D. Liebhart's Blog
December 7, 2023
The Last Word with Carly Newfeld
I had the pleasure of appearing on The Last Word with Carly Newfeld on KSFR public radio to talk about House on Fire August 2023. Carly and I meet at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival where I was volunteering for Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse. We happened to sit next to each other and start chatting and I mentioned my book. I appreciate how supportive Carly is of local writers and enjoyed our conversation. Click HERE to listen to the interview. The Last Word
March 17, 2023
The Ethics of Theft
I’m a thief. I think all writers are to some degree but I feel like I’m a rather blatant one. I create characters as amalgamations of people I know: Amie’s personality with Jennifer’s looks and Angie’s family circumstances. Eventually my characters morph into themselves and take me down paths that have nothing to do with where I started but they always come from reality.
House on Fire is very much my family’s story while at the same time not being anything like my family’s story. The main character is me, except I wasn’t a nurse when my dad had dementia and I didn’t live nearby so it isn’t me at all. So many of the scenes with the dad are things that really happened. My dad did saw a club off his truck! But they are also different because these people and scenes have become something other than what they were. It’s like creating an alternate reality where variations of life play out.
In Judy Bloom’s Master Class, she talks about keeping notes of conversations she’s overhead that she wants to use in a story. Faulkner famously said, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” I can honestly say I have no idea what ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is and I’m so not going to google it (if you do and read it, please let me know if you think that it is worth any number of old ladies). But clearly I’m not the only thief/writer out there. Even someone who writes pure fantasy uses their experiences as the basis for how their characters behave, even if their characters are creatures who don’t exist in reality.
House on Fire is about my family and me. It’s a story that belongs to me to a certain degree. But what about stories that don’t belong to me? My next book (tentatively called Madhouse) has stories that are mine but also stories that aren’t mine. People (friends) will recognize themselves even though the characters are only partly them or only the circumstance was theirs. My daughter is in Madhouse and has already said that I’ve so poorly masked her that she’s going to sue me once she gets her law degree (this might only be partly a joke). But just like House on Fire is my story without being my story, Madhouse isn’t these people’s story. I haven’t taken someone’s life and written it down. I’ve taken a huge array of things that I’ve encountered and reworked them into a story with a plot and characters with all kinds of things that didn’t happen and aren’t even close to what happened. It is fiction.
I take a seed from reality and build it into something entirely different. But what if I don't own the seed? If in my day-to-day experience I know a doctor who was a narcissist and prescribed himself medications and I have a doctor in a story who does that, is that unethical?
Honestly, I don’t actually care if that doctor reads the book and recognizes himself. He was a jerk. But I do care if one of my friends recognizes themselves and is hurt. I don’t want to hurt my friends but I also want to write a great story. What’s the right way to handle it? Do I warn them? Do I let them know it isn’t really them or it isn’t how I see them? What if they don’t believe me?
House on Fire is very much my family’s story while at the same time not being anything like my family’s story. The main character is me, except I wasn’t a nurse when my dad had dementia and I didn’t live nearby so it isn’t me at all. So many of the scenes with the dad are things that really happened. My dad did saw a club off his truck! But they are also different because these people and scenes have become something other than what they were. It’s like creating an alternate reality where variations of life play out.
In Judy Bloom’s Master Class, she talks about keeping notes of conversations she’s overhead that she wants to use in a story. Faulkner famously said, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” I can honestly say I have no idea what ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is and I’m so not going to google it (if you do and read it, please let me know if you think that it is worth any number of old ladies). But clearly I’m not the only thief/writer out there. Even someone who writes pure fantasy uses their experiences as the basis for how their characters behave, even if their characters are creatures who don’t exist in reality.
House on Fire is about my family and me. It’s a story that belongs to me to a certain degree. But what about stories that don’t belong to me? My next book (tentatively called Madhouse) has stories that are mine but also stories that aren’t mine. People (friends) will recognize themselves even though the characters are only partly them or only the circumstance was theirs. My daughter is in Madhouse and has already said that I’ve so poorly masked her that she’s going to sue me once she gets her law degree (this might only be partly a joke). But just like House on Fire is my story without being my story, Madhouse isn’t these people’s story. I haven’t taken someone’s life and written it down. I’ve taken a huge array of things that I’ve encountered and reworked them into a story with a plot and characters with all kinds of things that didn’t happen and aren’t even close to what happened. It is fiction.
I take a seed from reality and build it into something entirely different. But what if I don't own the seed? If in my day-to-day experience I know a doctor who was a narcissist and prescribed himself medications and I have a doctor in a story who does that, is that unethical?
Honestly, I don’t actually care if that doctor reads the book and recognizes himself. He was a jerk. But I do care if one of my friends recognizes themselves and is hurt. I don’t want to hurt my friends but I also want to write a great story. What’s the right way to handle it? Do I warn them? Do I let them know it isn’t really them or it isn’t how I see them? What if they don’t believe me?
January 6, 2023
Who set the house on fire?
The inspiration (even though that’s totally the wrong word for it) for House on Fire is rather obviously my own experience with dementia. My father lived with the condition for more than ten years. My mother took care of him at home for a long time but he ended up in assisted living for the last five years of his life, when it became impossible for him to be cared for at home. My mother visited him daily. The only times she didn’t visit him was when she herself was in the hospital.
