How To Write About Your Childhood Without Blowing Up Your Family

A MEMOIRIST EXPLAINS THE TRAPS AND TRIBULATIONS OF WRITING THE HARD STUFF ABOUT YOUR PARENTS, SIBLINGS, AND LOVED ONES.

This article appears in Lightward Journal Vol. 1. Preview it in print at the end of this page, and head over to lightward.shop to order.

Ever so often I do an “ask me anything” session on Instagram. I do it to entertain myself during a layover or some stretch of hours that needs filling. I get all kinds of questions about where I want to go next (Tokyo), my current Spotify rotation (MUNA), or how I process religious trauma (booze). A lot of the questions center around writing: how to find the courage to write about one’s life, how to find an agent, a publisher. But there is one question I get over and over again: how do you write honestly about family when you know they might read it?

This is the biggest challenge of the memoirist. Your job is to write about your life—what has happened to you and who has happened to you—and your life involves real people, tethered people. And when you write about the people who have impacted your life (especially family), it must involve hurt because no one survives childhood unscathed. No parent raises a child without fumbling. But for most people, the failings of family life rarely go beyond the thick air of the Thanksgiving table—what is said in the kitchen under the breath, or gossipped about between siblings. It is a different thing altogether to air the family’s business by writing it down for strangers to read and judge, to name the hurt and the source of that hurt: your father, your mother, your sibling, your ex.

But you must. Sanitized writing is not worth reading. You won’t find readers and you won’t get published, and more importantly—you won’t impact anyone, including yourself. Unless the pain is looked at and shared, it is behind the barn and festering. Trust me: what is unsaid is not smothered. It is coming out sideways. 

So how do you do it? How do you write truthfully and not get exiled? 

I was reading the introduction to Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur a number of years ago, and the literature professor was describing Kerouac’s style. He said, “he was a tender writer. It would be hard to find a mean-spirited word about anybody in all his writing.” That stuck with me. He wrote about people doing drugs and drinking to oblivion and destroying their own lives—and he did it with a curious, even loving, warmth. 

I remember hearing Glennon Doyle say, “write from your scars, not your wounds.” She was addressing the tendency to overshare on social media, to post on TikTok and cry into the camera about this morning’s fight or last night’s break up—to ask strangers for emotional support as you navigate a divorce. That’s what IRL friends and safe family are for. The internet is not a support system. The distance of a screen promotes mockery, lack of context, and whatever the opposite of empathy is. 

Scars are healed, tough, and yet you have the memory of the hurting and the wherewithal to address the cause. If you are still in the middle of the pain, you are angry—and anger is an emotion evolved to remove us from the cause of the pain. To flail the arms, push away, rage, seek revenge—to say “fuck you and fuck off.” This is the emotional equivalent of the hand on the hot stove, the bee sting: you are reacting. And as I’m sure you can imagine, people who jerk away from a stove or bee are prone to knock over a glass. They aren’t seeing the room in its full context of breakable things because they’re moving at the speed of pain. 

That said, when writing about family and real human relationships, we don’t always have a nice clean scar to learn from. Some pain is dull and unending, and some wounds fester. The key is: are you clear-headed enough to write with curiosity, to write with the knowledge that whoever hurt you is the hero of their own story? To not have a mean thing to say about anybody?

There is a difference between honest and mean. Honest is what happened as best you can remember. Honest is how something made you feel. Honest is owning your role and fairly seeing theirs. Mean, on the other hand, is speaking from a place of pain with the intent to damage. Mean is writing at the person who hurt you in hopes of hurting them back, rather than writing to the reader. Mean does not make for good writing.

When writing my first book, I recreated a lot of dialogue between my mom and me: moments from growing up where we had fights over God, church, and my sexuality—some of the hardest conversations of my life. My publisher told me that I had to get her written approval of the book. Publishers do this when a real person, who isn’t a public figure, is a major character of a memoir. There are so many moving parts to getting a book to market, and such a tight schedule, that a defamation lawsuit must be avoided. So, if you write extensively about a living non-famous person, chances are your publisher will ask for written permission. If you happen to be the child of Donald Trump or Meryl Streep, you can write a bit more freely. The Supreme Court ruled that if you write false or misleading things about a famous person, the statement must be false and you must prove actual malice toward them, which is a very intense burden for the prosecution.  

