As I meander through old photos and write this memoir about travels with my dad and my childhood, questions are surfacing in my mind about why. Why write about it? Why write about it now? Why write about it so publicly?
Several tales in now, I want to stop and reflect for a moment on my ‘why’ and the memoir writing process and experience. It’s a little exercise in noticing things that have come up for me as I tell these stories of my dad and my childhood. So, here - 12 weeks and 12 pieces in - is my baker’s dozen intermezzo.
This little memoir started out as a means of telling my daughter and nephew a bit about their grandfather, my dad. They never had the chance to meet him as he passed when I was pregnant with my daughter and my nephew was still a tiny twinkle in my sister’s eye. Some of the stories they’ve heard over the last 20 odd years but there are a lot that haven’t been shared. My grandmother had and now my mum suffers from dementia / Alzheimers and I suspect it will come for me one day too and I won’t remember the stories. Not for a few decades I hope, but maybe best to get them recorded while they’re still fairly clear in my head.
I’m also trying to organise my photo albums in the cloud. In part, as a way to distract myself from the chaos here while we wait for building permits but also I guess, and not to be morbid, as a kind of Swedish death cleaning exercise. You know, where you sort and eliminate your stuff, put your things in order, before you go so your children don’t have to deal with it all when you’re gone. I have some 70,000 photos saved including some 300 old slides from my dad. My dad’s slides are completely mixed up without any dates, locations, or context so part of the cleaning is creating new folders which at least gets them into some chronological order and by location or event. At some point, I’ll share my photo collection with my daughter and think it’ll make more sense to her if better organised. The beautiful part is that trawling through old photos is bringing back memories and they act as story prompts.
I’ve collected a few quotes from other writers who’ve reflected on memoir writing; thought-provoking perceptions which act as prompts of sorts for my own reflections.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. ~ Joan Didion
Turns out, I’m writing this for myself as much as for my daughter. Is it a mid-life crisis sort of exercise? A means of healing from childhood traumas? A way to make sense of things? Maybe all of the above.
The fact that it’s about my dad suggests to me that I’m actually writing about myself here as much as him. Writing about how travels with my dad, how his behaviour and way of being and thinking, impacted on me - made me the person I am today.
As Joan says, there is in writing a lot of reflection and analysis and a kind of search for meaning. What I see in the old photos and the related event(s) brings back factual elements but also prompts me to remember how I thought and felt about things at the time and how my perspective has changed over the years. In part, it’s about seeing and understanding my dad not just as my dad but as a person, an imperfectly perfect human in all his beautiful chaos and complexity, and the things that mattered to him and shaped him. As a child you may see things but haven’t yet got the life experience to contextualise and better understand.
One of the things that comes up frequently in my thoughts as I write is ‘parenting’. Through writing about my dad and to some extent about my mum, I’m unpacking how I experienced them as parents. Gabor Maté says siblings all have different parents and I think this is true. Certainly, as we’re discovering through chatting about these memories over the past months, my sister’s experience of our parents differs somewhat from mine. It’s not a bad thing but it has been very interesting to explore some of this with her.
A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I’m creating a form of fiction. ~ Isabel Allende
It does bring into question that line from the Allende quote below about memoir writing being ‘an exercise in truth’. Whose truth? What is true? Is it valid to say it’s my version of the truth? An old professor of mine, a specialist in 17th century German literature and thought, once told me that history is stories told by people who, depending where they were on the battlefield, shared their version of the story. The General on the hill’s story will differ dramatically from the story told by the foot soldier in the trenches. All stories are just perspectives really. Reminds me of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.
The memoir writing is also prompting me to reflect on how I’ve been as a parent and it’s sparked some difficult but also heartwarming discussions with my daughter. I’m realising how I’ve often sought to mimic things my dad did that made me feel good, safe and loved; I’ve tried to emulate these behaviours and his love language with my own daughter. Some of his more challenging behaviours which caused some anxiety for me as a child are ones I’ve always tried to avoid repeating, alert and sensitive to my daughter’s feelings. Nobody’s perfect and for sure I made mistakes as a parent. She’s a unique individual and has different needs and triggers than I do so that’s something else to mull on I guess. What has become clear to me though, through writing, is how much my own experience as a child has influenced my parenting style. Perhaps that’s normal?
