Stories I Have Heard

So many people write from their own family stories or, increasingly, write their family stories. In the current age of reality television and the Oprah-zation of America, everyone seems destined, even determined, to blast out a memoir telling the rest of the world gruesome tidbits about Mommie or Daddy dearest.

This trend is, on the whole, a bad one, with very few exceptions. Fictionalizing true stories, family or otherwise, is, however, another issue altogether.


A few years ago, an old Athens family auctioned the contents of a beautiful Victorian home on Prince Avenue in preparation for selling the house, which is located on a street long ago given over to businesses rather than homes. I don't now how much of the story I heard at the auction is true, but someone told me that the mother of the owner who had just passed away--or maybe the grandmother--jumped off the balcony with her newborn in her arms, in the throes of what we would now can postpartum depression. The mother died of a broken neck while the baby lived.


Not sure why that story stayed in my mind, but eventually, it emerged in a story, changed it's true: a schizophrenic mother jumped off the balcony when the daughter was almost grown, after years of living with the awful secret of her mother's illness. Why change the story? No reason. The true story, with obscure facts--and misinformation, no doubt--simply served as a kernel for the fictive story. What fascinated me about the story was the idea of the daughter's knowing that her mother jumped off the balcony and broke her neck. Did the daughter, when she grew old enough to hear about her mother, care? Did the burden of guilt remain a pebble in her heart? Maybe the mother's story seemed like fiction to a daughter who never knew her. The daughter's emotional response--that's what I pondered in my subconscious. How would I feel if I had been that daughter and the mother, my mother?


More than borrowing stories, the author borrows emotions and attitudes from his or her own life--emotions and attitudes that emerge and give shape to our work no matter how far from our lives our characters' lives are. Authentic emotions make fiction real, just as the lack of authentic emotions causes authors to create fiction that's false or bland.


I don't think authors should use their work as an excuse to throw open the family's Pandora's Box. I do think good authors can use that Pandora's Box to inform and create their work.