put myself back in the place. As I mentioned, I used photographs quite a bit. I tacked them around my desk. And I did talk with my family, but that was a very challenging piece of it for me because my mother was not really keen on me writing this book because she was always very private and I wouldn’t say in denial, but she did not share it with anyone that my father was gay in her life beyond our family. So, it was a very difficult thing to try to ask her about certain memories and especially the ones that had to do with their marriage because it was a painful spot to touch.

And also they were very, very close friends until the day he died. So, there was a certain betrayal, even though he was gone, that made her feel like she had to maybe pick sides, which was true. It comes up a little bit in the book too about their relationship and my relationship to them as a unit and their friendship. And my sister was very protective of my mother. So talking with her became a little more contentious. And what’s really interesting though, and a lot of the book, the second sort of braided thread of the story has a lot to do with my sister and I. And that was written later. My initial instinct was to write the present day story along with the memories of my father and the meat of the story. And I was given the information early on from a teacher I was working with and she didn’t think that was a good vehicle for my story. And I was sorry later, because I wrote the whole thing and then later came back and said, “No, I really want this three-month period of time from the time he dies until the time I scatter his ashes”. And so, once my sister read the manuscript, which I handed her and said, “You can read it, but you can’t expect me to change it”.

Marion: Yeah. So let’s dig into that a little bit more because-

Lisa: I know I went a little off. I’m sorry.

Marion: No, no, no, that’s that’s perfect. Because when we speak about truth, we are always also speaking about conflict because I have a sister and we do not agree on anything having to do with our mother. And my sister and I finally, years ago, adopted a phrase, which is that we are different because we grew up in the same household, not in spite of it. And-

Lisa: Yes.

Marion: We can live with that. So let’s talk a little bit more about that conflict that can arise when publishing a family memoir. I have so many writers who are living in terror of doing this, and yet they’re writing. So, everyone in the family is going to have a very different version of the same tale. I think what you’re saying is we can agree on that.

Lisa: Yes.

Marion: Same tale, same people. Or, at least they have their own version. So, you’ve just gone over a little bit of what you told your family and when you told them and you gave your sister a conditional experience, you can read it, but I’m not changing it. So did you, along the way, while you were writing read back quotes or run sections by them or get permission for anything. Just give us a sense of that, during the process, before you have a finished manuscript that you gave your. . . Or a draft of a manuscript you gave your sister, did you in any other way allow their input?

Lisa: I did not. I submitted the prologue to a couple of contests and it won a prize. And so they read that and that was fairly benign enough that they were okay with that. And I really didn’t go there with them throughout because I knew that there would be a debate of sorts. And I felt like once you’re writing something as big and hefty as a manuscript, it sort of takes on its own life. And I felt like it had a better chance at a strong start if it was fully formed when anyone in my family read it. And I think I was right about that because if I had started out by sharing chapters or bits and pieces, I think that they would’ve given me more pushback and it would’ve stopped me in some ways, but instead I didn’t. And I really appreciated, my mom said it was very hard for her to read, but she was really proud of me for writing it. And my sister finally really saw me in a way that included the whole story. And we became so much closer, Marion. It’s really interesting because the one person who is most adamant about me being careful about what I said became such an ally, that we’ve actually done some press together in the LGBTQ world because she’s also gay.

Marion: That’s just wonderful. And I love the fact that story can do that. There’s no believing that at the beginning of a project, you’re haunted by “What’s my Aunt Iris going to say about this sex scene? Oh my God!” And I always say to people, “First of all, let’s write it. Let’s just see what you got and then don’t read it to Aunt Iris and get it out there.” And there are consequences for memoir. But, listen to what you just told us about the positive consequence you had. Clearly, I’ve had people yell, call me up and scream at me over the many years that I’ve written many nonfiction pieces in the New York Times, for my four books. And I always say, “I will listen to you. You can scream at me for as long as you want, but let me ask you first, is anything you read inaccurate? Because if it is, we can have that conversation.
But first, answer that question”. And 100% of the time, it’s been no. “Okay, then I need to let you know that legally I’m allowed to get off the phone right now, but I’m going to sit here and listen to your complaints, your request.” Who knows? You may even ask me to do something that I would be willing to do in the next edition of the book, change a word or two. And I did do that once because the person made a very good point that I was making a comment about her body shape, which actually had a very important role in this story. But it wasn’t necessary. I thought it was necessary. It turned out it really wasn’t necessary. So I changed one word and she was happy with that. But, I don’t believe, and I was trained not to read quotes back to people.

