Writing About Loved Ones
No woman is an island
I have been relatively quiet here the last couple of weeks because I am nearing the final stages of my book, Earthly Bodies: Embracing Animal Nature. My partner is downstairs reading it in its entirety for the first time before I hand it over to my editor tomorrow. I value his feedback and it’s important (for the sake of our relationship) that he approves because he is in the book. Since I use storytelling from my own life to explore the lives of other animals, it’s impossible not to include my intimate partner. No one exists in a vacuum.
When I was writing earlier this year, he asked: “Is it harder to write about your past relationships or to write about us? It seems like writing about the past would be easier, it’s post mortem. Writing about the present, must be like carving something up that is alive and still squirming.”
I love writing about love but writing about loved ones can be difficult when we imagine sharing our work with the world. The fear of being misunderstood, of hurting or angering people close to us can cause us to edit ourselves. It is something all memoir writers and many nonfiction writers must grapple with. Author Phillip Lopate writes about this conundrum in a Creative Nonfiction essay:
“ I have written fairly critically about people who seemed to have no problem with it. I have written somewhat negatively about people who ignored the main substance of my critique but pounced with outrage on some picayune detail they thought I got wrong. I have written glowingly about people who took it amiss because they did not like the idea of having a walk-on cameo in my (center of the universe) story when they regarded themselves as the center of the universe or because they simply did not like the presumption that I could take their measure in a few paragraphs, regardless of how positively I ending up doing so. I have given offense to certain people by not writing about them when I wrote (critically) about their colleagues.
The issue at bottom is this: Who am I to judge anyone? A fair enough question. I’m someone who calls himself a writer, and if I write about my life, I am, inevitably, writing about others because no man is an island. The main rules I give myself in doing so are these: 1) Never write to settle scores (enter into the other person’s point of view and be as fair-minded as possible), and 2) Write as beautifully as possible because well-wrought prose invites its own forgiveness—from you yourself, if not from the offended party.”
Good advice. Big Shitty Party, is another essay on the topic by Melissa Febos, one of my favorite writers (unfortunately you need a subscription to the Kenyon Review to read it. The essay is also in her book Body Work, which I recommend). Here’s another great essay by Nicole Chung in The Atlantic.
With all of this in mind, here is a question and a couple of prompts to explore:
Is there something you've been wanting to write but have never written because you're afraid of what others (strangers or loved ones) will think? Write that, get it out of your system. Even if it’s just for you.
Hand write a letter to a dear friend or loved one you’ve been meaning to reach out to. Mail it and let me know what happens.