“What will your kids think?”
Writing about your children is not ‘sharenting’
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I sometimes think about the people I have written about it— in very small ways— who I no longer talk to. I wonder what they must think about what I’m doing, as a writer, or how they might disagree with versions of events as I have written them in books or essays. I hear them in my head dismissing me, thinking I must be so full of it. If only they knew the crippling anxiety that comes with public authorship!
I know this tendency I have— to wonder, but also to worry— comes from the distrust I developed for myself young, as a teen with an unstable home life. But I also know many people assume that writers set out to author The Record— a correct version of events. For The Record! I don’t think such a version of any event exists. I view the role of a writer, whether in memoir or fiction or poetry or any genre, as far more speculative. Writing memoir specifically is about letting a reader see a narrator, with all their limited powers of perception, groping around in the dark, and returning anyway, with something that might matter to a reader. I turn up the truth, but only as far as I understand it, and only about the story I am telling.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that writers have no interest in, or responsibility to other people’s perspectives. But I have noticed, in my own life, that people who know writers often worry that their version— the unwritten version—isn’t getting enough attention. I can’t fault anyone for that frustration, even though it implies that a writer has some special power that other people do not have, to testify to experience. But the only thing that sets a writer apart from those who do not write is the choice to write.
When we talk about writing children, this truism obviously gets complicated.
Children cannot testify to their own experiences, at least not until many years later, nor can they consent to their inclusion in an essay or book. Even so, I have noticed in writers and critics lately a heightened anxiety around any nonfiction that so much as mentions a child, even when the kids just peek into a scene in the most flat or generous ways.
