I have been playing around with the idea of writing a memoir about my colorful childhood for more than a decade, writing up brief, mostly comic episodes about bats and Christmas trees and the conversion of our family barn into House Beautiful. But I don’t seem to be able to find the connective tissue that would make those episodes into something cohesive. The problem, really, is that a lot of that connective tissue is pretty dark, and I haven’t been sure how to write that stuff. And that I am constantly aware of what I think of as the Rashomon factor.
Rashomon is a Japanese film from 1950 staring the brilliant Toshiro Mifune, in which the same story is told from four different perspectives. A samurai is found murdered in a forest; a priest, a bandit, the wife of the samurai, and the samurai himself (through a medium) tell their versions of the story, in none of which they are the villains. Every single event ever has many different versions. Especially in families. In writing a memoir you either have to be rock-solid in your conviction that your version is the true one, or ready to deal with the anger or anguish of family response.
There was a fascinating article in The New York Times on a new book by Molly Jong-Fast, about growing up as the daughter of writer Erica Jong. In the ’70s Erica Jong was sort of a literary “It” girl, the author of the novel Fear of Flying, and the creator of the phrase “zipless fuck.” Continue reading “Is Turnabout Fair Play?”…