In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 220.
For many years I’ve taught a seminar for college students called Writing About Family. My students often come to the course with family stories they feel driven to contemplate, reframe, upend, make beautiful, and share. Having only recently moved away from their families of origin, many find the subject of family itself to both compel their writing and inhibit it. Our first major assignment, a portrait piece scaffolded around interviewing someone about family, lands us in the thick of our most pressing, unresolvable questions: What happens when one’s view differs from a family member’s account? What if you want to interview someone who is reticent, disapproving, estranged, or dead? What exactly can be “copy” when family is involved? Is it a moral imperative to draw a boundary between stories that “belong to you” and a family member’s experiences?
These questions haunt me, too, as someone who feels compelled to write about family, particularly about family members who have passed away, who live in ongoing tension with one another, or who remain—as family members inevitably do—staunchly enigmatic. The goal of this writing exercise is to gather questions that arise when writing about family and take them as inspiration rather than as quelling quandaries. One of my favorite methods involves imagining an impossible conversation.
We take as our model Briallen Hopper’s essay “Dear Octopus,” from her book Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (Bloomsbury, 2019). In her essay Hopper conjures “a form of intimacy that consists of being harangued by someone in a bathrobe. A brother.” The essay begins where conversation ends. After growing up with the “soul-sustaining reprieve” of her brother’s companionship and conversation, the writer finds herself separated from her other half of a sibling dyad. In the midst of an ideological schism, conversation has become impossible. As a centerpiece the essay turns on an imagined conversation in the absence of a real one, a form of rebuttal to the very essay she is writing about their relationship. In this middle section Hopper uses parallel structure as an incantatory refrain: “He might say: I lost her when….”
In many moments, this refrain has proven useful to me. “She might say. They might say.” When working on our portrait pieces, I ask students to annotate their existing piece in the margins with notes that conjure another person’s perspective—a sibling or auntie, a long-deceased ancestor, an observing neighbor, an imagined reader or etherized voice of a “truth universally acknowledged.” These notes can be collected into an imagined conversation expressing what someone else “might say.” Whether or not this exercise becomes part of a finished piece, it has helped me when I become mired in questions of how to capture the inaccessible, how to approach resonant gaps. Helping to frame counternarratives and loving or frustrated correctives, these imagined conversations allow me to approach the elusive and unknown when writing about family.
Rebecca Rainof is a writer and scholar on the faculty in English at the University of California in Berkeley.
image credit: Vincent Botta