How to Write a Braided Memoir with Robin Schepper

FOR MORE THAN, thirty years, Robin Schepper served at the highest levels of American politics and government. She has worked on four presidential campaigns and in the Clinton White House, was staff director for the Senate Democratic Technology and Communications Committee under Senator Tom Daschle and served in the Obama White as the first executive director of Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiative, Let’s Move! Join us today, as we discuss how to write a braided memoir from your life experiences.

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Marion: My guest is writer Robin Schepper. Robin worked for four presidential campaigns and in the Clinton White House with staff director for the Senate Democratic Technology and Communications Committee under Tom Daschle, and served in the Obama White House as the first executive director of Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiative, Let’s Move! Her memoir is just out from Girl Friday Productions. The book is called Finding My Way: A Memoir of Family, Identity, and Political Ambition. Welcome, Robin.

Robin: Thank you so much. Really happy to be here, Marion.

Marion: Well, it’s a joy to have you here. This book is what is known in writing instruction as a braided memoir, meaning there’s more than one big theme, and that those themes are braided together. You’ve got three mondo themes here, all of them mighty: family, identity, and political ambition. I guess my first question has to be, did you wrestle with that? Did you consider making it more than one book? I mean, everyone has major themes in their lives. Go back to the moment, if you would, where you began your thinking about writing this book and talk to the writers who are similarly trying to incorporate several large themes in their work. What advice do you have from them? Or start by how it went and then maybe give us some advice about that.

Robin: Yeah, sure. Thanks for that question, Marion. I started writing short stories. I was taking a creative writing class and I wrote a number of short stories. I didn’t know at the very beginning what the mondo themes would be. I knew it would be about my identity and my family. I wasn’t really quite sure about the political ambition, but what I did was I wrote short stories that I thought were interesting stories that I had told for years that my friends said, “Oh, you got to write that down.”

I literally had titles for each of them and I put each title post-it notes on a wall in my office and I started moving them around. As I did that, started figuring out what were the threads of how they came together. That’s pretty much how I came up with the storyline and going back and forth in time in my book as well. But I love post-its and visuals, so it really started with I didn’t know how to do a book from beginning to end just starting on page one. I thought if I wrote a bunch of short stories and then I kept changing the order or changing which chapters connected with others, kind of like puzzle pieces, and then having a story arc as I put the puzzle pieces together.

Marion: Oh, that is so much information and so helpful in one answer and I so appreciate it. I think people don’t think about the visual. I used to use index cards and a cork board years ago, so I completely get that. Just to follow up on the idea of a braided memoir, I would argue that even though it’s braided, that finding my way is about creating one’s own worth. There’s still this sort of overall magnificent story of finding, owning, and maintaining one’s own worth.

I’ll set this up a bit for people. There were major forces presented to you from birth that might push against somebody having any self-worth. They include, but they’re not limited to the fact that your mother gave birth to you without being married to your biological father. You refer to yourself as the church would have at the time as a bastard child. It’s not a phrase we use anymore, but it’s a condemnation, that’s for sure. There’s a fact that your maternal grandmother ran what were euphemistically called a massage business out of a tony Upper East Side Manhattan apartment. And then there’s a fact that, until quite recently, you did not know the identity of the man who is your biological father.

I’m not giving anything away when I say that at one magnificent point in your life, you had an office in the United States White House. There’s lots of success, but let’s zero in on this idea of worth. You kind of have to have it to write about it or at least recognize it, so I would say in the top three questions I get from the students I work on writing memoir. They always ask, “How do I write about something while I’m still going through it?” Self-worth is something that’s a continual work, so talk about that a little bit. This self-worth thing is really a beautiful theme in this book, but I suspect it was hard to kind of stop the clock and say, “I’m going to write right now from here.” When can you write about something that continues on lifelong, like self-worth?

Robin: Well, that’s a really interesting question. Nobody has asked me that. I love this question. I started writing, really, as a little kid. I kept a journal. I’m an only child and I think, for me, was often I was lonely and I was trying to make sense of what was happening around me, why my mother and grandmother were fighting all the time, why I didn’t have a dad. No matter what it was. Like so many people who don’t feel a sense of worth, I wanted to prove to the world that I was worthy. Even if you’re in that stage of trying to find your self-worth, I think there’s elements that you can write down.

One of the kindest, I want to say reviews, reactions to my book is a friend of mine read it early on to give me some comments and she said, “I can’t believe how much that you have embraced the voice of a 5-year-old, a 10-year old, a 15-year old.” And I really attribute it to writing journals starting at a really young age and really trying to think of how would a 10-year old talk, how would a 15-year old talk. I think along the way, if you can find any worth of what you’re doing… To answer the question of self-worth, for me, it was if I helped somebody. If the nuns were picking on somebody in class and I stood up to a nun, I felt like I was contributing to the world and protecting that person, or I adopted a stray dog. Those little pieces, just over time, made me realize that it was important for me to give voice to the voiceless and really stand up for them, because nobody else was going to do that. I think slowly I realize doing that had a role in the world and that I could play that role and that meant that I mattered.

