232 pages
Whenever a memoirist gives a reading, someone in the audience is sure to ask: How did your family react? Revisiting our pasts and exploring our experiences, we often reveal more of our nearest and dearest than they might prefer. This volume navigates the emotional and literary minefields that any writer of family stories or secrets must travel when depicting private lives for public consumption.
Essays by twenty-five memoirists, including Faith Adiele, Alison Bechdel, Jill Christman, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Rigoberto González, Robin Hemley, Dinty W. Moore, Bich Minh Nguyen, and Mimi Schwartz, explore the fraught territory of family history told from one perspective, which, from another angle in the family drama, might appear quite different indeed. In her introduction to this book, Joy Castro, herself a memoirist, explores the ethical dilemmas of writing about family and offers practical strategies for this tricky but necessary subject.
A sustained and eminently readable lesson in the craft of memoir, Family Trouble serves as a practical guide for writers to find their own version of the truth while still respecting family boundaries.
“The writers in Joy Castro’s Family Trouble tell moving stories that probe the ethics of our choices and their consequences when we write about our family members. I know I’ll be recommending this book to my students for years to come.”—Lee Martin, author of Such a Life and From Our House
“What a valuable anthology! And how many times over the years I have taught creative nonfiction would I have reached for this anthology, with its testimonies to the fine lines these writers have drawn, and crossed, and recrossed, and regretted, and celebrated.”—Mary Clearman Blew, author of This Is Not the Ivy League
Introduction: Mapping Hope
Joy Castro
Part 1. Drawing Lines
Chewing Band-Aids: One Memoirist's Take on the Telling of Family Secrets
Jill Christman
Sally Could Delete Whatever She Wanted
Paul Austin
Case by Case: When It Comes to Family You Still Have to Talk To
Mimi Schwartz
At Its Center
Paul Lisicky
The Day I Cried at Starbucks
Ruth Behar
Memory Lessons
Rigoberto González
The Part I Can't Tell You
Ariel Gore
Part 2. The Right to Speak
What the Little Old Ladies Feel: How I Told My Mother about My Memoir
Alison Bechdel
Truths We Could Live With
Robin Hemley
Writing the Black Family Home
Faith Adiele
The Deeper End of the Quarry: Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Family Dilemma
Dinty W. Moore
Mama's Voices
Susan Olding
Living in Someone Else's Closet
Susan Ito
Part 3. Filling the Silence
The True Story
Karen Salyer McElmurray
I Might Be Famous
Ralph James Savarese
A Spell against Sorrow: Writing My Father In
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Things We Don't Talk About
Aaron Raz Link
You Can't Burn Everything
Allison Hedge Coke
Done with Grief: The Memoirist's Illusion
Sandra Scofield
Part 4. Conversations of Hope
The Seed Book
Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Calling Back
Lorraine M. López
Like Rain on Dust
Richard Hoffman
The Bad Asian Daughter
Bich Minh Nguyen
Your Mother Should Know
Sue William Silverman
Writing about Family
Heather Sellers
Gratitude
Source Acknowledgments
Contributors
