I Killed My Great-Uncle
My mother and my brother, 1943.
Three years ago, I yanked myself out of a professional depression by beginning work on a memoir. I’m writing my brother’s story. But my great-uncle Myron keeps sneaking into my narrative. I’m going to have to kill him.
My brother, Mike, was diagnosed sequentially as “retarded,” schizophrenic, and epileptic. He was committed to the Colorado State Hospital in 1957, when I was six, and he never lived at home again. Mike died in 1976, in tragic circumstances.
I waited until pretty much everybody involved in this story had died before I felt safe in beginning this book. I knew few details. I’ve done tons of research. This spring, exhilarated, I finished my first full draft.
My most trusted first readers responded unanimously — some with embarrassment because they couldn’t bring themselves to keep reading. I had planted a huge indigestible plug of family history early in the book that brought my readers to a totally bored halt.
I love tracking down these generations of family stories. A poet and essayist friend shares my infatuation with using how-to-look-up-things skills to unearth cool facts, an eccentric passion she calls “research rapture.” I become so smitten that I explore every lead, exhaust every idea. Field work is so much easier than the hard task of responding emotionally to character, to conflict.
What brought my mother to the moment when she married her first husband — Mike’s father — on a frigid January day in Butte, Montana, at the beginning of World War II? I searched for every conceivable answer, rapturous about my research. I wandered deep into the weeds: Jewish immigration to the West; my difficult great-grandparents; generations of mental illness in my family; my colorful great-uncle Myron.
I find all this backstory fascinating, but I included painfully too much detail in the first draft. Names, dates, even addresses. Now, I’m streamlining the structure, using my reclaimed objectivity as a scythe, a scimitar, an IED, to whack away at words that slow down my readers.
I’m riding the rollercoaster of rewriting. One day, I’m exhilarated, at the top of the track. I know my critics are right, and I’m eager to act on their advice. I whomp on the delete key, zapping phrases, purging paragraphs. I know exactly what I need to do. I’m thrilled with my certainty.
The next day, I hesitate. Must I remove these luscious stories I cherish? What will be left? I head down into the trough of doubt.
My readers reassure me. The story itself will remain, a strong and moving story about madness and sorrow and empathy.
Rewriting is tactile — like making bread or sculpting clay. I can feel the writing strengthen, tighten, grow leaner, become more muscular. I love watching the book mature. Whenever I talk about rewriting, I demonstrate what I’m up to by waving my arms, kneading the air with my fingers, rubbing my palms together. Rewriting is physical.
That colorful great-uncle I loved researching — Myron Brinig, a once-famous novelist — mattered to my mother as a model for freedom and escape. But all those priceless anecdotes from his life that I sifted into my first draft matter not one whit to the story of my mother and my brother.
A friend in my writers group struck to the heart of the matter. She wrote in the margins of my draft: “Myron is like a spirited and only partially tame horse — he is fantastic but needs a lot of work to rein him in. He has to remain peripheral.”
She’s right, of course. So Myron remains, but in no more than a couple of paragraphs. He matters only where he matters to my mother.
Great writers famously advise their colleagues to “kill your darlings.” I’m about to murder my long-dead but still intriguing great-uncle. Sorry, Myron.
Stephen Trimble will publish his memoir Leave Me Alone Forever: My Brother’s Madness, My Mother’s Sorrow in the fall of 2015. He is still riding the rewriting rollercoaster and has a couple of drafts to go. Steve’s website is: www.stephentrimble.net.
