(HOST) This winter, commentator Bill Mares has been working on a family history, a project that has taught him a lot about both his family – and the craft of writing.
(MARES) In the last few months my older brother and I have been assembling our family history. We’ve both sailed past the age of 70 with only minor cuts and abrasions. But our father died on his 73rd birthday. And our other brother died at 18. So, the candle of mortality cast its guttering light on this project.
In family history, as in all writing, we discovered there are only three questions: Who’s your audience? What to put in? And what to take out?
Since we didn’t plan to publish our history, we only needed to please ourselves, as well as our children, grandchildren, cousins, their cousins… well, you get the idea.
So what did we include? The writer Russell Baker said the autobiographer – or family historian – knows too much, that is the whole iceberg, not just the tip. First we reviewed what we knew – like the stories passed down for years at the family dinner table; and then what we had – like family letters; and finally how much research we wanted to do – while keeping in mind that information inevitably varies with generations. Some are replete with records – others are as uninformative as gravestones.
We had waited too long to interview our parents or grandparents – a wonderful resource if you still have them – so we turned to our cousins, who see family events from a different vantage point. Some stories didn’t need much context; others demanded it. We gathered a wealth of anecdotes, travel stories and family memories. And then we selected the bits that interested us most and could perhaps show something of why we are who we are.
We’ve been lucky in the written record. Our father’s brother wrote a 30-page history of their family’s emigrant story. Our mother made a similar record of her early life and ancestors.
Then, finally, it was time to tell the stories of our own lives. Here withered grass turned into lush weeds and vivid flowers – and we were drowning in material. Choosing what to include was much tougher.
So we tried to decide what we would tell a best friend if we were trading stories. And we took a longer view, shifting our audience from children to grandchildren and beyond – trying not to get bogged down in too much detail, and being as concrete as possible.
We added the honey and vinegar of a few successes and a few failures. And we tried to find the right tone between a tinny false-modesty and brassy bragging.
It was fun to do. And we got to decide how much to smudge our own page of history. Some family stories are mostly myth anyway, an accounting of things that never really were but will always be. The result is a treasure hunt of part memory, part research. But it’s not quite a memoir, which requires much more labor, and genuine creation. Indeed, the title of William Zinsser’s revealing collection of essays about the memoir as a literary form is Inventing the Truth.