My preference in my own memoir writing is to focus on revealing a portrait of an entire culture and using my life as an example, a microcosm, of that culture. That is why my French Boy’s is titled as it is. That’s the personal part. The book points to the culture in its subtitle: A 1950s Franco-American Childhood. The personal story which is suggested in the title then becomes a sort of trellis through which I intertwined the larger story which is promised in the subtitle.

In this way, a memoir becomes an Everyman /Everywoman story. French Boy, people have written to me, is their story. How did I know so much about them!

My literary direction was already clear.

When I started to write French Boy, I had been thinking of the story as a literary construct for quite a while, and I had formulated during this incubation time that “otherness” was to be a foundational theme to the story. Writing the book fleshed out that theme, and the long, lingering creation allowed me to craft a more dramatic narrative. (Using foreshadowing, suspense, setting, flashbacks, etc.) But…

In the writing process, something unexpected happened—as something unexpected almost always does—that was transformational. I connected with submerged feelings about troubling events in the story.

A summary of events

My parents had a chicken farm, and their chickens were unfortunately taken to an abattoir on the same morning as it was revealed nationally that President Dwight Eisenhower had had a heart attack. That day, the stock market reacted to the news by plummeting to its lowest level since Pearl Harbor fourteen years earlier. By midday, my parents had 7,000 slaughtered chickens and they faced a depressed meat market at which to sell at a huge loss the total of a half year’s work.

They went to bed that night knowing there would be no profit to pay debts. The chicks, the poultry feed, the gas that had heated the chicks, etc., had been bought on credit.

My parents were about to enter a struggle to restore their solvency. It took them five years to pay their creditors. My father said to me, years later, that had the chickens gone out a day earlier or a day later he and my mother would have had a different life.

The trauma of the ensuing financial struggle dominated my childhood and persisted into the present.

Carrying unwanted baggage

Writing French Boy revealed that I was still weighted with troubling feelings about what had happened to my still-quite-young parents. (They were 33 and 34.) As I wrote, I would find myself getting up from my computer, unable to continue with the chapter about the debacle that had occurred that day. I would move on to other chapters, knowing I would have to come back. Sometime. With reluctance. The fact was that, decades later, I was still living the struggle, the poverty, the hopelessness.

I was deeply identified with my parents and their struggle. The healing writing offered me was to separate this struggle into theirs and mine. I began to consciously grieve that this was something that had happened not only to my parents but to me. (I leave my siblings to deal with this on their own.) This let me know that while I could not heal my parents’ trauma, I could work at healing my own. This was powerful.

My adult self took pride that my parents had responded ethically to their financial disaster and had paid back their debts. My father went to his creditors, explained what had happened and affirmed his and my mother’s commitment to paying their debts. He said, “You can sue me, and that will force me to declare bankruptcy. Give me time. You’ll get paid.”

My parents were truly heroes.

In the writing, years after the events, I knew carrying this trauma of what had happened would not help my parents in any way. I was able to say to them (who are now long gone), “I love you, and I can’t help you. I was just a boy. I have to live my own life.” I had always resisted this insight as it seemed selfish. Now, the memoir told me it was my only option.

As I write this, this conclusion sounds trite to me—and still somehow, selfish, but, oh, this resolution to separate the two traumas—theirs and mine—continues to be transformational!

Memoirs offer therapy.

In the writings of my workshoppers, and in my own writing, I have consistently found that memoir writing produces deep changes in the individuals who undertake to explore their lives consciously, honestly and in detail. Writers often tell me that memoir writing provides significant and lasting therapy. They go on to say that it is cheaper than professional therapy, and in the end, you have a book.

In conclusion

So, for me, that was the payoff I received from writing French Boy. I had no idea writing it would lead there.

What a gift—and, in the end, I had a book!

In exchange for a review on Amazon, I will send you an e-copy of French Boy. I ask that you submit a review in a timely fashion and let me know you have done so. Request your review copy at [email protected]  and place “Review Copy/French Boy” in the message line.