Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family

by Joy Castro (Introduction)

Whenever a memoirist gives a reading, someone in the audience is sure to 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.

Genres: Memoir, Writing, Essays, Nonfiction

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Porter Sprigg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book encouraged me a lot as a writer wanting to tell my story while honoring my parents.

[Lisa Romeo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book for those writing--but more importantly, publishing--memoir and personal essay that includes private information family and close friends. Many different writers, with a variety of experiences, both positive and negative, share what happened between them and their loved ones who found themselves on the page in public. This book is equal parts advice, cautionary tale, encouragement, tips, and--sometimes--refreshing hope about the capacity of other people (nonwriters) to understand. But there's also heartbreak; it doesn't all go well, which is important to see too. Any writer struggling with how much to share, whether and how to change details and identities, and who gets to read and/or veto work prior to publication, will appreciate all the ways other writers have approached the situation. I recommend this book to anyone writing about family in nonfiction.

[Star · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whether you are a memoirist struggling with your own way to reconcile family and the story you need to tell or just a fan of the genre, this anthology is well worth reading. I would be hard pressed to pick favorites but Susan Olding's "Mama's Voices," Ariel Gore's "The Part I Can't Tell You," and Dinty Moore's "The Deeper End of the Quarry" would be among them. This will be a collection I come back to again and again. Thanks Joy Castro for putting together such an amazing collection of voices and showing us there is no one way to tell a story.

[Skye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone interested in writing memoir can benefit by reading this book. It is a collection of essays by different memoirists addressing the issue of how their families handled being written about.

[Kristin Boldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This an amazing collection on the ethics of writing family. I've attended many seminars, and where they failed, what they aspired to was the diverse and comprehensive coverage of a tough subject that this book excels at.

[Rachael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I wish had been available before my memoir was published. I had no idea what to expect from my family after my book came out; I just put it out there and hoped for the best. But reading what the contributors to “Family Trouble” had to say would have helped me put a little more form to what I was feeling.

The 25 contributors have some great advice: write what you need to write; do not try to anticipate family reaction; what you think will bother relatives will not, and something you did not think twice about will be the issue that has the potential to tear apart relationships. I underlined many passages in the essays. If I ever end up teaching a memoir writing class, I know I will share this book and its essays with my students. It would be a great teaching tool.

However, my main problem with this book is that I think the title is misleading. I read essay after essay, especially in the beginning part of the book, where there was very little family trouble demonstrated. In some cases, the writer was writing about parents who had died. Or, if there was a rift in a family due to publication, it was a rift that was later repaired. A lot of happy endings—much more than I had anticipated—punctuated these essays. At least Jill Christman is honest: “So that’s my story, and it has such a tidy resolution.” An aunt of Paul Lisicky’s eventually comes around and acts as if a book about the family was never written. Family members that caused Ruth Behar so much pain also ended up forgiving her and welcoming her back into the fold. Only a couple of essays deal with permanent or painful rifts.

I don’t think it’s realistic to think that blood is thicker than water and that family members will be prepared to forgive, if not right away than at some later date. I think this essay collection would have been better served by a wider variety of perspectives—voices from more memoirists who have experienced permanent family fallouts.

Overall, though, the book contains useful information for any memoirist. Oh, our lucky families! We are the ones who chose to not write fiction.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with any such collection (in this case, 25 pieces by 25 writers), some essays were stronger than others, but the ones that hit me where I'm at right now were very good indeed. (Where I'm at: I have lots of rough drafts of autobiographical material and am finally gearing up to start shaping some of it, finishing it, and, I hope, finding a place to publish it.) It was helpful to see such a range of attitudes and experiences and advice. I'm glad I read this book.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I plan to buy, re read and underline all my favorite passages. Fantastic writers each giving a glimpse into their collective processing. Amazing, I loved it.

[Mindela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific book--especially if you are writing, or thinking about writing, about family!

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was excited to find this anthology because imagining my family’s reaction–or non-reaction–to reading my forthcoming writing about them gets me up in the middle of the night and exacerbates my IBS.

I was especially interested in Bich Minh Nguyen’s essay, The Bad Asian Daughter. I related to the picture she painted of the dual lives she lives of code switching between her “ethnic” homelife and her public “American” life. Moreso though, I was struck by Nguyen’s struggle to accept that by writing a memoir, she is participating in the ultimate Asian family betrayal of bringing the private into the public sphere. I struggle with this too. By the end of her piece, her father is proudly sharing her book with friends and relatives, even if he has not read it himself.

Overall, I appreciated the pieces that offered the specific strategies the authors used (or tried to use) to bring their families into their writing in ways that felt honest and fair, even if I wouldn’t choose to do it the same way myself. Paul Austin, for example, explains in Sally Could Delete Whatever She Wanted, how he handed his manuscript over to his wife and invited her to remove anything she wasn’t comfortable with. That feels like a lot of editorial power to handoff to me, but for Austin it turned out to be an vital peacekeeping move for his marriage, and in the end she didn’t change a thing.

I would have liked to read more stories that didn’t have such happy endings, even if I was encouraged by them. I also would have liked to read more essays like Richard Hoffman’s Like Rain on Dust, which involved legal maneuvering with his publisher and signed no-fault contracts with people featured in his memoir. Hoffman’s book includes descriptions of the abuse he suffered as a child from a coach. By the end of his essay, we learn that his book contributes to the arrest and conviction of his abuser, many years and many victims later.

