10

I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person’s experience is not another’s. If five people in a family were to write the story of that family, we would end up with five very different stories. These are truths of a sort—the truth of adhering to what one remembers. Then there are facts, which are by their nature documentable. The weather on a particular day can be ascertained. As can the date of the explosion. Perhaps there is a photograph of the dress she was wearing. And so forth. But the intentions of your father? The inner life of your mother? At these we can only hazard our best guess.

Students sometimes tell me that they’re waiting for someone to die before they feel they can write their story. They say this sheepishly, guiltily. As if, in some way, they’re wishing for that person to expire, already, so they can get on with the business of writing about them. I try to liberate my students from these tortured thoughts by telling them that they may as well just start now, because it can be more difficult to write about the dead than to write about the living. The dead can’t fight back. The dead have no voice. They can’t say: But that isn’t how it was. You’re getting it wrong. They can’t say: But I loved you so. They can’t say: I had no idea.

And so each day when I sit down to write I am wrestling not only with my dead parents but with a dearth of documentable facts. A friend offers to set me up with a world-famous medium the FBI frequently uses as a resource in solving complex cases. “She’ll be able to tell you what your father knew,” she says. But I can’t call the medium, at least not now—not only because I’m skeptical but because I need to arrive at my own beliefs about myself and my parents and the world we inhabited. I need to understand who I was to them, and who they were to me. In the absence of the empirical, I am left with a feeling central to my childhood: all my life I had the sense that something was amiss. I was different, an outsider. My family didn’t form a coherent whole. My parents and I lived in a breakable world. I had been deeply, mutely certain that there was something very wrong with me, that for all this I was to blame.

Thirty-five thousand feet in the air, between Minneapolis and San Francisco, that mute certainty began to fall away as if I were a molting animal. There had been something amiss. We didn’t add up. And not because I wasn’t my father’s child but because I—and possibly one or both of my parents—had never known.