Marion: That’s a lovely answer. I have to say that I noticed that theme of fighting for transparency, I would say, in your story for yourself, for your lineage, but also in the political realm in which you worked. Are you saying that that’s something you realized while you were writing, that there was this sort of story of transparency and how your early self-worth issues then compounded to become this political activist? Or did you realize that while you were writing it or is it something that you realized while you were growing up and taking notes, that you wanted things to be out in the open the way you do?

Robin: I think I realized that as I grew and got older. When I was younger, my mother wouldn’t let me talk about who my biological father was. She told me it was somebody else and she got married later and wanted me to tell everybody that my stepfather was my biological father because we had the same coloring. I got physically sick, actually stomach problems, developed an ulcer at the ripe old age of eighth grade, 14-years old.

I think I just realized over time that transparency and what I would add is authenticity is so important for writing and so important for knowing who you are and how you want to walk in the world. I just always fought for that and I felt I was in this environment in Catholic school, where I saw a lot of hypocrisy that they’d be teaching about Jesus’ love and then a nun would hit a student with a ruler or slap somebody against the face.

I did not understand that hypocrisy, so I think it was the inverse of hypocrisy and people telling lies that I realized that I could not live in the world with lies, because it really affected my wellbeing. As I wrote, I wanted to be as honest as possible. In fact, my husband, when he read some early drafts, is saying, “Are you sure you want to say this? Your mother’s going to hate this.” And I said, “I have to write this. I have to. This is my story and I have to write it the way I felt it, even if she’s going to hate it.”

Marion: Well, that’s a great answer and we’re going to get to some of the big revelatory moments in a second. I want to lay in a little bit of the pipe of that eye of yours, that person who was taking notes along the way, and how you use them because you have a bumpy life. Then in ninth grade you end up at Spence, one of the more exclusive private schools in America, and you have this lovely section where you write, quote, “I was relieved that we had uniforms. The moment I put on my iron white Oxford button-down shirt and Chris skirt, I was transformed. With this uniform, I would be one of the private school girls walking in New York, the ones who had wealth and privilege. With this uniform, no one could tell I was a Catholic scholarship kid with no money and no father. My secret would be safe. But even so, being a new girl in ninth grade was a challenge. I had never been around such wealth before. I could spot the nuances, that macrame bracelets around the other girls’ wrists and their tasteful small gold or diamond stud earrings.” Lovely.

So, let’s talk about eye. Casting our eyes back over our lives is tricky business, but the reader wants to know only so much, of course. There, in the macrame bracelets and underwhelming earrings, is the key to old money. Talk about finding those details. Did you find them in your journals or did you remember those as you cast your eye back? Because that is precisely what works in that scene to make sure we understand that you feel like an outsider, but that your eye can always be trusted in this book. It gives you great authority.

Robin: Oh, thank you. That’s so kind. I studied journalism later on in life, and as a journalism major, you have to observe. I was keenly observant at a very young age of the differences between the Catholic schools and the private schools in New York City. But it started even earlier as a young child coming from an immigrant family, where I had a red backpack with white leather straps and everybody else had green army backpacks. I think, for writers, just observing around you of what makes something different or unique. Before iPhones, I carried a little little journal, and even if I was sitting on the bus or sitting somewhere, I would just even write bullets, not really phrases, but things that I noticed. I took a great writing class, where my writing teacher made me think of the senses of something that I had to explain like, “What am I smelling? What am I seeing? What am I hearing, touching, feeling?”

I just carried that with me for so many, many years that I kept these little journals and I would say, “Oh, I smell urine when I’m walking down 42nd Street,” or “Blue smells different in California than it smells in New York, the color blue.” We don’t think about a color of having a smell, but for me it did. I just think being observant and almost acting like a journalist of your own life and seeing the nuances of how people portray themselves or what they wear or what’s in fashion for me was a lot about what people wore, because it’s New York City was so much… I don’t want to say fashion, but you can tell a lot about a person by what they wear.

Marion: Oh, absolutely.

Robin: And I was also fascinated always by shoes. When I travel, I can always tell who the Americans are and who are the non-Americans by their shoes. I think it was just my journalistic training and then just writing notes and pages in this little notebook all the time. I guess you could do it on an iPhone now, but I like the physical feeling of writing in a book.

Marion: Yeah, me too. I carry a notebook everywhere I go. Self characterization is perhaps the most difficult thing to portray. As I, too, was trained as a journalist and we’re supposed to leave ourselves out of the story… or at least in my generation growing up, we were. Now, of course I teach memoir, I’ve written tons of it, and getting myself into the story. It was a hard lesson, actually, and I’m sure it was for you, but you do this really great thing where you lay pipe really early for themes that are going to come up later in the book. The transparency is absolutely one of them. This desire for things to be out in the open.

