Carole Duff: Writing a Memoir Partly About a Person I Never Met

Carole Duff
WRITING A MEMOIR PARTLY ABOUT A PERSON I NEVER MET

I found the journals while cleaning closets during spring break. Six 9-by-6-inch books written by my new husband’s daughter, who had taken her life at age twenty-four. A person I’d never met. When I asked Keith about them, he said Gretchen had told him she wanted to tell herself the truth, so he’d encouraged her to keep a journal. I nodded then asked for permission to read them. “Oh yes,” he said, “reading Gretchen’s journals is the best way to get to know my daughter. And you can ask me anything you’d like.” Keith didn’t speak about Gretchen much but enjoyed talking about her when he did. Of course, I was curious.

On the first morning of my next break—our Fourth of July vacation—I stacked the six books in chronological order and dipped into each, one after another. I quickly discovered that although Gretchen had written for herself, she expected to have readers. But, as I read along, her honest admissions and sexual pleasure-seeking brought out the worst in me— judgment, jealousy, anger—qualities I worked hard to hide. I abandoned one book then another and another. When Gretchen described an unsuccessful suicide attempt in her final book, a flashback to the childhood nightmare I hadn’t had in years spiraled me into a panic. I closed the book and packed up the journals. This was more than I’d bargained for.

And yet, knowing my relationship with Keith would be less if I distanced myself from his loss, I made a firm promise to read the journals, all six books, every word from beginning to end, after I resigned my long-commute job the following year. Keith and I were building a house together, and I would oversee the project.

While house building and reading the journals that following year, I decided to write about Gretchen and include some reflections inspired by her words—about her, but not a biography; just Keith’s Gretchen stories and her journal entries. Certainly not those thoughts or feelings I worked hard to hide. For several months, I wrote Keith’s stories and transcribed journal entries, which I wove into a chronological draft of a possible book. Strangely, my own stories seeped through the pages.

A year later, as the house neared completion, I signed up for a creative writing class to learn how to polish the manuscript for publication. I was a seasoned academic and technical writer, only rarely creative or literary. One night in class, I read a selection about five-year-old Gretchen, whose childhood world ended when her parents divorced. The passage included hints about the violent crime that happened to my family when I was five. “Who is the protagonist?” a classmate asked. “What is the plot, the conflict, the story arc?” Questions continued. “Why did you write this? What is the story really about?” I didn’t know. But, after no small amount of weepy, head-bowed, shoelace-fixated self-pity, I determined to find out. To close the distance and face the fearful feelings I’d fled from the first time I read her journals.

Based on the connections—the inexplicable disruptions when we were both just five years old, depression and anxiety episodes starting for both of us at sixteen, similar troubles in college and rejection in love—I created a braided narrative, alternately appropriating Gretchen’s journal entries and Keith’s stories in one chapter then telling my same-age stories in the next. For my chapters, I drew from thirty years of letters I’d written to my parents, which my mother had kept, and my sisters sent to me after clearing Mother’s attic in advance of her eventual move to a care facility. At the time, I hid the bags of letters in my closet, hoping to forget my unstable past, which appeared in the letters despite my curated prose. Now, I needed to bring that past to light. Yet all along, I hoped I could reveal my personal secrets without returning to the emotional pain and suffering.

As for the alternate chapters, I wondered if I could rightfully use someone else’s stories and still write an honest memoir. Memoirists write about all sorts of relationships: mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, spouses, friends, and lovers. So, in a sense, I reasoned, we creative nonfiction writers all appropriate others’ stories to tell our own. Telling one’s truth is the heart of memoir, but what about writing about someone you never met? I thought of Julie Anne Powell’s 2005 blog turned memoir Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. A gimmick, some critics said, a stunt according to Julia Child, the Julia in the title. Not at all what I wanted to do, though arguably very like the first draft of my “book.” Looking back, I can see the problem: I was not yet ready to let go of safety, comfort, and certainty to tell a real story.

