The Blogging Life

I often advise my students to avoid sharing their work with a larger audience until they are able, and willing, to create art from life, a process that requires distance or a craftsman’s care or both.  I’ve ignored my own advice at times.  A few weeks after my dad died, for example, I wrote about watching him die.  The essay, which earned a spot on the “Notable Essays of 2002” list as cited in The Best American Essays 2003, got its power from an immediacy that read as intimacy.  I couldn’t have written the same essay even six months later.  “My Father’s Dead (If Only I Could Tell You)” had to be created when I could still hear my dad’s last gasps echoing in my ears.   It had to be written while I was still shell-shocked.

This blog is also an exception.  I’m writing the story of the reunion with my birth family as that reunion unfolds.  Like many narrative blogs, it has taken on a life of its own; it is both life and art at once.  As with the essay about my father, part of the lure of the narrative blog is that it’s written in the raw.   It won’t stand still.  Neither the writer nor the reader knows what’s going to happen next.  Maybe the blog knows, but it’s not telling.

But it’s inherently risky to write in medias res, in the midst of things.  Especially as communication between my birth family and me has become more (re)strained in the last couple of years, the blog has become the communication.   I write.  They react.  We communicate.   Silence.   If my blog were a petulant teenager, it might be accused of writing only to spark communication, some kind of reaction, but my blog is not a petulant teenager, and neither am I.  Yet it’s often hard for me to anticipate whether the people this story touches will be pleased, hurt, or angered by my words.  That’s not a statement about them as much as it’s about my own rhetorical intuition–and the complexity of the situation.  Thankfully my journalist twin is also a ruthless editor.  I often send her drafts to review and readily take her advice.  “Spot on,” she’ll say.  Or, “This one’s going to get you in trouble.”   Sometimes I’ll send drafts to my birth parents, too, part heads-up, part conversation-starter outside of the blog itself.  Still, in those moments before I hit the “Publish” button, I frequently find myself dangling between truth and hurt, hoping that there’s enough truth to honor myself but not enough to cause hurt.  Before the day is out, I’ll know if I have succeeded.

I often wish that I could see as far into my birth family as I allow them to see into me, to understand what it is like for them to be discovered, to have the secret they intended to take to their graves exposed, both in life and in art.  It must be hard for them, I almost wrote just now, before I heard my sister’s voice reminding, “Don’t speculate.”  This isn’t speculation: when the dust settles, my brave birth mother tells me to keep writing.  Every time.  Keep writing.  

The important part here is that in addition to the hundreds of people who read each entry on this blog, there are a handful of people in that audience who are part of the story, who are alive and well, and reading.  I’m not worried about my relationship with my twin or my adoptive family, but I do worry that what I write might damage my relationship with my birth family.  The bottom line:  I don’t want to damage that relationship, and I don’t want to stop writing.

I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning.  In trying to tell a complete story, a true story, I wrote too much.  I projected.  I remember one early entry that set off a firestorm, and one I deserved.  I quickly went back and corrected the entry–took my words out of my birth mother’s memory–and apologized.  I (hope I) haven’t made that mistake again.  At other times, the emotional truth of my own story has wounded, and I’ve found myself on the defensive, reeling from the barbs flung back.

In the face of so much risk, it’s hard to explain my (selfish?) compulsion to keep writing, to use writing as the vehicle to discovery.  My job does not depend upon this writing.  It won’t bring me fame or fortunate.  My twin and I are not the secret offspring of a Kardashian or the man who discovered that his biological father is Charles Manson.  We’re all pretty average people.  And while there is no one “normal” in adoption, our story is fairly run-of-the-mill, too.

So why write?  Because I can.  Because I can’t not.  Because it’s how I know to make sense of of this story that is my life that is my art that is my life.

[Deep breath.]