In the second part of my craft essay, I show how to preserve honesty in a memoir while writing about yourself and others. Wisdom Builds Her House released on August 20^th in paperback and e-book formats. The audiobook is now available on Spotify.

After several more drafts and uncountable revisions, I slowly realized the braided narrative wasn’t working. One major problem was that Gretchen was the more interesting character. Like Lucy Grealy in Anne Patchett’s memoir Truth and Beauty, Gretchen was the star, and I appeared in her shadow. Patchett and Grealy had been roommates and friends though; Gretchen had died twenty months before I met her father. Even with his permission, could I use her journals and his stories as Patchett used—and was criticized for using—excerpts from Grealy’s letters to her and private information she knew about Grealy’s sex life and addiction? 

I looked for models of a memoirist writing about a person they never met, and found just a handful, including Adam Schefter’s The Man I Never Met: A Memoir. The man was his wife’s first husband who died in the north tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. An extraordinary man, according to family and friends Schefter interviewed—greatly loved, a family man who Schefter honored biographically. The man’s life contrasted with that of Schefter himself, who told his lessons-learned story with “warts and all” honesty. And one of the sources he used was his own personal journal.

I’d never kept a journal—too personal, too revealing—but did want to tell the truth. That’s why the braided narrative wasn’t working. Gretchen’s biography wasn’t missing from the braided narrative. My honesty was. The story didn’t work because I couldn’t write an honest memoir and still hold fear, guilt, and shame at a safe distance. I had to choose integrity over fear, let go of the familiar, and shine a light on the hidden; to find the best in myself and stand in discomfort. To tell the unvarnished truth about my thoughts and actions as things happened.

So, instead of using Gretchen’s journals as chapter epigraphs hinting at the real story, I quoted entries within the context I encountered them and my honest responses—that which I’d worked hard to hide—as if writing a personal journal to tell myself the truth. Here’s an example of what resulted, an excerpt from Wisdom Builds Her House:

“Before diving into the journals, I asked myself what I knew about Gretchen’s childhood. I opened my laptop and started another list. Born on the Autumnal Equinox of the Bicentennial year, her younger brother Alex born less than two years later. Precocious: her mind grew faster than her body, only five feet and one hundred pounds as an adult; read to herself at age three; at four taught Alex to read and showed interest in drawing, which led to a profession in art. Physically fearless: riding bikes, jumping off the high dive at the community pool to learn how to swim, kicking through the board at Tae Kwon Do trials when no one else did. Child of divorce: her parents separated when she was five. For ten years, she and Alex lived with their mother. Then, as teenagers, they moved in with Keith and called the townhouse home until they left for college. Gretchen’s journals began in the middle of her first year of college. I saved the document, reached for her first book, and read the first entry again. 

February 25, 1996: “I wonder, will I be honest with my observations, or will I edit my life self-consciously, knowing I’ll have witnesses? Or one witness. I don’t know… I worry I’m not deserving of trust…” 

Later, I would read that her “one witness” was a boyfriend who read her journal on occasion. Now, I was the one witness, and trust was the question. 

Trust. I bookmarked my place and pondered. Certainly, I was trustworthy at work, a good hard worker as Gretchen had been, according to Keith. But she wasn’t referring to work ethics; she meant deserving of trust from those with whom she’d been sexually intimate if not emotionally honest. In a perfect world, love and trust merged into one, what Gretchen called “Merged Permanence.” Was I worthy of that kind of trust? A question I’d never asked because I wanted the answer to be yes. Absolutely yes. I rubbed my face. Deep down I knew the answer wasn’t so simple. And deeper down I feared the answer might be maybe. 

Or no.” 

***

How did I get from braided narrative to the final product? A kind yet firm development editor guided me toward the truth about writing memoir: I am the protagonist and no one else, I am the narrator, I am the I. The plot, conflict, and story arc are about me. The sources I appropriate are my own. Keith’s stories and Gretchen’s words are only relevant in relationship to mine. With my editor’s help, I unbraided the braid, cut many sections about Gretchen, and added the missing sections about me. By leaping into the unknown, I found and faced my real story then wrote it.

What was that real story? The person I never met was me. 

Linkup with Five Minute Friday: https://fiveminutefriday.com/2024/09/12/fmf-writing-prompt-link-up-preserve/

This essay was published in Cleaver Magazine’s August 22, 2024 Craft section: https://www.cleavermagazine.com/writing-a-memoir-partly-about-a-person-i-never-met-a-craft-essay-by-carole-duff/