Anyone writing a memoir must face the challenge of how to tell the painful truth of his or her story at the same time as one does not want to cause harm or pain. My latest memoir A Sugary Frosting has brought me face to face – personally – with the challenge of telling the […]

It is not always easy to tell the painful truth in a memoir—in fact, it usually isn’t.

Anyone writing a memoir must face the challenge of how to tell the truth of his or her story at the same time as one does not want to cause harm or pain. I have written elsewhere about telling the truth in a memoir. Those posts have been more on the objective level—the theory of telling the truth.

A Sugary Frosting has brought me face to face – personally – with the challenge of telling the truth. I’m not a great fan of “silly me thinking I knew how to tell the truth before I had to face the challenge!” so this is not going there. No, this piece is simply an application of what I  already knew and have written about.

A Sugary Frosting is a book that I co-authored with Martha Blowen, my deceased spouse. The title to the book came from Martha’s journals. There was an entry in which she referred to her childhood as being A Sugary Frosting with life “having to be sweet and sticky.” This definitely was part of the painful truth.

Martha died on August 18, 2008. At the time, she had written parts of her memoir, and I picked it up and finished it. There was no title to the book, and it was I who provided A Sugary Frosting.

Martha felt very strongly that the emotional tone of her childhood had created much difficulty in her life. These difficulties may have contributed to her illness and death. That, of course, is an idea that cannot be verified. But, it definitely was a thought that Martha believed in and shared with me on many occasions. She felt that her childhood, smothered with sugary emotional frosting and the insistence that everything be “nice,” had long led to a difficulty in perceiving life. I go into that in the sequel to A Sugary Frosting which I call My Eye Fell Into the Soup—but I’ll hold off on explaining that title.

Her childhood was one in which she had been taught to deny reality in favor of making every conversation, every interaction, EVERYTHING be pleasant and nice and—especially—positive. This was a unsettling for her. How do I share this painful truth in a memoir?

My perspective

As son-in-law, I experienced this compulsory reframing of whatever was happening as I interacted with her parents –  especially with her mother.

• If one expressed something negative, she was likely to say, “But, you don’t really feel that way!”
• If she wanted you to do something, she would not ask you to do it. She would say, “You will want to do this, I know”.
• If one did very ordinary actions – like parallel parking, or return a damaged good to a store – she might say, “Oh, you do that so well!”

One was oddly left with the impression that she somehow did not approve of what one had just done or that one had done a faux pas.

Martha often felt that her cancer snuck up on her because she had learned to mistrust her own intuition. Whether this is true or not I don’t know. I do know that I myself often experienced doubt about myself when I was in my mother-in-law’s presence. I would have to stop and ask myself, “How do I really feel?”

So in writing A Sugary Frosting, I felt I had no choice but to place this observation—the painful truth—into the text. I knew that this was the reality of Martha’s childhood. At the same time, my own sense of affection for Martha’s mother led me to feel conflicted about telling the the whole story that is so essential to understanding Martha.

Martha’s mother was a woman of considerable talent and accomplishments (e.g., she had the equivalent of an MA), and she had been very kind to Martha and to me. Our children grew up next to their grandmother who was always so generous in childcare. This wonderful person was also the woman that I knew. She was not just the emotionally handicapped person that is occasionally described in A Sugary Frosting but she was a multifaceted complicated woman who is also now present in the book.

This is how complicated telling the painful truth in a memoir can become.

I have found it challenging to do the book promotion for A Sugary Frosting because of this conflict between how to tell the painful truth and honoring a relationship. The complication is all the greater because of my deep relationship to Martha and wanting to honor the truth of her life as she saw it. I could not tell her story without telling the painful truth.

Have you had a similar experience of telling the painful truth in a memoir? Leave your comment below.