I thought I’d done a great job of writing about my mother, with love and honesty. I thought she’d be happy—but when she read it, she wasn’t. For one, she said she thought I should take out all of the homosexuality stuff, because that would make the book unpopular. I told her that would remove the truth of my life. I asked her about my portrayal of her, and she told me she felt made fun of, mocked. 

I asked my editor for advice. What the hell do I do now? I have to be faithful to my experience and I can’t remove these conversations from the book. He said, “Ask her what specifically she’d like to change. What wording? She can change her words, but not yours. Put the power in her hands.” And so I did. This gave my mother agency over her own portrayal, and it made the book better. She didn’t take out sections or deny any scenes happened. It was “I wouldn’t say that” or “I wouldn’t say it like that.” Her edits didn’t take the heat out of our arguments, but rather gave her idiosyncratic language all her own.

My dad didn’t even read the manuscript. He didn’t care how he was portrayed. He knows I love him and he’s beyond caring what other people think of him. This isn’t from some elevated Buddhist stance—he is simply tired of caring. In his golden years he has zero fucks left, in any direction. Some people are going to care, others won’t.

There are other tricks to writing the truth. I write about things my friends are going through, not always what’s happening to me, and therefore isn’t my story to tell. But sometimes the anecdote or lesson is too provoking to ignore. In cases like this, I change the gender and some of the facts so that the lesson of the story can be conveyed without giving the person away. If you have a guy friend in Miami who stole money from his asshole boss, make him a girl in Seattle. Tell the story, but change the markers.

Anne Lamott says, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” That makes me chuckle and nod my head. But the reality of family and friendship is that it’s hard for a lot of us to blame evil intent for our pain. It’s usually misunderstanding, generational trauma, insecurity, mental illness. 

My friend Margie once told me: “If you knew everything you’d comprehend everything, if you comprehended everything, you’d understand everything, and if you understood everything, you’d forgive everything.” This is the posture I try to write from—looking at my life with curiosity and care.  “Imperial distance” as Mary Oliver would say. I own what happened to me, but I also own how I portray others. Say it in a way, with a little distance, that brings you closer to the people in your life who have shaped your life. See your own experiences as a narrative, with your family as key players, without which you wouldn’t have a story. The muscular lessons of loyalty and boundaries and choosing love in spite of hurt. 

When my first book came out, I was still worried about my mom. I was putting her in the spotlight and she didn’t ask for that. What if people disliked her? What if someone wrote an op-ed piece about my book, focusing on toxic religious family members? What if, what if, what if? 

Well, none of that happened. People loved her. They identified her as just like their mom, or just like themselves. They knew she caused my pain and they still loved her because they recognized the goodness in her. She got messages and emails from people saying how much they appreciate her. I wrote the hard things about her with love, and it worked. I was proud that my intention manifested: I wanted to portray her honestly. To show both my love for her and frustrations with her, braided together and bound. It seemed to work. 

But it could have gone another way. Some people are so sensitive, so controlling, that they’ll hate you for writing about them in any way other than worship. Sometimes there is nothing you can do but risk the heat or not write. If disappointing someone is out of the question, perhaps writing isn’t for you. But if you’re willing to risk discomfort in the name of truth-telling, in the belief that true stories help others and heal ourselves, then writing can bring you great purpose. If you write about real people and hard things with love, they should give you the space to do so. And if they don’t, maybe they need to be uncomfortable. Maybe they need to read those hard things and be angry and face the consequences of their actions. 

It’s about weighing these two things: discomfort and importance. Is what you write important to you, to the world, to someone going through it? Is it worth squirming for, having a hard conversation for? If you want to write it, chances are you think it is important. I write to process my wounds, to get what has happened to me out of me, to take a look at it and see what’s really going on. And I write so that maybe a young queer kid with an upbringing like mine might feel less alone. I write to heal me by knowing me. I write to maybe heal you, too.

Experience this essay in print via Lightward Journal, available at lightward.shop!