Life Histories

A recommendation I’ve often heard is that a person should make it a point to talk with their older family members to gather their life stories while their elders are still alive. Large parts of a family history often go missing when those generational links are separated. Finding Your Roots, a TV series moderated by Dr Henry Louis Gates, is well known for investigating the family trees of various guests where that generational missing information is often the impetus for the guest’s story.

I mentioned Finding Your Roots here because when the ancestry investigation uncovers a guest’s generational missing information it is invariably a story of intense struggle, misery, and grief. The thing that then becomes obvious is that there was a clearly understandable reason the family members didn’t discuss their pasts; it would have been immensely painful to bring it all back and would serve no real purpose in their current life. In many cases, that family member had struggled not only to survive, but to reinvent themselves.

Like most authors, I have a list of book ideas that I want to write at some point. For a long time I’ve wanted to write a book about my mother, who died of leukemia at age 67 in 2000. My childhood was extremely difficult, and after leaving home in my mid-twenties I was mostly estranged from my mother. But I didn’t want to write a “misery memoir” on the order of Mommy Dearest; I wanted to truly understand how she came to be the person I knew. Since I could no longer ask my mother, I needed to talk to her sisters, my aunts, who are now well into their eighties and nineties.

I had a Finding Your Roots experience when I spoke with my aunts. It took a promise that I wouldn’t write details of my aunts’ own experiences before they were comfortable talking about their childhood with my mother, because I was essentially asking them to reexperience their own traumas. I did come away with a much better understanding of my mother’s life, as well as my aunts’. I also got yet another look into the generational descent of abuse and how the damage accumulates. After those talks, the premise for my book necessarily morphed from “why was my mother so incredibly dysfunctional” to “how did she manage to function at all”.