Reviewer Meg Nola Interviews Elissa Altman, Author of Permission
Does the thought of writing a soul-baring memoir cause you a flood of anxiety? Elissa Altman gets it, but as a teacher of memoir writing, she wants you to embrace the desire to write your story, if indeed that is your dream. “The creative impulse … must be honored,” she says in the interview below. “If one is compelled to engage in creative expression, the worst thing that they can be told is No, you’re not allowed. It’s stultifying, paralyzing; it makes one invisible and isolated in an already isolating world.”
Elissa’s Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create earned a starred review from Meg Nola in Foreword‘s March/April issue. In the review, Meg called the book an encouraging writer’s guide about “pushing beyond doubt, fear, repression, and shame to craft stories of relevance and truth.”
Doubt, fear, repression, and shame—that’s quite a daunting list to overcome, but we get the feeling Permission is up to the challenge.
For reviews of dozens of other empowering projects covered in March/April, click here. And you can use this magic link to register for your free digital subscription to Foreword.
Enjoy the interview.
What initially led you to memoir writing? Was it a reflexive instinct or did you read any particular memoir that sparked feelings of connection and resonance?
It was absolutely a reflexive instinct, born of my love of essay (which I began writing before memoir), and, early on, narrative food writing; I had gone to cooking school back in the 80s, and Laurie Colwin changed everything for me in her writing about the table, family, friends, and the underpinnings of what the magic in the mundane looks like on the page. We live in a world of exceptionalism and the bright and shiny object, and imagine my surprise to learn that it is the small—the minute, the human, the universal—that pulls readers into memoir and essay and keeps them there. When my students ask But who is going to want to read this boring story?, I always respond: far more than you know. Keep it small. Keep it mundane. That is where the magic is.
Memoirists are, by nature, inquirers and watchers, and I was an inveterate watcher from as far back as I can recall. I watched how people interacted with each other very closely. I grew up hearing the same stories from the same people over and over, and each person was married to their own versions of them to the degree that they used to fight over the versions rather than the facts of the stories themselves. In Permission, I say that humans are heavily invested in being right, and where story is concerned, I have always been fascinated by how strongly people cling to this, often in the face of truth. Humans are also pattern and theme-sensitive, which is how archetypal stories and characters are born, and I found myself naturally drawn to generational story repetition. In my family, there is a longstanding abandonment myth that goes back well over a century; it was the great tribal threat, a repeated warning, and used like a weapon to keep errant children—or anyone—from going off the rails. And it mostly worked.
It was only during the writing of my last memoir, Motherland, that I came to understand that my family was built upon this intergenerational and primal story of rejection, and the risk of it; rejection as a theme repeated over and over again, like a Mobius strip, and I never would have realized that, I don’t think, without the distance and examination that writing memoir requires. It allowed me to drill down to the truth of who these people who came before me were, where their stories came from, and who I am as a result.
Aside from giving oneself permission to tell a particular story and pushing beyond familial, individual, or cultural boundaries, you note how writers and artists need to feel the permission of personal legitimacy. That what they are doing is valid, and that creative expression deserves their time and energy. While these are varying aspects of permission, are they also interdependent?
Absolutely, yes. One of the most human of needs—like sustenance, love, shelter—is being seen, and being heard. We are the art-making species, as Robert Macfarlane says. Not all work is meant for public consumption, certainly, and that fact has to be acknowledged: the number of students I’ve had who assumed their journals could be published is many. But we depend, almost biologically, on creative expression as life-blood. As Liz Gilbert once said, “No little kid, handed a coloring book and crayons, ever said Naw, not feeling it today.” One of the things I’ve witnessed repeatedly is the creativity that is fostered and cultivated among the young in some families, only to have it halted when the kid (writer/musician/visual artist) is told that it in fact isn’t legitimate, that it’s meant to only be a hobby, and they’re expected to either become a doctor or a lawyer as opposed to, say, a classical pianist. How do creatives handle this?
The creative impulse in whatever form it comes must be honored. If one is compelled to engage in creative expression, the worst thing that they can be told is No, you’re not allowed. It’s stultifying, paralyzing; it makes one invisible and isolated in an already isolating world. We are people of story, community, and creativity; I stand by that.
You write about staying in your grandmother’s Brooklyn apartment after her death—the images and sense of place are compelling and vivid, from the apartment building itself, smelling “of the food of a thousand Sabbaths,” to the “gefilte fish covered with wax paper” in the refrigerator and the open “box of Coffee Nips” by the television. Everything seemed to be in a state of suspension, like your grandmother “had just stepped out for a minute to run an errand.” Yet for many writers, emotional overload or the passage of time can cause a loss of focus in remembering integral sites and settings. How can memoirists evoke and retain an observational clarity?