One of my favorite things is early in the book, when you’re talking to the head mistress at Spence and you are asking for better sex education in the curriculum, and it’s the best quote ever. She says, “Young ladies at Spence do not engage in that behavior, so what we provide is adequate.” And then she said, “We will not discuss this again.” Your characterization of you as someone who is willing to go in there and have this conversation, and you did in fact enact some change after you left. You heard that they had a more, let’s just say, robust sex education curriculum, but this decision to characterize ourselves is very, very important so that we understand later on when we do something big, courageous, and all of that. Talk about choosing that scene with Madam Schmahmann, your head mistress, and what you… You weren’t just patting yourself on the back. You were setting the reader up to know that you were confident later on to do certain things. Talk about choosing that scene. It’s a good one.

Robin: Oh, thank you. Well, people often ask you, “What do you do or who you are?” And I’ve wrestled with that forever, because I’ve had different types of jobs. I’m not a doctor or a lawyer. What I realized over time is I’m an advocate and an activist. I’ve done that my whole life fighting for different issues. So, I reflected on when was the first time that I actually stood up to power and really tried to take it on. I thought that that scene of really being a disruptor in my elite private school was really my first political act that I ever did in my life. I thought it was important to write in the book, because I ended up in politics and I didn’t know I was going to be, but I wanted to share that politics. I would say what I call little p politics can take many forms and for me is I wanted to make sure that young women had all the tools necessary to protect their bodies and make sure that they could have a future with their education and not be stymied by an unwanted pregnancy.

Marion: There you go. This is why memoir is really a call in response. You set up in Act I, a lot of what you’re going to cash out in Act III. One of the things we get to cash out later in the book is the whole idea of recovered memory. It’s a topic that comes up late, as I said, during the Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings. You’re triggered to remember incidents from those teen years that you didn’t report chronologically. I want to talk about that a bit. I talk to writers all the time about what to do with past acts of assault. It’s a huge decision to cover that material publicly. I really think you set it up by starting that conversation with Madam Schmahmann, all those pages before that, but it’s a huge decision to cover this. Can you give any guidance to writers on how you navigated the decision to write and publish the details you include in this story?

Robin: Yeah, it’s probably the hardest thing that I wrote about it. Even when I think about it, I get emotional. I really took the strength of looking at Dr. Ford and other people in the Me Too movement, speaking up against Harvey Weinstein and I decided, “Where do I want to sit in history? Do I want to do my part to do something?” And realize that I think the hard part for writers is trying to imagine what will happen to you if you put this out there, whether it’s about sexual assault or something else. It took me years to report it. Hard to talk about it, but I have two sons, and I think I really did it because I have two kids and I want them to live in a world that sexual assault doesn’t happen all the time, whether it’s to boys or to girls.

I just believe that the more we name it and the more that we talk about it and that other writers write about it, that we understand that it’s prevalent because there’s still so many people that think, “Oh, this just happens once in a while and the media is overplaying it.” That’s just not true. So I decided that it was too important to me that even if someone decided to call me names after they read it, or if there were people in my community decided that they don’t want to talk to me anymore because I wrote about something that was taboo, I really had to come to terms that I don’t care. That I had to write my story and I felt that if I wrote my story, that hopefully I could inspire others to do the same.

Marion: Yeah. I thank you for that and I thank you for the reporting you did on that particular incident, something that happened to you in high school that you then much, much later ask a high school friend about, and she’s got more memory of what happened to you. I found that particularly stunning, the idea of reporting on one’s own life, but particularly in this arena when there’s so much mist around it because of memory, so much shame around it for all the obvious reasons, so much fear around it. Can you just talk a little bit more about doing the reporting to confirm you thought perhaps what had happened to you, only to find out that there was more than you remembered? That must have been astonishing.

Robin: When writing a memoir from your emotions and your memories, I decided that I needed to not necessarily fact check, but check with others if I was missing something. The process when I reported my sexual assault decades later, the school sent out a lawyer and I was interviewed for four or five hours I can’t remember in a room. Like any sexual assault, she kept asking, “Who else did you tell? Who else did you tell? Who else did you tell?” I called somebody I knew in high school who then told me about other stories that I didn’t remember. Between talking to her and talking to my therapist who explained that the hippocampus often keeps you from remembering things that are too horrible for you to process, I felt I did this for a number of friends, actually, for different periods in the book.

I didn’t always quote the other people, but just to help my memory of a place or what airplane we took or whatever it is. I think when you are writing a memoir, it’s helpful to get other perspectives because they may see something or notice something that you didn’t. I found it extremely helpful, not just the scene about sexual assault, but a lot of other scenes in the book. I did reach out to friends that did remind me of certain scenes that could help me either describe in more graphic terms, a scene in New York City or somewhere else, or something that we did that I could weave into the story.