[Bryan Parys · Rating 4 out of 5]

As far as craft essay collections go, this is really successful and pulls from a really broad range of voices and experiences. Some of these are just damn good essays in their own right (Heather Sellers, Susan Olding, Ruth Behar, and Rigoberto Gonzalez are standouts), and even the shortest selections (Alison Bechdel for one) contain at least one line worth posing to nonfiction students.

[Jillian Barnet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entertaining and thought- provoking read. I picked this up because I’m a memoirist, but non-writers would also find it enjoyable, I think. It reads more like a group of personal stories, rather than advice or how-to specifically for writers.

[Kyle D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much better than I anticipated. Very readable just as a collection of essays, not just as a didactic manual or textbook. Lovely throughout.

[Anna Persky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection contains fascinating essays about the unexpected and expected hazards or writing about family.

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection of essays on how to write stories and memoir about family. Great examples and advice.

[Aimee Knupsky (bookchantment) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Learned so much

[Nina Zhao · Rating 5 out of 5]

enjoyed this very much. 4.5 - for a few essays that I didn't love quite as much (which is unavoidable with collections like this)

[Lara Lillibridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book for creative nonfiction writers who, like me, need reassurance that if we write about our families, we will live through the aftermath. Not that things always go smoothly—some of the writers paid the price for writing about family by loss of relatives for years—but that every one of them felt it was worth it.

[Literary Mama]

In the introduction to her compelling anthology, editor and memoirist Joy Castro claims that “memoir is the genre of our era.” I agree. Through the ubiquity of social media, autobiography appears easy—almost reflexive, like capturing the infamous “selfie.”

With Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, and Tumblr to story our lives, the boundaries between the private and public are increasingly tested and blurred. Recently, Dean Obeidallah posted an editorial on CNN’s website, “Are We Sharing Too Much Online?” In it, he observes how social media norms have changed over the relatively short time of their development. At first, such sites advertised users’ daily highlights through photos and brief slogans, chiefly confirming the fun everyone was having. Progressively, however, the medium’s norms have become more self-disclosing and intimate, more raw and real. Often, these self-disclosures reveal secrets about relatives as well as the fraught emotions of family life. Why, and to what end, are so many people turning to memoir as a means of airing their own—and their families’—dirty laundry? And what is at stake when the private of familial life becomes the public of social consumption?

While Castro’s collection doesn’t directly address memoir as it’s written on blogs, the twenty-five essayists in Family Trouble certainly grapple with the question of what’s at stake in “revealing family” through public writing. How these writers struggle to compose authentic lives on the page and how they confront difficult and necessary personal truths involving their families impact anyone who has ever made a controversial comment about a relative on Facebook, in a blog post, in a letter, in an essay, or face-to-face. Each piece in Family Trouble invites readers to witness the hard yet lyrical stories writers tell about themselves and their family members as well as consider what it means to use complicated family dynamics as artistic material. For this is the ethical challenge at the center of Castro’s book: to communicate personal truths about one’s family—whether unsavory or sublime—and position one’s art against one’s relationships.

Read Literary Mama's full review here: http://www.literarymama.com/reviews/a...

[Shawna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geared more to memoir writers than memoir readers.

I got this book mainly because I am a fan of Joy Castro and thought she's have an essay included in here, but she only wrote the introduction. I enjoyed most of the essays--although many were quite brief, only three or four pages. They also seemed to repeat the same message -- the people you write about in your memoir are going to have a variety of reactions, for some it will ruin the relationship, others will fixate on some small detail you never imagined would upset them, other relationships will get stronger because you spoke the truth. So there were a few essays in this book that seemed a little redundant.

Also for me short essays are unsatisfying, a big part of the reason why I read memoir is to sprawl out in someone's life and get an in-depth view. For me it's like the difference between engaging in a movie or a television show. Getting to know characters over many hours, season, and years is far more satisfying in my opinion. That's kind of what this books was for me. I wrote down the authors whose essays I liked, and I will go seek out their memoirs to read...so I can sprawl.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some good ideas in this book to spur someone on who is hesitant to write a memoir. Revealed are examples from the authors and ideas to help someone know how to start (or, even if starting a memoir is a good idea-worth it).
Reading this book, though, can possibly dissuade a person to write personal history, since the contributors mention that they lost some close ties over what they had written. Another dissuading point can be that quite a few of memoirists had pretty unhealthy pasts. What if a prospective writer has a background that is not full of incest, violence, and the like?
I especially liked Susan Olding's story "Mama's Voices". Her writing is so flowing and interesting that it makes me want to read some her books.

[Iva · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book focuses on the complexities of telling the truth about one's family. In 25 essays, provided by many writers who also teach classes on memoir writing, valuable and interesting reactions are revealed. Often the smallest detail was the irritation, as opposed to the bigger issues which the author had expected. Reading this collection in one fell swoop is not recommended as the observations often felt similar. However, there are valid and surprising takes on writing about one's family. Some essays were excellent; other not as fresh or to the point. Useful primarily for those wanting to include their family in memoirs and non fiction writing.