You can just check the accuracy. I want to make sure this happened on this date, this happened to this person. But I love what happened with you and your sister. And that’s very, very, very beautiful. So, I’m very glad to know that. So when I teach memoir, I talk about going from here to there. Going from here, when you did not know something or when you could not do something, in act one, to when you could. And then in act three to show us what life is like with that new material on you. So how would you describe your transcendence in a sentence or two from here to there, from what you were to what you became?

Lisa: Well, and some of this comes from the work that I have learned through your work because the X, Y, Z was always in the back of my mind.

Marion: The algorithm. Yes.

Lisa: The algorithm of, I always felt like the story truly is about a woman seeking love with a wounded heart. As illustrated by her complicated relationship with her father, that led to love and acceptance. And to me, that’s the arc of the story, the wound from my father of abandonment and what felt like rejection was just perpetrated over and over and over in many failed love affairs. And at the end of the day, it took me to realize my need to love myself and not to seek the love of a man externally, to find self-worth and value. And the transcendence of the protagonist in that regard is so much more universal than just other women with a gay dad. I think for me, I wanted to tell a story that was about a woman’s journey to self-love with a wounded heart.

Marion: And it comes across beautifully, not in the least because of your candor. So let’s talk about telling the truth or specifically writing the truth. Your father’s coming out results in many things, not the least of which was keeping his secret, which you are sworn to do. Which of course as secrets do, weighs on you in several ways. And you embark on a life of rebellious choices, as you just said, multiple, let’s say love affairs. But some of this was very rebellious. So if you hadn’t told us, we’d never know that you had this rebellious period. So, talk first about the choice of being honest. Is it a hard choice? Is it an easy choice? Is it the only choice for a writer? And you don’t tell us everything, obviously. I don’t know what brand of toothpaste you use, but that’s not exactly important to this story. What’s important is that this secret keeping propelled you to do things that you perhaps might not have done without the secret burning inside you.

Lisa: Certainly when I was a teenager, that was very true. I rebelled against the idea that we were all supposed to do the right thing because clearly if dad did something different and it was a secret, then it must be bad. And then maybe dad’s bad, but certainly the behavior is, and if dad can be bad, well then I can be bad.

Marion: Yeah.

Lisa: And, it wasn’t like I consciously woke up one day and decided all of that, but it was sort of in the ether. And I felt like I didn’t have to conform because I had someone who was a parent be so out of bounds. And again, at that time, there was not one person that I knew that had a gay parent, certainly not anyone that would say so out loud. You wouldn’t talk about sex at all in front of the children.

Marion: Nope.

Lisa: So the idea of our parents as people and having love and sexuality be on display when you’re an adolescent. . . and again, this is the 1970s. Today it’s much different, and I certainly raised my son differently as a result. And when I was dating, when he was a kid, I was much more open about who I was and what my life was because I had lived with those secrets. So in the sense of the rebellion, it had to do with not really caring about what they thought because I felt like I was betrayed so I can do whatever I want.

Marion: And it really lends enormous reliability to your story. I think that’s a conundrum that a lot of people face. They say, “Well, if I write about this rebellious behavior, then won’t the reader stop feeling like I’m reliable?” And I always say, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They’ll believe in your reliability more if they know that you’re telling them the truth.” And we don’t have to agree with your choices. We just have to know you’re telling us the truth. And so as we wrap this up, you’re absolutely the expert writer to whom to direct this last question, what exactly happens to secrets when we expose them to sunshine?

Lisa: What a great question. In some ways, when we expose them, they are rendered powerless. And when we carry them, they are much heavier and more toxic than maybe even the actual situation because of the shame that comes along with them. Or, just the idea of how wrong it must be for it to be a secret.

Marion: Yeah. That’s beautiful. I love that. Thank you, Lisa. That was just wonderful and so helpful and so generous for the writers listening in. Thank you so much.

Lisa: Well, thank you. I really appreciate it and I’m happy to have been able to share this with your listeners.

Marion: Well, I’m delighted. The writer is Lisa Lucca, her books are available on Amazon. See more on her and her coaching as well as her radio show at lisalucca dot com. 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 overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com where I offer online classes in how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.