Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
Shortly after my father's sudden death, a friend gave me C.S. Lewis's "A Grief Observed." I read it post-funeral, in the awkward days when visiting relatives have returned home, when you're supposed to re-embrace work and routines. The book offered little comfort — it's an often self-pitying look at Lewis's "mad, midnight moments" following the loss of his wife. But one passage stood out. Lewis writes of tales he's read, "in which the dead tell us that our mourning does them some kind of wrong. They beg us to stop it…It made the dead far more dead."
I've thought often of those words. I wrote a memoir in the aftermath of my father's death, and while the book was many things — a search for meaning, a travelogue, the story of my adventures as a global volunteer — it was largely a book about Dad. I was measuring my life against his, telling his stories, making him the ghostly muse in my midlife crisis, and I wondered if I, too, was doing some kind of wrong.
They beg us to stop… It made the dead far more dead.
My father never asked to be on display. And what we as memoirists choose to display — what we insist is essential to display — is an easy source of conflict. Dad grew up poor, never went to college, yet reached upper management with high-tech firms on both coasts. I wrote about this. It defined him. It fueled his drive and ambition. It defined me. I always felt like the lite beer to his stout ale. He was not only one of the smartest men I've ever known, but one of the most decent. Shortly before he retired, when his Fortune 500 employer closed the facility where he worked, Dad fought to ensure that every employee received a management-level severance package. His empathy came from his own humble beginnings.
But Dad was embarrassed, I think, by his lack of a college degree. It was a secret of his professional life, a fact I'm sure he concealed from colleagues. That may seem tame in a scandal-a-day world, but Dad was a private man, and except for Kardashians or politicians, most of us don't expect our secret shames to become public knowledge, particularly after we're gone. I respected Dad more than any man I've known. Sharing his personal failure, as he saw it, would have hurt him. I wrote about it anyway.
Writing a memoir is a selfish act. For the memoir to work, to truly be alive, the honesty of the writing must outweigh the feelings of your subjects. As the central figure, you have to write what scares you: the drama resides in the dark places where you're least comfortable. And that means exposing yourself. It's like ripping off the front of your house and saying, "O.K., here we are, take a look — I'll be in the shower if you want a closer view." If you can't do that — if you're unwilling to bleed, naked, on the page — why write memoir?
This honesty isn't easy for friends and family, who probably weren't eager to be "characters." But the living can at least retaliate. A fellow writer once told me about a friend who released a memoir. "It's really good," she said. "He shares all these wonderful stories about his family. None of them will speak to him anymore, but it's a really good book."
The dead can't retaliate. And I didn't just write about my father's life — I probed that life. Our relationship was strong, but parts of him were unattainable to me. He was a workaholic. He spent long hours at the office. Like me, he internalized his thoughts. So I compensated by interviewing his friends and co-workers, who told me stories I'd never heard. A former boss revealed how he and my father laid off 30 workers, agonizing over the horrible task.
"We cried together," he said.
I never questioned the accuracy of these stories. Why would I? These were my father's closest friends. But memory is unreliable — we twist events based on our own perspectives, our own sense of what's "real." Once that narrative goes from the mind to the page, the dead can't correct you; they can't say, "Wait — that's not how I remember it…"
In the months after Dad's death, my mom found letters he'd written, then stashed in a drawer. He wrote of his impoverished childhood, another subject he rarely discussed. Some of it is heartbreaking — "Hunger, no money for food because Daddy was out of work" — but he revealed how the experiences shaped him.
I'm listening to some old country music tonight that is triggering massive memories of my childhood. Sometimes the flashbacks are so strong I wish I could record it. If you could see them, you would probably cry in sadness where I could cry in happiness. Although the times were tough, they were good because they made me what I am. Therefore, they bring me happiness.
As I learned more about my father, I began to feel not that I was revealing his secrets, but that I was sharing his private wisdom. Dad had certain favorite sayings he told me and my sister, the types of semi-clichés that many parents tell children, though for him they were life-guiding principles. "You can do anything in life if you work hard enough," he'd say. "Always do your best and be your best. If you're gonna do something, do it right."
If you're gonna do something, do it right. That's the approach I took in writing the memoir. And yet I discovered something curious once the book was released: even though it's my story on the page, readers see it through the prisms of their own lives. For all of a memoir's exhibitionism, your tale is interpreted by readers to suit their own needs, their own experiences, their own journey. It's a type of literary scavenging: they keep what serves them and reuse it for new purposes.
But it is still your story. And in telling mine, I grew closer to Dad. He became not more dead, as Lewis warned, but something entirely different. He became more real.
Ken Budd is the author of "The Voluntourist — A Six-Country Tale of Love, Loss, Fatherhood, Fate, and Singing Bon Jovi in Bethlehem."
A version of this article appears in print on 12/01/2013, on page SR9 of the NewYork edition with the headline: When Writers Expose the Dead.
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