Over the past few months, I pitched an editor at What’s Up Moms? a few ideas. While I didn’t make a sale from those efforts, she circled back to me recently asking for ideas. I sent her two fleshed out reported essay ideas with detailed anecdotes, research nuggets and potential sources. Then closed my email with this:
A side note: I started writing an open letter to my husband’s birth mom, who essentially abandoned him and his brother when my husband was 3 years old. It turns out, this experience has informed his parenting. I’d like to transform it into a narrative essay, something along the lines of: “My Husband Was Abandoned by His Mother; Now He’s Showing Our Sons He’ll Always Be There” or “My Husband’s Birth Mother Abandoned Him – and He’s a Better Dad Because of Her.”
You can guess which idea she ran with. The key challenge in crafting that essay: It wasn’t entirely my story. It was my husband’s. I wondered does that make me a reliable narrator? Equally important, I didn’t want my piece to be a judgmental, angry, and unsympathetic rant about the birth mom who I believe failed my husband.
It’s tempting for all of us to share our stories in part by imagining how the characters in our lives are reacting to and receiving information. It’s a huge gamble to claim you know how you must have looked; how your child felt in a specific moment; or whether your absent mother-in-law, a woman you’ve never met, has undiagnosed mental illness.
In my piece for What’s Up Moms?, I did a lot of “Maybe she …” or “I suspect she … ” and even “I can’t imagine that …” Do those qualifiers make me reliable? I’m not sure. They did make me feel more authentic though.
Spotting Unreliable Narrators
During my April intensive essay writing workshop, we discussed a powerful essay by Mark O’Brien. Admittedly, when I first read the story, I wondered, would my 7-year-old know that drinking and driving is not okay — that it’s against the law? We talk about important issues with our children, and yet, I’m not sure he really understands what it means to drive while intoxicated.
O’Brien uses dialogue and visuals to put readers into the scene. “He could tell from my voice that whatever I was about to say was important, and he got quiet and attentive, staring at me with his eyes wide and curious.” But some of my students questioned whether he could really know what his son was feeling. How could O’Brien really know what his son could tell?
These subtle assumptions and projections are something I’m trying to pay attention to in my writing. In some cases the difference is as subtle as shifting from “I blushed” to “I felt flushed” or “I could feel my cheeks grow warm.” It’s about putting the focus back on YOU, your experience, your journey, your feelings — not projecting your thoughts and feelings onto the characters in your story.
In the What’s Up Moms? story, I had to check myself throughout. I worried that I was sharing Brandon’s feelings, not mine. That I was speculating about his biological mother’s motivations and the fallout of her actions on my husband instead of focusing on how her absence impacted MY life and my children’s.
An early version of the piece even included this projection: Brandon was only 2 years old when she relinquished custody, resurfacing maybe a few times each year in an attempt to buy back their affection. She couldn’t handle the pressure. She hadn’t planned for a child with special needs. She had to maintain a demanding career.
The trouble is: I can’t know these things. And that’s why they ended up on the chopping block.
In The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick writes, “I began to read the greats in essay writing — and it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae. By which I mean that organic wholeness of being in a narrator that the reader experiences as reliable; the one we can trust will take us on a journey, make the piece arrive, bring us out into a clearing where the sense of things is larger than it was before.”
It’s a tough balance to be sure, and I’m not sure I nailed it in the What’s Up Moms? essay (or any others). What I do know: The experience encouraged me to view my work more critically. To check myself when I’m unsure. And to know that sometimes the only way to be reliable is to write from your own heart.