Writing through Secrets, Family Relationships, and More

A family of writers:

I was in college when my father published his first novel. It was a novel about a man similar in many ways to him. It was upsetting to see the novel’s depiction of the oldest daughter, who bore more than a little resemblance to me. Both the ways she appeared on the page (too much like a stereotype) and the ways she didn’t appear (hardly any pages were devoted to her) hurt me. Did my father see me this way? Did I not play a more important role in his life? I know, then, both what it’s like to be written (imperfectly) about, and also not be be written about enough.

These, though, are problems that can be relatively easily healed. If my father had simply talked to me about the character in his book and told me that, if she was inspired by me (as she clearly was), she wasn’t me, and if he'd simply told me how important I was to him and that he didn’t have space in the book to explore that, that could have gone a long way to heal the problem. 

But my father couldn’t do that because the book had a much bigger problem: The man in the book (who, as I said, was very similar to my father) was having a series of affairs, and my father had just had a long-term affair with a woman who resembled the main mistress in the book. My father insisted the book was 100% fiction. And though my sister and I knew he was having an affair with his colleague, my mother still seemed to be in the dark about it. 

So the book broke secrets at the same time that it tried to keep them. Confusing. 

And when I asked my father about it, he got furious. 

My solution at 21 was to move forward. My parents’ relationship was their own problem.  Like many young adults, I thought that my story, my experience was my own, that I could leave behind the complications of my past.

But moving forward isn’t all that easy.

I wanted to have a voice, and so I soon started writing myself.

My early poems explored failures of communication. Though I took my writing and craft seriously, and though I began to publish with some regularity, I couldn’t quite get my mind around being a public writer. Who was I writing for and why? And did I really want to share the innermost workings of my soul with the world? 

Now, looking back, I understand that I was trying to break secrets that were too dangerous to break. Over many years, I came to realize that not only was I holding the secret of my father’s infidelity, but also the secret of sexual abuse that itself was clouded in unknowing: my family at first said that I had had a strange babysitter as a young child and then, taking the same line they had around my father’s affair, they took the babysitter story back and simply denied that anything could have happened. 

Why do I share this now? 

People often ask me what to do with secrets, how to address or not address them in their writing.

In my own experience, writing can be a pathway to truth and  liberation. But it needs to be treated with the right intentions. 

My father’s writing perhaps revealed some truths, but it also led to greater confusion and mistrust. I do not believe that art necessarily heals. I do not believe that great art excuses hurting people. And there are plenty of writers who have not been healed in the writing process.

But I do believe that if we approach our writing with authenticity and honesty, it can lead us to greater freedom. 

My own experience writing:

My poems helped me express what it was forbidden to express; they knew before I did that there were things I knew that I couldn’t say. They knew before I did that even if I couldn’t say these unknown things directly, there was a language of poetry, of dream, of imagination that could get at the body’s and psyche’s deeper truths. 

If you have secrets that you are worried your writing might reveal, if you are worried that what you write might hurt people in your family, people you might even love, don’t stop writing. 

Those things that have not been expressed often propel our writing, and to hold them back can literally make us sick.

Write. But write first for yourself with full authenticity before you even worry about publication. 

Don’t rush to publish.

Often, we think of the most serious writing as the writing that is published, but I disagree. When we prioritize publication, we prioritize writing for others, form over function, the mask over the deeper truth. 

For me, the most serious part of creative writing happens between the writer and the page. If that relationship is sacred, then the audience can come later. If that relationship is not sacred, then what is being offered to an audience is not worth much. 

If you worry about what other people will think, you will not be able to have the freedom of discovery that the page can offer. Remind yourself that no one will read your writing until you are ready to share it. 

So many of my students had their diaries read as children or teenagers by family members. That betrays trust and invades the sacred relationship between the writer and page. Keep your writing where only you can find it. Keep the page a safe space. 

If we have the safety of privacy in our writing, the page can be a place to hold the pain, confusion, and secrets that our body otherwise holds. Some of the trauma, tightness, tension that our body holds onto can literally be released when we express ourselves on the page: the page gets to store it instead of our muscles. 