A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons. ~ Isabel Allende
My demons. Yes. There are a few. Doesn’t everyone have some? My husband gets exasperated by my regular barrages of questions, my endless questioning. It may just be one of those gender differences things but it’s dawned on me as I’ve been writing that actually it’s possibly a learned experience. As mentioned above, my dad’s ‘flying by the seat of the pants’ approach to most things created some uncertainties and anxiety for me as a child. I think my need to know everything developed as a coping mechanism for that. It’s not that things are rigid or can’t be changed but I seem to have an overwhelming need for a lay of the land as a starting point. I’m working on letting go of this need to know things.
Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
As a child, I always loved to listen to my mum, grandmothers, and great aunts tell the stories of the old ones, family members from back in the day. My mum has this little white leather suitcase full of old family photos and occasionally on a Sunday morning we’d drag it out of the cupboard onto her bed and cuddle under the covers while she told us stories of the people in the photos. There was wee Aunty Panty and Auntie Tushy and Poddy… colourful names for colourful characters, all ordinary and yet extraordinary in their own unique ways. The Scottish, at least in my family, have a great tradition of giving everyone a nickname that somehow reflected something about them, physical or personality related. My hope is that these stories of my dad convey sense of character as much as anything else; bring my dad and other family to life for my daughter in a way the pictures alone can’t.
My sister has spent the last couple of decades getting our family tree up on My Heritage. A labour of love! She’s added many of the old photos from my mum’s little case and and chased down DNA matches to keep building the tree. It’s pretty amazing. I like to think of my memoir as a tiny addition to this; adding a little flesh to the bone of a small part of the family tree.
Write what should not be forgotten. – Lynda Barry
My dad and older relatives in my tales are, of course, no longer with us and my daughter and future generations won’t have known them. They and their stories are part of our family history, our DNA, our identity so I feel it’s important to share; open this little window into the past. It’s been a little tricky at times weaving in elements of my dad's history from before I was born but an exercise in some ways of connecting dots. Dots of who he was and how he came to be the person he was and how that often impacted events during my childhood. It sometimes feels a bit hamfisted but more often the writing just flows, takes me where it wants without too much thinking or planning. I’m often surprised by what comes out onto the page and it often doesn’t end up where I thought it might.
Memoirs are the backstairs of history. ~ George Meredith
I’m pretty mindful of the challenge of writing about a German father who, not through his own choice, was in the Hitler Youth and a boy soldier during WWII. It is part of his story though and my daughter quite rightly has questions. My dad and his family were, as far as I’m aware, in no way pro-Nazi or part of the party but there is always the complicity through silence and inaction isn’t there? I don’t really know what to think about it. I asked my Omi once and the response was that they didn’t know what was going on. My dad never really expressed any political views that I can recall. He did listen to news on the radio 24/7 and I remember him being quite positive about Pierre Trudeau but politics was not a subject for conversation at the table or elsewhere.
There was one time though, one of my great-aunts was visiting with her husband and there was a big argument at dinner. My great uncle had worked through WWII as a senior executive at ‘Conti’, as I discovered many years later the infamous German firm Continental AG (tires/rubber) used forced and slave labor in its factories and became heavily involved in the Nazi war machine, and at dinner he denied the holocaust happened. Both of my parents challenged him and really he must have been very aware of what was going on at the time! I was a bit shocked but, at 8 years old, didn’t really understand what they were talking about. My great uncle was quite elderly so I guess the subject was parked so as not to spoil the rest of their visit.
In any case, there is no escaping the fact that half my family is German and Germany is part of my dad’s story. I know from his and other relatives accounts of wartime and post war Germany a little of what life was like for ordinary, middle class tradespeople. Stories that you don’t hear much about. I’m sure Meredith meant backstairs in the sense of memoir exposing the things that go on behind the polished front or official story that is presented to the public or the private, sometimes unpolished, often raw, interior monologues travelling alongside events, but it prompted me to think about this aspect of my memoir writing; something which, I guess, has been adding some perplexity as I write.
We write to taste life twice. ~ Anaïs Nin
The other half of my family is Scottish and my Scottish mum is the leading lady of my dad’s story. This week would have been their 67th wedding anniversary; he passed a few months before their 40th. In writing about my dad, I’m understanding more about my mum as well and how, in many ways, she helped shape my relationship with my dad. In my very first piece ‘Dancing with the truth’, when my dad’s attempt to return a record ended badly, my mum’s laughter and pragmatism led the way on how best to respond to some of his antics. Laughter.
