April 2006: Turning Inward (cont.)

Years ago I heard the novelist Harry Mark Petrakas speak at a writers’ conference. He told about being with his father when his father was dying, about lifting this man, who had once been enormous but whom he could now hold easily in his arms, and carrying him from his bed to a chair. He gazed at the shrunken figure, a grieving son, but, inevitably, unavoidably, a writer, too. And the writer found himself taking careful note of the papery crumple of skin, the press of bone, the eggplant stain of the eyelids. He was both fascinated and shamed by his fascination. But he was a writer, so his mind went on recording.

I have made it a solemn rule of my writing life never to draw my stories from my children’s lives. When she was about eleven, my daughter, Beth-Alison, used to beg me to write about her. “Mom,” she would say, “write a story about me. You could call it Heavens to Elisabeth.” And I would answer, “I can’t write about you. I don’t know you well enough.” I knew Beth-Alison about as well as any mother can know a young daughter, but I knew her, inevitably, from the outside. If I had tried to write about her, I would have invested her not with her own but with my insides, and the result would have been simultaneously an invasion and a forgery.