You Own Everything That Happened To You

I have long been struggling to tell the story of my childhood in Alaska, writing myself in circle after circle, trying to narrow in on something that I can only sense, not see; it’s still just off to the side, still just out of reach. My agent and I have parted ways; she was patient for many years, but wanted a different book than the one I think I need to write.

One of the writers I turn to again and again in my quest to find the arc of what I am trying to do is Alexandra Fuller, whose Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight is a brutally raw portrayal of her family’s life as unsettled white settlers in Zimbabwe (when it was Rhodesia), Malawi, and Zambia. The book, and the subsequent books (which focus, in turn, on her mother’s story, the end of her (Fuller’s) marriage, her father’s story and his death, and most recently, on her adult son’s death from a seizure) made her an outcast in her family. While her work brought her closer to distant English cousins and closer to a sense of her own purpose, she is now estranged from her mother and sister, who won’t forgive her, it seems, for her art, her way of contending with the tragedies, the endless drama that had been their family’s “independent weather system.”

Rejection is a risk memoirists take. Frank McCourt’s mother, Angela, denounced his and his brother Malachy’s stories of their childhood as “a pack of lies” (she died a few years before Angela’s Ashes was published, but Frank and Malachy had been very public about the horrors of the Limerick slum they were raised in). There’s a robust discourse in memoir circles about the ethics of telling family secrets, where the line is, who owns the stories, and so on.

But as so many memoirists have said in various ways, your family and friends have their own experiences of the past, and they aren’t your audience. Your audience is anyone who recognizes something in your story, something about themselves maybe, something that feels familiar, something that helps them know they are not crazy or alone. And memoirists often find support and encouragement in Anne Lamott’s saying “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

You own everything that happened to you. It seems straightforward, at first. But what about intergenerational trauma? Secrets in previous generations that informed your childhood, whether you were aware or not? How do you define “happened to you”? Did something that happened to your parents “happen” to you, in the form of their anger, their anxiety, their nightmares, their grief…? What about things that happened to your spouse, or their parents, things that informed how they treated you and the children you had together?

One of the secrets I’ve learned about secrets, as I relentlessly revisit the past in pretty much all my waking hours, is that their power lies not so much in what they are, but the weight people give them. We have some agency over how we let the past control us, but just some, I think. What I have observed, in talking to people from where I grew up, for example, is that “dirty secrets” are dangerous only if they remain secret, or if we decide that the details are not important anymore. “Dirty secrets” is literally the phrase someone used to describe things they were pointedly not going to tell me, looking smug and triumphant as they delivered this news. This was someone from my parents’ generation, someone who witnessed and experienced decades of dark, painful, violent things. In that moment, I realized that what this person was trying to weaponize had already done all the damage it was going to do to me (I can’t speak for other people). The details they coveted and held onto so dearly, for their own trauma-related reasons, were irrelevant.

People say things like “the stories I could tell…” and I don’t understand why they don’t just tell them, except to acknowledge that maybe it’s like waving a loaded gun, which is something only people who are afraid to shoot do.

Fuller’s father, whose feelings about religion were that there is quite enough to be getting on with in this life rather than worrying about the next one, was not like my father in that way, but I recognize the Fullers’ family dynamic, the father-worship, the devastation of his loss. In Travel Light, Move Fast, the story of his death from pneumonia on a trip to Hungary in 2017, Fuller writes “The death of the force behind a family is not something the average Anglo-Saxon family will withstand; Shakespeare knew this and wrote about it, it’s all over the Bible, so perhaps it’s a Judeo-Christian trait. The family falls; that’s inevitable; but it either falls together or falls apart. That isn’t a choice, though; it depends on the family’s fault lines.”

My family didn’t fall together, which is not to say it fell apart, but the re-configuration is in process, fault lines shifting, new cracks opening down to whatever bedrock there might be. The next generations will contend, or not, with the legacy of us, what we did, what we said, what we tolerated, what we didn’t.

Tell me a story about a time you told what happened to you and people listened. That’s a story I want to hear.

Tell me a story about a time you told what happened to you and no one listened. That’s also a story I want to hear.

Can I tell the story of what happened to me? I don’t know. I have tried and failed, again and again, though it’s possible that the failing is part of the story now, my story, the one that some people listen to and others ignore. But I don’t write for the ones who refuse to hear; I write for anyone who needs to hear a story about making your way in a world where, despite the meanness and suffering, there are kind, healed people and kind, unhealed people and they all walk with you, ahead, behind, around, as you are becoming the person you want to be, as you are learning to be exactly who you are.

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