Marion: Yeah, great response. That’s very, very helpful. I think people forget that they should report memoir. I think they forget that reporting is as easy as calling… Well, in your case, as difficult as calling a friend and saying, “What do you remember,” but that we need to be prepared for their responses. You did a great job with that one. That fascinated me. You talked before about how emotional you still get when you go back to this recovered memory. Whenever I have a memoir writer on, I always ask the same question, and it’s this. You cover several traumas in your book and I won’t give them all away because I want everyone to buy the book, but I will ask you instead, what we’re asking of a memoir writer when we ask her to revisit trauma? Are we asking her merely to revisit it, reenact it, reanimate it, relive it, or report it coolly from this side of our life?

Robin: I really think it’s depending on what you’re asking your reader to do. For me, writing about it was cathartic because I actually could think through it. But there were times where I was crying so much writing it that I had to leave the room and not look at what I’d written for a week. I don’t think it means that you’re reliving the trauma, but perhaps observing. What I came to the final conclusion, for me, for all my traumas is that they are part of me and something that I can share, but they don’t define me. If I can think of a metaphor, they’re like the cookbooks on my shelf in my kitchen that I see all the time that I sometimes take out to look at for a recipe, but they don’t define who I am, that I’ve created who I am.

Marion: Great. Who you are includes being a writer and that’s a wonderful distinction to be able to make, I think. This book certainly allows you to make it. Well, you’ve written for a bunch of other places, though, beforehand, and you said you had written a bunch of short stories, meaning short pieces of memoir took that to mean. Talk to me a little bit more about that in the run-up to this. I love the image of you pinning things up, the sticky notes, but were you testing your material on the public at all when you wrote for various blogs or were you thinking about, “How far can I go,” or what would you think people would be interested in? I mean, just talk about how do we, or if you did it all, test your topics on other people before you published.

Robin: Yeah, absolutely. It was all of the above. I would write something, a short story, and I had a couple of people… Well, my classmates when I took creative writing classes, but also a couple of dear friends. I would ask them, “What do you think,” and try to get feedback. That was really helpful. It was also very helpful taking classes and writing short stories to find my voice. I first wrote in the third person and I didn’t use my name, my first name, Robin. I used my middle name, which is Francisca.
So I wrote, “Francisca did this,” or “Francisca did that,” and I think some of the reasons I did that is that I wasn’t totally comfortable embracing what I was writing about because I was writing about some sensitive material that was scary to me. But then I would rewrite them, those chapters, two times, three times, four times. And then when I started saying I and using my name, the writing got richer.

I think it was a combination of writing short stories to test it with different audiences, but also the most influential that happened to me was finding my voice and finding my style of writing, because I’m a newbie in writing memoir. I’ve written reports and academic papers, but never a memoir. Testing the waters by doing blogs and little chapters and testing different types of voice, first person and third person, really helped me find my voice for this book.

Marion: I think that’s fascinating and helpful. The idea of using your middle name and having a look at oneself is a very interesting assignment that I think a lot of people are going to go now try and until we can inhabit ourselves in the first person. Of course, you don’t have to write memoir in the first person. You can write it in the second person, you can write it in the third person, but that eventual confidence to write it in the first person… Is that what you would say it is confidence that allowed you to settle in the first person of comfort? How would you describe that? What word would you use to describe that? You said you found your voice, but…

Robin: I agree. It was confidence, that it was over time that I realized, “Oh, I own this. I’m fine with this and I want to put my memoir out as me.” But it did take time and lots of versions. Writing this was a very long process. It wasn’t something that I said, “Oh, I’m going to write this,” and it was done in three months. This was a two-year process of taking short stories that I had written 20 and 25 years ago and trying to weave them together. It was the confidence… You’re absolutely right. It was I started becoming more confident as a writer, but also inhabiting my own stories that I was okay to share them, because there are a bunch of stories that I wasn’t sure that I wanted to share. There are a couple stories that I did take out because I just didn’t think that they matched the storyline, and I decided to say, “Okay, maybe I’m going to write a second memoir and then I can put them in there.”

Marion: And there you have it. Well, we’re so grateful that you did write it, and I thank you so much for coming along today and sharing your insights on how you did it. It’s a joy to talk to you and I wish you all the best with the book.

Robin: Thank you so much, Marion.

Marion: You’re absolutely welcome. The writer is Robin Schepper. The book is Finding My Way: A Memoir of Family, Identity, and Political Ambition. See more in her at robinfschepperauthor dot com. See more on the book at girlfridaybooks 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 overitstudios 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, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow Qwerty wherever you get your podcast and listen to it wherever you go. 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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