Writing The Family

"Do you ever worry that your family is going to get mad when they find out you're writing about them?" my friend Pedro asks.

The reason he asks is because he's worried. He thinks someday his mother or his father or his grandfather or one of his obscure cousins is going to find something he wrote--a poem about how strange his family is--and they're going to be very, very displeased.

I've already been through this once with a family member. My mother, in fact. It turns out my mother wasn't exactly wild about a story in my thesis collection, a story that's titled "Good Mother," a story that's loosely based on my relationship with my mother post-divorce and on the ugly side of my relationship with the Wily Republican.

"Well," she said after she came to that story in my thesis. "I never knew you hated your mother, but it's so clear now."

She was half joking, half not. She didn't like the way I painted her, and she certainly didn't like the way I described her "new" life: living with her boyfriend in a trailer, consumed with packing her things away because she didn't have room for all her "nice" things anymore.

I wrote the story shortly after she broke the news about the trailer to me. I was appalled. My mother is not a woman who lives in a trailer, no matter what the circumstances are.

"It'll only be for two years," she promised. "Three tops."

As soon as she said that I knew it would be longer than that. I think she knew, too. If our lives were being played out on the big screen, that's when the music would crescendo over her last words--Three, tops--and the director would cue the passing-of-seasons-montage. We'd see the trailer in three icy winters, three muddy springs, three crisp falls, and then there'd be a dramatic pause--pause!--and then another icy winter, another muddy spring, another crisp fall.

I saw all that in my head. I saw it and I felt the need to explore my feelings about it in story form.

My mother was not pleased. Not pleased at all.

It could have been worse though. She only moped for about two weeks. Every time I saw her, she mentioned that I was a girl who hated her mother (Example: "Adam, your sister and I are making a pie tonight. Did you know she hates me?") and she would pout and let out extravagant sighs. Then, thankfully, she picked my thesis back up and moved on to other stories that didn't have anything to do with her. In fact, they didn't have anything to do with anyone she knew, except that maybe they had a little bit to do with me, but she didn't really think about that.

Basically because I handed my thesis over to her on this condition: she was not to automatically assume that every narrator, every I, every girl character was based on me. "Especially the sexy parts," I told her, hugging the book to my chest. "Do not picture your daughter engaged in the sexy parts. That's just wrong."

And none of the sexy parts or the stories that were so obviously based on things that have happened to me bothered her. It was just the one story, the story based loosely on her, on me, on the post-divorce happenings, that made her sulk for two weeks.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, so I'm pretty confident I can make it through anything else now. So I tell Pedro that.

"Well," I say, "they already know I'm writing about them. And so far it's been okay. Well, my brother doesn't know about his story, but my brother doesn't care about things if they aren't Hooters or beer, so I don't really anticipate a problem there."

It's true. My brother has a story. I'm working on it. I'm amused by it. It came about because it seems like the only thing I want to write about since I've moved home is my family. I blame the new proximity, the family functions, and being thrust into their strange social circles again after three years of distance.

I'm writing a lot of family stories that are based on hypothetical questions.

My brother's story started when I asked myself this question: "What if a person like me was forced to move in with a person like my brother after he dropped out of college?"

(The answer is in the very first line: At this point in her life, Jayne O’Neil is sharing an apartment with her brother. This is what she thinks of that: It’s awful. It sucks. It’s ruining her life.)

I've recently started another family story based on a hypothetical situation: a family Christmas party gone horribly wrong. This one revolves around three girl cousins--two artists, one doctor--who are trying to understand where they fit in the world and in their own family. I can't even tell you how much fun I'm having with it. It started out loosely based on my family and my two close-in-age cousins on my father's side (not to mention my grandmother), but it's quickly progressed into a story not at all about us, but more about one very spoiled and bitchy granddaughter, another granddaughter who thinks she's the favorite, and one calm, cool, collected granddaughter who is the actual favorite.

Pedro knows I'm writing that one, too. I think he's worried that my cousins will be in an uproar after they read it, that they will no longer want to speak to me, but that story has unraveled so far past the truth of our family dynamics that no one would ever recognize the people the characters were originally slated to be. And I'd hope they think it's funny.

So do I worry? No. Not right now. And besides, even though they might have originally thought my little "writing thing" was going to be a quaint on-the-side hobby and have since been proven wrong, my family has known for years that anything they do or say in front of me is considered possible material. And if they didn't want to become shadowy versions of themselves in a piece of fiction, then, for God's sake, they shouldn't have been so bizarre.