Steve Luxenberg - Official Website

Memo to New York City readers of Annie's Ghosts (and anyone from nearby towns in New Jersey and Connecticut who is interested in the book and its author):

This Tuesday, June 2, at 6:30 p.m., I'll be speaking at the Lower East Tenement Museum, 108 Orchard Street in Manhattan. Okay, if that isn't enough by itself to get you on the subway and down to the Essex Street-Delancey Street station (the nearest one to the museum), here's why this particular author event is special: Two authors for the price of one, and the admission price is ... free. (Both our books will be available for purchase and signing, and need I say that Father's Day is right around the bend. But the talk/conversation is absolutely free.)

I probably wouldn't write a blog about this event if I were appearing alone, but I have no hesitation about plugging the other writer. Erin Einhorn's book, The Pages in Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home, came out last year in hardcover, and last month (April) in paperback. We don't know each other, but our biographies suggest that we should: both Detroit natives, both journalists (Erin's a reporter for the New York Daily News), both with mothers who were secret keepers.

Erin's journey into her family history took her to Poland in search of the family that sheltered her infant mother from the Nazis. Erin went looking for the past, and unexpectedly found herself in the middle of a very present-day dispute,. "Six decades after two families were brought together by history," the book synopsis says, "Einhorn overcomes seemingly insurmountable barriers — legal, financial, and emotional — only to question her own motives and wonder how far she should go to right the wrongs of the past."

I've read Erin's book, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about her journey, and how it compares to my search to understand my mom's motivations for hiding the existence of her disabled sister. My quest also took me to places I didn't expect.

Please join us for what I believe will be an engaging discussion of the risks and rewards of exploring family history.

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, Erin Einhorn, family history, family secrets, journalism, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, memoirs, The Pages in Between

This recent news story from The Washington Post offers a delightful example of the difficulty of reconstructing past events, the topic of my previous posting.

A brief summary for those who don't want to click on the "news story" link above: In 1861, Jonathan Dillon was a watchmaker at a shop near the White House. He was repairing President Lincoln's pocket watch on the day of the attack on Fort Sumter. Four decades later, he told a New York Times reporter that he had etched the following on the watch's inside surface: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try."

His story remained unconfirmed until March 10, 2009, when experts at the Smithsonian opened the watch and discovered a significantly different commentary: "Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels on the above date thank God we have a government."

The essence of Dillon's story was true. He had etched a pro-Union message into the watch. But he hadn't mentioned slavery and he hadn't praised Lincoln. Did he intentionally inflate the content of his message?

I don't know, of course, but I would argue: No, not intentionally. Based on my recent experience in researching Annie's Ghosts, I'm betting that Dillon was certain that he had written those loftier words. Over the course of 40 years, as Lincoln's reputation grew and the Civil War had become identified as the war that ended slavery, Dillon's memory of his words incorporated those ideas. Essentially, I'm suggesting, he remembered his message in light of everything that had happened in his lifetime.

There's a comparable moment in Annie's Ghosts. I'm interviewing a cousin about her argument with my mother over the secret that stands at the center of the book. Just as my cousin is recounting a climatic moment in this 50-year-old argument, we're interrupted by the waitress's offer of coffee. After the waitress leaves, my cousin resumes her account—and offers a different (and more dramatic) version of the key moment she had described only seconds before.

As in the case of the watchmaker, the crux of her story was true. I knew, after all, that my mom had kept the secret and that something had caused the two of them to have a falling out. But was either version an "accurate" account of their conversation? Not likely. Rather, my cousin was giving me the version that reflected years of thinking about that moment, a version that reflected her feelings as much as her memory.

"The nuances lie beyond my reach," I wrote in Annie's Ghosts. "Fifty years later, this is the best my cousin can do."

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, Lincoln, memoirs, Steve Luxenberg

I suspect the world can survive without another blog, but perhaps there's room for one more place to discuss writing, reporting, books and the issues that interest the readers of books.

As the author of Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret, a new nonfiction book that is part memoir and part history, I was drawn to the following question when it came up in a recent online discussion: How far should memoir writers go in reconstructing scenes and dialogue?

The answer might seem obvious, but I suspect it confounds most writers who don't want to just pretend that we all have infallible memories. Some writers have gone beyond reconstructed dialogue, arguing that invention (based on memory, of course) is legitimate—because truth, in a sense, is in the eye of the beholder anyway.

I draw a harder line than most. I favor the rough edges of memory over neat and pretty reconstructions. (More interesting, usually.) Invention? As I wrote in the online discussion, that's why we have novels.

Readers, I think, are smart. They know that most writers don't have notes or documents to back up dialogue from long ago. So what's the problem? In a word: Credibility. As a writer, I want readers to grant me some license to tell my story. But if I present lengthy dialogue as fact, I risk losing their trust—and their interest. Bad deal for me.

I'll be back here every few days over the coming months to write new posts. Please feel free to share your thoughts here, or at the Family Secrets Forum (where you can discuss the power of family secrets), or by sending me an e-mail through the Contacts page. I'll be reading your comments, in whatever form that appear.

Labels: Annie's Ghosts, memoirs, nonfiction, Steve Luxenberg