“I don’t know if I remember my brother anymore. I think that the act of writing him, of making him, has become the memory.”
Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
A few nights ago, a pile of final copy edits of my memoir lay on my kitchen table. My wife pulled out champagne. I had finished a story that took me a long time to write. It was a story about addiction and death and grief, with my brother at the center of it, and the memories of a lot of other people splintering out around him.
My brother died of an overdose in 2000. Before he died, he did a lot of bad things, and a lot of good ones, too. Some of those things involved me; most didn't. He was my half brother, a lot older than me, and I idolized him. Like most addiction stories, his carried with it a sizable blast radius. His death became the axis around which all other stories turn. I wrote that in the memoir. I was very proud of that line when I wrote it. That's a beautiful line, I thought. The death right there at the center, so many lives held in its orbit, pulled in by the tragedy.
When the champagne popped, I was hunched over the table, my hoodie pulled tight around my face. I felt sick; I didn't want to look up. I heard myself shouting that I was a bad guy. I was surprised by both the volume of the words and by how much I meant them. For years, my focus had gone into the construction of the book. The moment there was nothing left to construct, I was flooded with questions about the validity of the endeavor, of the book's right to exist.
"I'm a bad guy," I shouted. "I'm a thief."
My wife tilted her head down to try to meet my eyes.
"What have you stolen?" she asked me.
Well, for starters, that line. As soon as I heard myself say it, the realization began creeping up on me. It was my brother's line, one that I'd written. Somewhere toward the end of my manuscript, there's a scene where my father and brother are on a balcony, arguing about my brother's addiction. My father is pushing, trying to understand, and then my brother yells at him, trying to explain. He calls himself a bad guy. He calls himself a thief.
This was a story my father told me, and then I put it in scene: my brother back from rehab, sitting slumped in an old sweatshirt, my father above him, unsure what to do. And then my brother's words, which I found so poignant when my father fed them to me. Somewhere in the retelling, they had become unreal, or a different kind of real. My brother said them to my father; a decade later my father said them to me. Then I wrote them, shaped and reshaped a scene around their existence. At a certain point, one undefinable, I think, they began to feel like mine only.
I was struck by the idea of those words, a junkie's snarled self-assessment. They became a perfect dramatization of guilt: my brother's, yes, but more generally that feeling of something wrong in you that you can't take back. And so when I felt that inward anger and the need to admit it, I reached unconsciously for my brother's words. In trying to acknowledge my guilt, I was perpetuating the very act I'd meant to apologize for.
Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
In a recent essay for BuzzFeed Books, Peter Orner writes beautifully about his deceased father and the ways that his father crops up in his fiction. He was, he admits, often unkind to his father through his fictional avatars. But, he writes, "My father never gave me any grief about my work because he was a good and generous reader who understood the difference between nonfiction that tries to tell the truth and fiction that uses the truth to find something else."
What mensches, both of them — Orner for the tenderness with which he acknowledges his father's gift to him; his father for the gift itself, a generosity of perspective that is, in its own way, as creatively liberating as a trust fund. I know this because my father is that kind of mensch. A man who has only gotten a tiny bit rankled at my descriptions of his "gelatinous ass," his "simian upper lip;" who, far more important, has sat supportive through my descriptions of his anger, his disappointment, his grief. Each time he reads my work, I put the expectations of extraordinary empathy on him — see something of yourself in here, see the way that I see you, and then forgive that glimpse because you see past the facts of your representation.
But there is a crucial difference between my father and Orner's father (and Roth's father, too, and Plath's and Knausgaard's, and on and on). My father has never been housed in the fiction section of a magazine or a bookstore. His name has remained the same on the page or, worse maybe, he has gone unnamed for hundreds of pages, identified only as my father, restricted in identity to one very real biological transaction. He has never had the honor of being used to get to that "something else." He is, instead, left on the page to be nonfiction truth, the definitive story.
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