TOO PERSONAL

The charge against memoir is accurate. I plead guilty.

Last fall I sent my memoir to a man I had known slightly in prep school. He had gone on to become the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the most respected literary publishing houses in America. Our contact back then had been purely professional in the way school assigns people to each other — he was a proctor, I was a student, and that was the extent of it. But a connection is a connection, and I had a book, and he had a publishing house.

His rejection came back with two words doing all the work: too personal.

I have turned that phrase over for a long time. It was meant as a verdict, and I took it as one. But somewhere along the way I realized it was also a job description. Memoir is too personal. That is the whole assignment. A memoir that is not too personal is a résumé.

So let me concede the charge up front. Guilty. The book violates privacy — mine first, and then, unavoidably, the privacy of everyone who was in the room. I did it on purpose. I believed the truth of what happened in those rooms was worth more than the silence that had been protecting them. Not everyone agrees. This is about the people who don’t.

Across the road from me lives a retired poet, a man who spent years running a respected writing program before he withdrew from all of it. I put a copy of my book in his mailbox, hoping he would read it. Months of silence. When I finally asked him about it, he told me he hadn’t opened it — he wasn’t sure what I expected from him. I said I was just hoping he’d read it and tell me what he thought. He asked why. I said, well, you ran a writing program. He said, I was just an administrator.

Then he asked if I wanted the book back.

I said yes — if you’re not going to read it, give it back. I kept my voice even. But I understood something in that moment about what a memoir asks of a reader. It isn’t entertainment he was declining. Opening that book would have made him a witness. Witnesses get implicated. A man who has spent years perfecting his own privacy knows better than to look through someone else’s open window.

Then there is the other kind of reader.

At the small Montessori school where my life as a student began, there was a boy a year ahead of me who was, by common agreement, the best young writer in our class. Very creative. I admired his writing and said nothing, because he was reserved and withdrawn and I was whatever I was. We orbited the same classrooms without ever quite becoming friends.

He graduated and went off to one of the great New England boarding schools. A year later, by no design I can explain, I followed him there. I knew he was on that campus. He was on the opposite side of it, and in two years we never spoke. Then he went on to an Ivy League university in Philadelphia — and a year later, I followed him there too. The strange part is that I didn’t fully register the pattern until this week: three schools, the same boy always one year ahead of me, like a figure walking a ridgeline I kept climbing toward and never reached.

Sixty years of nothing.

Then he saw my book mentioned in an alumni bulletin, read the opening pages, and wrote to me. What he sent was partly admiration and partly something I never expected: an apology, albeit over half a century late. He had known I was arriving at that boarding school, he said, and if he had been a decent human being he would have called on me, welcomed me, helped me find my footing. Instead, in his own insecurities, he ignored me. And then at university, hearing I was there, he ignored me again. He had carried it since his mid-twenties — the realization that he had been remiss in extending a hand to a fellow human being.

He told me one more thing. At a class reunion decades ago, he had spotted a boy he’d liked when they were young — caught sight of him at registration, then again at the class photo — and the moment the shutter clicked, went looking for him. The man had already left. He wrote to him afterward and never heard back. What he wanted, he said, was for the man to tell him what the boy had been.

When he saw my book in the bulletin, he felt that same pull. So this time he didn’t wait for the reunion to end.

Think about what happened there. My book invaded my own privacy — laid out the family, the drugs, the road, all of it — and that invasion is precisely what gave him permission to open his own vault. Exposure begets exposure. Privacy volunteered in answer to privacy violated. That letter is the entire case for memoir in a single envelope.

And then there is my family.

After the book came out, one of my siblings broke off all contact. No explanation. No citation of chapter and verse. I have my suspicions — there is a scene in the book, a hard one, involving our father and our mother, and I have always assumed that was the unforgivable page. But the truth is I got silence, not a reason. I was left to guess which truth was the one that ended us.

Another sibling did contact me. He told me he didn’t feel he came from a broken family at all, and that he was familiar with my way of being creative with my writing. That’s just not the way I remember it, he said. It was the first time he had ever reached out to me about my work, and, as far as I could tell, the last. I wrote back: thank you for contacting me about my writing. Too bad your concerns were limited to making sure you weren’t going to be mentioned in it.

I’m not proud of the bitterness in that reply. But I’ll stand by its accuracy.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Every one of these people — the publisher, the poet, the siblings — recoiled from the same thing. Not from lies. Nobody has accused me of lying. They recoiled from telling. The offense was never the events themselves; the events were survivable, apparently, as long as they stayed in the vault. The offense was the key turning in the lock.

And I understand the vault. I honor what it protects. Privacy is a real thing, a sanctity, and a family’s silence is a kind of shelter that everyone inside it helps hold up. When one member starts describing the interior, the shelter is breached for all of them, whether they consented or not. That is the legitimate grievance against memoir, and I won’t pretend it away.

But I know what the vault costs, because I know what else is locked in there. My grandmother’s kitchen. A woman singing in an island wind. The good along with the terrible, all of it going quiet together, because the vault doesn’t sort. Silence protects everyone’s privacy and buries everyone’s truth, and then the people who held the silence die, and there is nothing.

My siblings chose the vault. The poet across the road chose the vault. The publisher chose it too, in his professional way — there are limits, his verdict said, to how much of a life anyone should have to look at.

I chose the book.

Though I wonder, some days, how much choosing I actually did. My father was a difficult, controlling man — that much is in the book, and it is the mildest thing in there. But he was also the one who insisted, all through my childhood, that an examined life was the only life worth having. He was wrong about nearly everything in the method. He was wrong about the timeline. He drove his children away from him one by one, insisting on a philosophy none of us could live inside. And then, fifty years later, one of us sat down and examined the life. In a weird way the old man set me up to write this book. It would not surprise me if he knew it.

Someone asked me recently what I considered the greatest achievement of my life. I’m a man who never had children, never built a family of my own — the usual answers weren’t available to me. I didn’t have to think long.

Writing this book, I said.

The book that ended what was left of the family. The book that is too personal. That one, yes. That’s the achievement.

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