My dad first started showing signs of dementia a couple of years before my daughter was born so maybe 2003. It’s amazing how many families see signs of some kind of deterioration that they can’t put an accurate label on. My husband and I were living abroad and every year when we came back to America we’d stay at my parents’ house. After one such visit, my father sent me an angry letter about how ungrateful we’d been on our last stay: We made jokes about the LA heat and the truck he lent us that had a broken air conditioner (it was 102). We didn’t buy my mother flowers (we took them out to dinner). We didn’t wear our shoes in the house (we were living in Japan at the time).
Despite the fact that this whole thing was totally out of character, we all responded (including my mother) as if it were “normal” in the sense that none of us ever thought there was something wrong with my dad’s brain that might be causing him to act so strangely, which in retrospect I find astonishing. It’s not that knowing would’ve made any difference in the outcome, but knowing might have helped us deal with his increasingly challenging behaviors.
I wrote a letter back apologizing as best I could and asking why he simply hadn’t talked to us while we were there. My mother feared that we’d never speak to them again but instead we simply stayed in a hotel the next time we were in town, which was the following year for my father’s 70th birthday, where I first announced I was pregnant only to miscarry the very next day.
By the time my parents came to visit us in Japan about a year later, a month after my daughter was born, I think we had a name for what going on. My father had vascular dementia and there was nothing to be done for it. Each time we came back after that, I’d notice a tremendous decrease in my father’s overall memory. The most painful was when my daughter was six months old. We’d stayed with my parents for a few weeks, then moved to a hotel so my husband’s older daughter could visit and meet her sister for the first time.
We moved down the street less than a half a mile away to the Holiday Inn. I called to let them know we’d gotten settled and were heading to the airport to pick up Jessica. My father answered the phone and said, “When did you get here?” We’d literally just left their house. It was maybe fifteen minutes. I think I felt my heart actually break. For three weeks, they’d taken my daughter for a walk in the stroller every morning. She crawled up the stairs to “read” the paper with them in bed. They doted and fawned over her like all grandparents but for him the weeks we’d stayed with them had vanished in the time in took us to drive a few blocks.
When I visited my mother once my father was in assisted living, I would go with her everyday to see him. We’d often spend the evenings after we’d come back sitting by her pool having a glass of wine. My mother was typically an excessively positive person, always hunting for a silver lining but on those nights, she’d let her guard down and show me a side of herself not many other people got to see. There were two phrases she’d say over and over through the years: “He didn’t deserve this” and “If he’d know this was going to happen, he would have blown his brains out.” It’s that latter one that is the seed for the story that became House on Fire.
https://remember-for-me.com/
My dad first started showing signs of dementia a couple of years before my daughter was born so maybe 2003. It’s amazing how many families see signs of some kind of deterioration that they can’t put an accurate label on. My husband and I were living abroad and every year when we came back to America we’d stay at my parents’ house. After one such visit, my father sent me an angry letter about how ungrateful we’d been on our last stay: We made jokes about the LA heat and the truck he lent us that had a broken air conditioner (it was 102). We didn’t buy my mother flowers (we took them out to dinner). We didn’t wear our shoes in the house (we were living in Japan at the time).
Despite the fact that this whole thing was totally out of character, we all responded (including my mother) as if it were “normal” in the sense that none of us ever thought there was something wrong with my dad’s brain that might be causing him to act so strangely, which in retrospect I find astonishing. It’s not that knowing would’ve made any difference in the outcome, but knowing might have helped us deal with his increasingly challenging behaviors.
I wrote a letter back apologizing as best I could and asking why he simply hadn’t talked to us while we were there. My mother feared that we’d never speak to them again but instead we simply stayed in a hotel the next time we were in town, which was the following year for my father’s 70th birthday, where I first announced I was pregnant only to miscarry the very next day.
By the time my parents came to visit us in Japan about a year later, a month after my daughter was born, I think we had a name for what going on. My father had vascular dementia and there was nothing to be done for it. Each time we came back after that, I’d notice a tremendous decrease in my father’s overall memory. The most painful was when my daughter was six months old. We’d stayed with my parents for a few weeks, then moved to a hotel so my husband’s older daughter could visit and meet her sister for the first time.
We moved down the street less than a half a mile away to the Holiday Inn. I called to let them know we’d gotten settled and were heading to the airport to pick up Jessica. My father answered the phone and said, “When did you get here?” We’d literally just left their house. It was maybe fifteen minutes. I think I felt my heart actually break. For three weeks, they’d taken my daughter for a walk in the stroller every morning. She crawled up the stairs to “read” the paper with them in bed. They doted and fawned over her like all grandparents but for him the weeks we’d stayed with them had vanished in the time in took us to drive a few blocks.
When I visited my mother once my father was in assisted living, I would go with her everyday to see him. We’d often spend the evenings after we’d come back sitting by her pool having a glass of wine. My mother was typically an excessively positive person, always hunting for a silver lining but on those nights, she’d let her guard down and show me a side of herself not many other people got to see. There were two phrases she’d say over and over through the years: “He didn’t deserve this” and “If he’d know this was going to happen, he would have blown his brains out.” It’s that latter one that is the seed for the story that became House on Fire.
https://remember-for-me.com/