One of the beautiful things about writing this memoir actually has been the times spent talking about the past with my mum. I have often wondered about her allowing my dad to take me to Mexico when I was so young, knowing how he was, and when I asked her recently about it she said, ‘You were well matched; had the right temperament to travel alone with him. The stories you told when you came back were often alarming for me but you told them with laughter and joy so I stopped worrying.’ Ha!
My mum has been diagnosed with dementia and is losing her short term memory. She’s pretty much housebound now and does little apart from 1000 piece puzzles and cuddle with her dog on the sofa watching foreign language soap operas. A far cry from the sharp go-getter serial entrepreneur of even just a few years ago; although, still pretty sassy when she wants to be. Since I started writing the memoir, we’ve had some wonderful chats. She doesn’t always remember details but still remembers a lot from her youth, her early days with my dad, and my childhood. The stories I share with her make her laugh which I love and she often has something to add that I’ve forgotten. We are tasting life twice together!
The answer to why write about it so publicly still eludes me. I’m writing primarily for my daughter and nephew but I could do this privately. I find his story interesting but then he’s my dad so why would anyone else be interested in reading about him?
I asked google why people write memoirs and this is what the AI overview said:
People write memoirs for deep personal reasons like healing from trauma, processing life events, and self-discovery, as well as to share unique stories, preserve family history, inspire others with tales of transformation, or simply to make sense of their own experiences and emotions in a structured, cathartic way. It’s a way to control one’s narrative, find meaning, and connect with humanity through shared experiences, even mundane ones, by presenting their specific perspective on life’s journey.
I’ve covered a lot of those above and think I’m left with ‘inspire others’ and ‘connect with humanity through shared experiences.’ Maybe. Maybe this is why. Maybe I felt some people might find inspiration from some of this. Maybe I thought there are others who grew up in the 70s with immigrant parents who might find my stories relatable.
I was delighted a couple of weeks ago to see I reached 50 free subscribers! Woo hoo And, then last week after the last memoir piece, poof, 3 people unsubscribed within minutes of the email going out. Ouch. No need to bring out the violins. 47 lovely people are still here and I appreciate you! But it did make me curious. Was it something I said? Were they just tired of getting weekly emails from an old gal rambling on about her childhood in the 70s? Is my writing, storytelling, just not that good? Am I starting to repeat myself? Were they just overwhelmed, and I know the feeling, with too many emails in the busy holiday period? I’ll never know. Most pieces get between 40-60 views but, to be honest, engagement is actually very low to non existent. Is it all just not very relatable? Boring even?
It’s made me stop and think about how best to go forward. I’ve decided to pause on writing here for a bit till I figure a few things out. There are more stories to tell about travels with my dad but maybe good to let them sit and percolate for a bit. The farm updates which I’ve been writing between the memoir pieces are also on hold for the moment. I fear my frustration and annoyance at the bureaucratic hoops and delays with the project plan is seeping into my writing so probably best to hold till we have some good news. Plenty to keep me busy while I ruminate on things Substack related. I have a few other writing projects I’m working on offline; some short stories which I’d like to put some time and energy towards. Also, yesterday, as our little caravan was being lashed with torrential rain, I spent a few hours scrolling through IG watching painting reels and am feel very inspired to pick up my paintbrush again. So, all of that to say, we’re on a break.
Thanks for joining me, for reading. As always, it would be lovely to hear from you dear reader so drop me a line in the comments. Please feel free to share your thoughts on my memoir, your memoir, or just memoir writing in general!
Wishing you sugar and spice and all things nice for the holiday season! See you soon.
F ox
If you enjoyed my little musings here, please click on the heart at the bottom or the top of this post. It helps others discover Notes from Sardinia, and also, of course, sparks my joy!
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Unless external credit given, all images copyright Fiona Pape.
I resonate with what you wrote about the importance of preserving your father's stories. What if this personal archive could evolve into a truly dynamic, interactive experience for future generations with emerging AI?
Please don’t stop writing! Love the stories about your dad!
And don’t worry about people leaving - you are writing because you want to . The numbers don’t matter.