Having a synesthetic memory in this case was a blessing for me (it can also be a curse). The smells, colors, the echo of the hallway leading to the apartment—even the feeling of the walls, which were fake stucco—all lodged themselves in my brain in such a way that they overlap; they’re knotted together and cannot possibly be teased apart. Memoirists as a rule tend to have an innate sense of place, especially if trauma is involved. The evocation of places from the past can also be nudged along by the chronic writing about them; in my classes, I ask students to write about one particular object that evokes one particular place: 1000 words about [fill in the blank]. With every revisiting of that exercise, the student pulls back a little further and a little further until they are inhabiting that place again, with all its sights and smells. But by and large, I think that most memoirists are natural masters at observational clarity. The danger, though, is becoming so mired in interiority that the observations lose that clarity and become muddled. I remember hearing that the poet Marie Howe gives her students an exercise on the first day of class where her students are asked to come in and write down ten things they saw that day, without the use of metaphor. It’s really hard to say an oak tree, a gray poodle, a garbage can because they want to imbue it with metaphor. Her students come back to class with all sorts of layered metaphor, when all she wants is external observation, paying attention, looking.
You discuss revenge as a motivation in memoir writing. It might provide a galvanizing rush of catharsis, but it is “never, ever a good creative intention.” Why is a revengeful memoir so toxic—for both the author and the subjects involved?
I definitely don’t think of revenge writing as leading to catharsis—I think of it as leading to more toxicity, and a psychic stickiness that keeps the writer from reaching a place of transcendence which in turn leads them beyond revenge. The answer to the second part of this question first: bad or good, no one ever likes being written about, because it results in a lack of control. Every last one of us takes great pains to craft a veneer of perfection and when it gets cracked open by someone who is writing about us, it is jarring, even when what they’re writing is positive. Revenge, though: it’s unfinished business. It’s a dopamine rush. It’s a duel in the sun at high noon. It’s poking the bear. But more than that, it turns craft upside down: Revenge writing in memoir is never, ever a valid creative intention. Retribution masquerading as art inevitably fails at the foundational level; it deflates language, renders characters cliched and flat and lifeless. It dilutes human complexity and possibility from the story; it negates human frailty and the ambiguity that goes with it. It slows the pace and pulls the reader into the muck of someone else’s poison. If what you are writing requires that you unpack a complicated story about someone who was in your life in a negative way, you have to ask yourself: is this really necessary? What are my motivations and intentions behind including it? Does including it move the story forward? Sometimes the answer will be yes. Sometimes, no. And if the answer is no, you have to really evaluate why you want to engage in it.
Even when a memoir is written from a place of healing or emergence, it can receive negative reactions from the author’s family, friends, colleagues, or general community. In your case, family members were angered when you revealed a troubling incident in your grandmother’s life; by exposing this “non-secret secret,” a collectively maintained “veneer of perfection” was damaged. How can memoir writers emotionally prepare themselves for this kind of potential pushback?
It is challenging because it may or may not even happen. It’s also completely unpredictable; pushback is a moving target. I once wrote a year-long column for the Washington Post about my mother, who has been, for most of her life, body dysmorphic. This fact was very much a part of the column and she knew I was writing it. When the first column came out, she was irate, not because of the reference to anorexia, but because they revealed her age. Short way of saying you never know what is going to set people off, or how they are going to respond, nor do you have control over it. But you do have to accept responsibility for what you write, what you say, and you have to fathom the possibilities of response.
In my case, I actually lost my family—I was classically, biblically disowned in the most emotionally violent way anyone could have been—and it was something I could not have possibly predicted because, for one thing, these people and I were very, very close from the time I was born. For another thing, this story that I had revealed was daily conversation in my childhood home; my father talked about it (my grandmother walking out on him, his sister, and father, when my dad was three) all the time, because that is how he metabolized it. I didn’t know, and couldn’t have possibly known, that my aunt had buried it, and that even one of her kids, who was in her mid-sixties when the book came out, had no idea. The person who was at the center of the disowning had designated herself the keeper of the family story keys, apparently, and no story could be told that wasn’t pre-approved by her for public consumption.
I think that when this kind of thing happens—and I tell my students this all the time—that if there is (heaven forbid) a rupture ostensibly because of something they wrote, chances are it’s actually not the thing that they wrote that’s at issue, but something else and whatever they wrote crowbars open the door to excision (unless they’re engaging in character assassination, and that’s a different story).
I think that every memoirist will experience pushback to some degree; as I said earlier, humans are heavily invested in being right, and we naturally resist the idea that two different people can grow up in the same house, and come away with two different truths about their experiences. Both of those truths are valid. My suggestion: if you’re writing about family or friends, let them know. Do not feel obligated to share your manuscript with them (which almost always ends in disaster). But let them know that you’re writing it, and why you’re writing it.
Are there any self-protective legal aspects to consider when publishing a memoir?
Every publisher I know puts their books through internal legal reads which can often be rigorous. If they hit upon anything that might be considered libelous or malicious (inadvertently or not), they will ask the author to make changes. It’s important to say this: before it even gets to that point, make an inquiry into why you’re writing the thing you’re writing. If there’s revenge or character assassination at play, you have to deal with that head on and understand your intent and motivation. Have a pair (or two) of trusted eyes who can read the book and flag anything that jumps out at them. (My primary readers are my wife, and another writer friend.) Include a disclaimer on the copyright page; it might not mean much, but it also might.
Are you working on any upcoming projects that you might like to share?
Right now, I’m in earliest research (what I call my hunting and gathering phase) on a book about music, intergenerational creative fulfillment, grief, and healing. But that’s pretty much all I can say for the moment.
Meg Nola
