Every Day I Write the Book, Part 2

England

I have come to England to revisit my past. My family lived here in the mid-sixties and early seventies and I am writing a novel based on my parents’ marriage at that time. I have not come to reclaim my dead parents, but to let them go. To let their secrets and the extreme privacy that girded their relationship and certainly my father’s past – to let that go too. My memories of them are fixed. There will be nothing more to add, and they will not be around to deny or confirm the stories I carry of them.

My agent and early readers of my novel have told me that I’ve been narratively boxing myself in by hewing to the truth. Which is kind of funny, because it is only my truth. My two brothers’ bubbles of the Venn diagram of our Ur family intersect only at the myth of our family, and then diverge into their own versions of the same events or attachment to events I don’t remember. Meaning, my parents are dead and the three of us already have three different views of them. Aren’t all of them true? Or more accurately, aren’t all our fictions equal?

In London, their ghosts are everywhere. Feeding pigeons at Trafalgar Square, my father reading every damn placard in the National Portrait Gallery and then forcing us to listen to classical concerts while sitting on the cold, hard pews of St Martin’s in the Field. This much – empirical events (there are pictures) – are where my brothers’ and my versions agree.

But underneath the facts (yes, we really did tromp through the snow on the Matterhorn on New Year’s to melt lead and tell fortunes in a local Gasthaus), these are people I only knew one side of – the side every child knows, “the parents”.

Not-knowing is an uncomfortable place for we humans to be. Firstly, we want ourselves to be known deeply. Or at least we want the good parts to be known. I personally would like my children to know seventeen-year-old me who got lost on the wrong train to Paris with no money and no French, but who got herself home to Germany anyway. Or the twenty-four year-old me who, with a group of other actors, mounted two all-female plays at the Wooster Theatre in the Village in the eighties. I don’t talk about these versions of me much, even though I desperately want them to see her (Hell, I want to see her again!), because I know they can’t imagine it. They really can’t. And as much as they love me, they really don’t care that much. 

I don’t know what they think of me, how much they see, but I’m certain it’s not that girl. Guessing, since they find my refusal to familiarize myself with every smartphone boop and swoosh and app and setting, a symptom of early (maybe not “early” to their minds) senility or worse, a terribly worrying intellectual deficit (would I be able to survive a zombie attack – clearly not if survival depended on smartphones). They don’t see the high-school girl who attacked a guy who veered down a dirt road while she and a friend were hitch-hiking, got herself loose by tumbling out of the moving car, and flagged down a driver to get us to safety. They see the older woman who dusts the living room every Sunday in baggy sweats, while watching ‘Law and Order: SVU’ on the television.

It is hard to accept that I am only partly seen by them. By everyone, really, especially as I get older. People used to tell me I looked like Stevie Nicks, now I get, Judi Dench. I’m not complaining. I’m simply saying that there’s a world of difference between those two realities.

How much does any child know their parents? It occurs to me that I’m now fictionalizing my already fictionalized view of my own.

And if parents are desperate to be seen more wholly, we are even mor eager to know our children’s every thought and experience. When they are babies, we know the weight of them, how they like to be held, what they will eat, what soothes them, what scares them. Now that my sons are in their twenties, whole weeks can go by and I haven’t a clue what they were doing or thinking or feeling. It has been three or four years since my oldest even spent the night with us. And so I base my understanding of who he is on the information I glean when we see each other and on what I remember of his younger self. But that may not be the truth of him, the essence of him, at all. When I was his age and visited my parents, I reverted back to who I was as a kid. Not entirely, but enough so that they didn’t see what others saw. Even when my memoir became an LA Times bestseller and was developed into a TV show, my father asked if I was getting paid for all that.

So while we humans don’t like not knowing stuff, we spend a great deal of time in the land of not-knowing, especially when it comes to the people we love. And if you are like me, you resort to making up whole stories that later prove to be wildly inaccurate. I recently said to one of my sons, “So let me see if I understand the reason for you making this next plan.’ And I laid out a whole framework of why he made plans to do this thing, based on what he had expressed in the past – I mean, way past, like ten years past – along with a couple of things he had said at a dinner recently. And he looked at me like, “Where did you get that idea?” and set me straight.

This is why my mother used to say, “Remember, we are all in this alone.” Which she meant to be comforting, by the way. We can’t know each other entirely. We simply can’t. And so, I forge on. Tromping along streets I walked with my mother, peering into the windows of the house we lived in, devouring the British countryside they knew so well. None of which yields any truths that eluded me before. Instead, I find myself more and more able to let my parents float into the vast universe of not-knowing. And when I do that, I can make up whatever I want. Because they are not around to say, “Where did you get that idea?”

Revisiting The Museum Pub, where I would with my parents, as a girl. We would order Shepherd’s Pie. Now they don’t serve it; the menu is much more Eurocentric.