Chapter 15

What Will People Say?

The whole time I was growing up my mother always used the question, what will people say if they find out or if they see you? as a way of keeping us all in line. In Italian culture there is a concept called, mala or brutta figura, and my mother was a great believer in avoiding mala figura at all costs. Quite simply translated mala figura means bringing shame down on your family, making them look bad and embarrassing them and yourself.

I should not have been surprised, therefore, when my first book was published, and my mother was horrified: “Why can’t you write poems like the kind of poems that are on the backs of funeral cards? Why can’t you write beautiful poems about nature like the poems I memorized in Italy? Why can’t you make up a life for us that is a life of leisure and wealth? Don’t write about me. Don’t tell my secrets.”

Every time one of my students asks: “How can I write about that? My mother will be angry. My father will be upset. My sister will be annoyed.” This makes me think of my mother standing on the basement stairs, anger evident in her face, when she told me not to write about her anymore. And I tell myself, what I always tell my students: This story is your story; it is the world seen through your eyes.

The people you describe are people who are part of your world, and if you deny your obligation to write about that world, you’re denying yourself and all the writers who went before you, the writers who gave you permission to tell your story. If you start censoring yourself, telling the story the way others wish it could have been, you destroy the writing. It becomes a lie and it loses its power to move others to laughter or tears.

After my first book came out, my sister Laura, who was the nurse in my brother’s office, placed copies of the book in the waiting room. Since they kept getting stolen, she finally wrote in black magic marker on the cover: OFFICE COPY: DO NOT REMOVE.

That stopped the books from disappearing. One day my mother, who was certain that no one else could clean my brother’s office the way she could, got busy with her vacuum and her mop at a time when she thought only my sister would be there. She tied a rag around her head and put on her biggest apron and proceeded to move in her usual whirlwind fashion through the office. Suddenly, she looked up and saw a patient sitting in the waiting room. The woman asked my mother if the author of the book was related to the doctor. My mother whispered: “I think it’s his sister,” and scuttled out of that office and never went back to clean for him again.

It wasn’t until one of my books was published in Italian and English that my mother seemed to understand and forgive me for writing about her. I think about how Thomas Wolfe’s mother refused to talk to him again after he published Look Homeward, Angel, a book I loved and read over and over when I was a young woman. I’m glad he didn’t decide to not publish that book. I think he knew how important it would be to another generation of young people, capturing as he did that longing and loneliness we all felt as we were growing up.

Once I became courageous enough to write about my life, influenced as I was by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, I couldn’t go back to poems that imitated Keats and Shelley and that were not from the center of my own life. This is not to say that in fiction you can’t create characters that are parts of many people you’ve known or that you can’t write a narrative poem in the same way. It is important, however, to tell the truth about what you know concerning what it means to be human. And in a poem, if you are using the first person and writing as though the speaker in the poem is yourself, you can’t get away with lying or pretending that you are something other than what you actually are. Even in fiction, if you lie about what you know to be true about human nature, your reader will sense it and will refuse to be drawn into the character’s life.

The following poem, “What I Can’t Face About Someone I Love” from What We Pass On, is about my relationship with my son. Even in the title, I try to speak to how important it is to tell the truth in our writing, no matter how painful that may be.

What I Can’t Face About Someone I Love

That my son loves me but would prefer

not to see me too much. Every Sunday night,

when I call him in North Carolina where

he lives with his wife and two children,

I can hear the heaviness in his voice,

his “Hello” tempered with impatience,

our conversation stiff and stilted, though

I always think I can talk to a stone.

Strangers in buses and trains tell me their life

histories, acquaintances tell me about their affairs

and shattered marriages, show me the secret

undersides of their lives. My graduate students vie

for my attention. They want to sit next to me

and carry my bags and fetch my lunch,

but my son can’t wait to get off the phone

with me. I ask him how the kids are

or specific questions about school, ask about

his wife, his job. He answers with one or two

words; “They’re fine,” or “Okay,” or “The same.”

My son is a lawyer; he was always brilliant

with language, at least written language,

and he can read a three-hundred page book

in an hour and remember every detail,

but with me he turns mute as a stump.

If I ask for help with some legal problem,

he will give it, but I do not hear in his voice

the lilt I hear in my daughter’s voice

when I call her. Instead I hear reluctance,

as though his attention were focused

on some truly fascinating person

and he can’t wait to get off the phone.

I tell stories that I hope will amuse him,

but finally, after struggling and finding no response,

I can’t wait to hang up.

I say, “Well, John, have a good week.

Give everyone a hug for me.” I know my son

has divorced me, somewhere deep inside

himself in a place he doesn’t look at.

I am too much for him, too loud, too dramatic,

too frantic, too emotional. I laugh too much.

I wear him out in a minute and a half. If he never

saw me again he wouldn’t miss me and this is what

I can’t face about someone I love.

Here, is another poem, called “What a Liar I Am,” also from What We Pass On, that exposes the lies I routinely told myself and my husband during his lengthy illness with Early Onset Parkinson’s Disease.

What a Liar I Am

I have been lying for a long time now,

the sicker you get the more I lie

to myself most of all. I cannot say

how angry I am that this illness

is another person in our house, so lies

are the only way to get through each day.

How hard it is to admit that I am often

impatient and raging and that anger

is a pit I can never swallow, that love,

even mine for you who have been with me

forty years, cannot dissolve the hank

of loneliness that has become lodged

in my throat, the irritating squeaking

of your electric wheelchair, the way

I want to run from the putrid smell

of medicines rising from your skin,

the way I lie and lie so you won’t know

how heavy this illness feels. How long

it has been going on, sixteen years now.

Your feet dragging along the carpet

on days you can still walk,

are like a fingernail on a blackboard.

“This is all too much for you,” you say,

and I reassure you, “No, not for you,

nothing is too much for you.”

“I am a burden you say,”

and “No, no” I say. “Not a burden.”

The face I see in my mirror is not one

I want to see. Oh love, I could not

have imagined it would come to this,

when I can only live by lying to myself

and you, you with your begging eyes,

your reedy voice a clanging bell that calls me,

you whom I love but cannot carry.

I remember Marie Howe speaking at a conference once, and she told a story about her brother who said to her: “But it didn’t happen that way.” She responded: “It’s my poem and it’s the way I remember it.” I want to say that my poems are drawn from my personal cache of memories, and I have to be as true to those memories as I can, even if maybe I’ve forgotten something or got it wrong. It has to feel true to me as I’m writing it, and hopefully, then, people will say, as my cousin Carmela did: “You got it perfectly. You really caught it. That’s what it was like. Exactly.”

A word of caution is necessary here, however. While I am encouraging you to be brave in your writing, there is a difference between writing and publishing. When you’re ready to publish a book in which you’ve written about a living person, be sure to consider that person’s likely reaction. Will he or she be offended or embarrassed? Use common sense. If the voice in your head says, This could cause you trouble, you may want to think about leaving that part out. I suggest that you set aside the poem for a while and then take a fresh look before making a decision.