Not Memoirs

I have thought lately about writing my memoirs, but I can’t do it because as it turns out no one wants to be in them. Typical writer’s dilemma.

I have volumes of material to draw from after blogging for more than a decade, plus writing elaborate, epic holiday letters every year since 1984. But when I originally started my blog, and mentioned it to my father, he said, “Leave me out of it.” Meanwhile, each year when I complete the first draft of my holiday letter, I send it to my children to read what I said about them so they can make corrections or additions, and so they can veto anything they would prefer I did not say. My daughter vetoes almost everything right off the bat. “Just say I’m alive,” she suggests. Her brothers and my daughter-in-law run a close second at censorship. Everyone has privacy concerns. By the time they get done with it, the paragraphs about them have nothing left in them but adverbs. They rip the heart out of my most humorous anecdotes about them and slash my carefully turned phrases to smithereens. (Don’t tell them about this blog post. Shhh.) What movie they watched last night is private. Where they live, how old they are, where they work, and what kind of cheese is in their fridge are private. Off limits. You would think they are all in the Witness Protection Program. 

This is a classic issue writers face. We write from life. We write from what we know and whom we know. Authentic writing comes from our owned experience that is closest to the bone. But this involves other people, and mainly other people who play a primary role in our lives. And they want to protect their privacy. What a burden this puts on me to come up with vast quantities of engaging fiction out of thin air. Notice that I write a lot in the fantasy and sci-fi genres. I hope I have not offended any alien life forms.

My daughter has a terrific sense of humor. (I’m probably not supposed to disclose this.) Several years ago, I encouraged her to consider doing stand-up comedy. She’s funny. She finally got me to shut up about it by reminding me that most female comics rely on their relationship with their mother for most of their best material. Way to turn the tables, huh? A few weeks ago, she asked me if I could modify an old blog post in which I revealed her age so as not to reveal her age. Since the blog post was a personal reflection on her birthday (from her mom), I didn’t see how that would work. So I simply deleted the entire blog post. She seems to think that the whole wide world reads my blog. Honestly, on a good day, my father and maybe a couple of penguins read my blog. Consider yourself an aberration if you are reading this (unless you are a penguin). I felt confident that it will not hurt my chances of winning the Nobel if I deleted the blog post about my daughter’s birthday, so I did it to make her happy. All I want is for my children to be happy, like any Jewish mom worth her weight in kugel.

My husband has been a real mensch all these years living with a writer. He has stoically suffered a vast array of indignities in the service of humor on my blog and in my holiday letters as well as in other personal essays and autobiographical writing. It’s so easy to turn the idiosyncrasies, actions, and quirky personality traits, of someone I know so well, live with daily, and see so close up into funny stories. None of us could live perfectly moment to moment without doing occasional ridiculous, inexplicable, and just plain weird things. No one can live up to that kind of scrutiny. And here he is stuck with a writer-wife who is just waiting to pounce and harvest the stuff of his everyday life to go for a laugh. If he has the misfortune to drop a raisin on the floor, and makes picking it up look like an Olympic acrobatic event because he is old and doesn’t bend anymore, I can’t restrain myself from asking him to look around to see what else he can do while he’s down there; and then writing about it. I want to take this opportunity to thank him for being such a good sport. I might go so far as to call him my muse, but in truth, he’s pretty much mostly my amusement (which does in fact have the word “muse” in it, so there is an argument to be made there if he’s so inclined).

I should write my memoirs and then seal them in a time capsule with instructions for my great-grandchildren to dig them up in a hundred years and have them published. Sadly, they will have to remove all the football references since no one will have any idea what that’s about. Also, if my current backlog of rejection letters is any indication of the whims of the publishing industry, no one in publishing thinks I’m funny, and that may not change in a hundred years. It occurs to me now that I could make a living writing more entertaining rejection letters for publishers if they would let me, which they certainly would not. I would probably get rejection letters for my rejection letters. Honestly, a potato could write a more entertaining rejection letter than the ones I get from these publishers.

I suppose I must also face the fact that the planet may no longer exist as we know it in a hundred years. So if I create a time capsule, I would have to consider my audience, which could turn out to be algae and cockroaches, neither of which are famous for their literacy skills. Any way that I look at it, my memoirs are doomed to the ash heap of history. I won’t ever get to tell my version, and in a hundred years, if people are still around and I have descendants, they will hear the stories of my life through the filter of my children, grandchildren, great-grands; like a colossal game of telephone (does anyone even remember that game these days?). I hope the stories will retain a grain of truth and a dose of humor. Someone else will have to win that Nobel for telling the story of my life, because I would rather have my children feel secure in the fact that I have not revealed their favorite colors in a tell-all memoir. I am a Jewish mom before I am a humorist. So I’m zipping it. You will just have to imagine that I had a good life and that I’m funny. I sincerely hope you are not a penguin.