Don’t hold back. If you think that you’ll write everything except just one little secret that energy of holding back will permeate the whole project. Give yourself the freedom to put it all on the page. 

Don’t worry at first about form. Don’t worry if your writing is “good enough.” 

At the same time, allow form itself to guide you. I find that making art instead of simply journalling can be more healing and more revealing than a brain dump. Often, when we journal, we write from the same place that we often go to in our mind—we stay in the same loops. 

By contrast, when we make a piece of art, when we try to make something beautiful, surprising, original, we tap into a greater wisdom that our writing often carries, we surprise ourselves, we go into that altered space of the creative, intuitive mind. 

Revise as authentically as you write. 

Go back and re-read it. Listen to it. Aim for greater precision, greater insight. 

Connect your writing with your body. Connect it, also, with spirit, with what is greater than you. 

Does this mean that you should never publish? Absolutely not. 

When you have at least a second draft, you can be realistic about what you want to do with it. Before this point, it’s impossible to be realistic because you don’t even know what “it” is.

What should my father have done with his novel? I think that if he needed to write that novel and share it with the world, he should have had honest conversations with the people in his life about his own actions and their relationship to the subject of his book. The main problem was not that he wrote, rather it was what he did and how he handled it.

We live in a world that urgently needs to face up to difficult truths. Not expressing the truth is not the solution. The problem is often not the message-bearer but the action itself. Pay attention to your actions and live in integrity. The writing and expression will follow.

If and when you’re ready to publish, I recommend doing an inventory of the people your writing might hurt and having some conversations.

Do you want to continue to have a relationship with this person? If you do, are you willing to edit the work? What is the cost of doing that edit? What is the cost of not doing that edit? 

If you have a close relationship, you can always show the work to that person and get feedback from them in the editing process. This is a way to maintain trust. 

But if someone has hurt you, it is usually not your responsibility to protect them. As Anne Lamott says, “if people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” 

Remember that you have control over what, when, and how you share.  You don’t need to share your writing until you’re ready. 

How other people respond, of course, is out of your control. Sometimes other people’s responses can be surprising—often the things we least expect people to react to elicit the biggest responses. 

In my life, it’s been a long journey to write my story.

In my forthcoming book of poems, I write more explicitly about abuse, trauma and healing than I have in other of my poems. I am at a  point in my writing that I don’t feel I have many secrets to protect, but it took me a long time to get here. Interestingly, some of my most explicit poems didn’t make the final manuscript—in the end, it was important that I wrote them, but I didn’t feel that some of them were as well crafted and didn’t feel that they were necessary to the book itself. 

I have written many things that I wasn’t ready yet to publish in the past. I believe not publishing was, for a long time, the more empowered position for me to take. In writing, I partly healed myself. My body literally got healthier. 

I have shared my poems in my forthcoming book with my husband and children, but I no longer see my parents. Will they read my book? Perhaps. What will they think of it? I don’t want to hurt them. I still love them. But at a certain point it became clear that their narrative and my narrative didn’t have enough points of intersection to continue to communicate. We went in the same circles again and again and continued to hurt each other. I don’t want to hurt them, but it’s also not my job any longer to protect them. I tried to do that for a long time, and in the end, the toll was too great on my body and psyche. 

The cost of not writing.

It’s common to worry about what our writing might expose, but I find that the greater concern is the cost of not writing. 

What is the cost of not expressing yourself, of keeping those secrets bottled up, of keeping them stored in your body, your muscles, your inflamed immune system? What is the cost of passing those secrets down from generation to generation?

What is the cost of keeping your voice to yourself because you can’t express the full truth, the cost of giving up on your voice and creativity?

When you let your voice have freedom, what you often find is that behind it, bottled up, is not just our pain, but also your enormous wonder, your joy and full range of emotion. 

When you allow yourself the freedom of expression, you allow yourself the freedom to make something truly beautiful, to be bold and experiment, to have fun.

And once you’ve done that, you have a great gift. Then you can decide what you want to do with it and how, when, and where you want to share it. 

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