Deborah Tall - A Family of Strangers

Interview

This memoir traces a lifelong struggle for you that begins early in childhood. At what point in your life did you begin to write this memoir? Did you start years ago, or was the book written all at once, with a concentration on remembering what things you discovered at different points in your life?

I wrote this book over a twelve-year period, beginning in 1993, three years after my father’s death. It was prompted by a phone call, about a year after he died, from a previously unknown cousin. Nat filled in a large piece of missing family history—he had known my grandparents, who had died while my father was still young. He knew other cousins and my father’s half-brother, whom I’d never met. Questioning Nat motivated me to begin serious research. I subsequently met other relatives and traveled to Ukraine in 1996. I was writing parts of the book in those early years, documenting the ongoing process of discoveries, but was dissatisfied with it as a memoir and put it aside for a while. It took quite a few years before its present form took shape in my mind. I ended up throwing out a few hundred pages of writing in favor of a minimalist, lyric narrative. The process of editing and shaping the material and then finalizing the book took another four years.


Your prose gorgeously limns the border between poetry and prose, showing the facts of your memoir in tight, lyrical sections. What drew you to write in this way? And how do you think the form you chose informs the content?

I’ve been drawn to poetic prose since early in my writing life. The novels of Kawabata inspired me, as did novels like William Goyen’s House of Breath. My early attempts to write poetic fiction in the seventies were pretty roundly rejected, so I gave that up, but prose that edged toward poetry always fascinated me. When I began writing and teaching creative nonfiction, I started thinking about it again. My development as a poet had led me to value concision and understatement, which initially seemed at odds with the narrative task of nonfiction, but some of my favorite essayists (Dillard, Didion, Griffin) write with the density, structural logic, and rhythms of poetry. Working with my one-time student John D’Agata, I explored the notion of poetic nonfiction further and began publishing lyric essays in Seneca Review. There’s tremendous energy and innovative work in this sub-genre among young writers now. Simultaneously, I began to distill the hundreds of pages of drafts I had accumulated for A Family of Strangers into what was most essential, and I reconsidered my narrative choices. Finally, the form I chose—a series of short glimpses and meditations—seemed right for the material. The experience I’m portraying was fragmentary, gradual, and perplexing, so it makes sense that the prose echoes that pace and tentativeness. The section titles serve to link various motifs over time. And research was such an important part of the process that it was important to me to find a way to include the voices of other writers, but not in a conventional academic way. So I gave most of the quotations a section to themselves. I think of those voices as akin to the Greek chorus—they walk on stage to comment on what’s going on in the narrative, to lend insight, and to provoke the next move.


A Family of Strangers documents the challenging process of uncovering your family history, but there is also a lot of other research you did for this book, particularly to understand the psychology and politics of 1950s suburbia. What did you learn about that era? And do you think modern society is still under those same pressures?

It’s interesting that we’ve suddenly found ourselves in an era with a number of echos of the fifties. The fear-mongering, threats to civil liberties, and attacks on women’s rights and aspirations all seem eerily familiar. That wasn’t the case when I was first working on the book, but it really resonated as I was finishing it, and I thought hard about how those elements shaped my childhood and family dynamic. I’ve also thought a lot about suburbia over the years. My previous book of nonfiction, From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place, was prompted by my flight from suburban blandness, and I teach a course on sense of place. I think we’re very much shaped by our literal surroundings.


One of the themes in this memoir is about the importance of family members bearing witness to each other's lives. When secrets are kept and histories are not shared, isolation ensues. Do you think there are instances when traumas should not be shared? Is there ever a time when it is best to truly let the past die?

I’m no psychologist, of course, and each situation has its own perils and dynamics. Many people, though, believe that the truth needs to be acknowledged before one can fully heal from past traumas. Yet, that thinking is the product of our age; it was certainly not the thinking at the time my father was orphaned, quite the opposite. The ability to forget and move on was valorized. That aim seems to have shaped the entire post-World War II generation. I found the ensuing silences, even as a child, frustrating, sometimes infuriating. Yet I wanted, through the book, not to judge my father but to understand him. He lived by a different social code of another era. I understood that if he explored his own pain he might come undone.


On that same note, neurotically remembering every detail or forgetting (repressing) everything are both forms of madness. Could you talk about the balance between the two? Does forgiveness require loss of memory? Does healing require remembering?

I do believe that memory is essential to healing and that it leads to forgiveness. Repression makes us act blindly. Knowing oneself includes acknowledging painful facts. Yet dwelling on the past can cripple us. There does have to be a delicate balance. It’s probably an ongoing process throughout our lives—remembering, incorporating, learning from, moving forward with a new degree of knowledge and clarity. The book enacts a piece of that process for me. It was extremely painful at times to write it. Some days I’d just sit at my desk and cry. Yet it’s rewarded me with peace.


Do you feel differently toward your father after discovering his history? And has writing it all down influenced that?

Yes, certainly. With every new discovery, there was a necessary realignment of my view of him. Sometimes I felt quite angry, other times sorrowful, pitying, but also guilty about exposing his past. He wasn’t here to question and argue with, or to ask permission of. But writing about him was also a form of reincarnation, an aspect of grieving. While I was writing about him, he remained vividly in my life. Ultimately, the research and writing helped me to understand and forgive his flaws. It released me from a fixation I didn’t previously understand and freed me to love him for what he was.

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