After several more drafts and uncountable revisions, I slowly realized the braided narrative wasn’t working. One major problem was that Gretchen was the more interesting character. Like Lucy Grealy in Anne Patchett’s memoir Truth and Beauty, Gretchen was the star, and I appeared in her shadow. Patchett and Grealy had been roommates and friends though; Gretchen had died twenty months before I met her father. Even with his permission, could I use her journals and his stories as Patchett used—and was criticized for using—excerpts from Grealy’s letters to her and private information she knew about Grealy’s sex life and addiction?

I looked for models of a memoirist writing about a person they never met, and found just a handful, including Adam Schefter’s The Man I Never Met: A Memoir. The man was his wife’s first husband who died in the north tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. An extraordinary man, according to family and friends Schefter interviewed—greatly loved, a family man who Schefter honored biographically. The man’s life contrasted with that of Schefter himself, who told his lessons-learned story with “warts and all” honesty. And one of the sources he used was his own personal journal.

I’d never kept a journal—too personal, too revealing—but did want to tell the truth. That’s why the braided narrative wasn’t working. Gretchen’s biography wasn’t missing from the braided narrative. My honesty was. The story didn’t work because I couldn’t write an honest memoir and still hold fear, guilt, and shame at a safe distance. I had to choose integrity over fear, let go of the familiar, and shine a light on the hidden; to find the best in myself and stand in discomfort. To tell the unvarnished truth about my thoughts and actions as things happened.

So, instead of using Gretchen’s journals as chapter epigraphs hinting at the real story, I quoted entries within the context I encountered them and my honest responses—that which I’d worked hard to hide—as if writing a personal journal to tell myself the truth. Here’s an example of what resulted, an excerpt from Wisdom Builds Her House:

Before diving into the journals, I asked myself what I knew about Gretchen’s childhood. I opened my laptop and started another list. Born on the Autumnal Equinox of the Bicentennial year, her younger brother Alex born less than two years later. Precocious: her mind grew faster than her body, only five feet and one hundred pounds as an adult; read to herself at age three; at four taught Alex to read and showed interest in drawing, which led to a profession in art. Physically fearless: riding bikes, jumping off the high dive at the community pool to learn how to swim, kicking through the board at Tae Kwon Do trials when no one else did. Child of divorce: her parents separated when she was five. For ten years, she and Alex lived with their mother. Then, as teenagers, they moved in with Keith and called the townhouse home until they left for college. Gretchen’s journals began in the middle of her first year of college. I saved the document, reached for her first book, and read the first entry again.

February 25, 1996: “I wonder, will I be honest with my observations, or will I edit my life self-consciously, knowing I’ll have witnesses? Or one witness. I don’t know… I worry I’m not deserving of trust…”

Later, I would read that her “one witness” was a boyfriend who read her journal on occasion. Now, I was the one witness, and trust was the question.

Trust. I bookmarked my place and pondered. Certainly, I was trustworthy at work, a good hard worker as Gretchen had been, according to Keith. But she wasn’t referring to work ethics; she meant deserving of trust from those with whom she’d been sexually intimate if not emotionally honest. In a perfect world, love and trust merged into one, what Gretchen called “Merged Permanence.” Was I worthy of that kind of trust? A question I’d never asked because I wanted the answer to be yes. Absolutely yes. I rubbed my face. Deep down I knew the answer wasn’t so simple. And deeper down I feared the answer might be maybe.

Or no.

How did I get from braided narrative to the final product? A kind yet firm development editor guided me toward the truth about writing memoir: I am the protagonist and no one else, I am the narrator, I am the I. The plot, conflict, and story arc are about me. The sources I appropriate are my own. Keith’s stories and Gretchen’s words are only relevant in relationship to mine. With my editor’s help, I unbraided the braid, cut many sections about Gretchen, and added the missing sections about me. By leaping into the unknown, I found and faced my real story then wrote it.

What was that real story? The person I never met was me.

Carole Duff’s memoir Wisdom Builds Her House was released in August 2024. She is a veteran teacher, flutist, naturalist, and creative nonfiction writer. She posts weekly on her blog Notes from Vanaprastha and has written for Brevity Blog, Huffington Post, Mockingbird, Please See Me, Streetlight Magazine, The Sage Forum (where she is a regular contributor). Carole lives in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains with her husband author K.A. Kenny and two large dogs.