Jezebel 
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New York, 5:03 PM
Mon Nov 9
52 posts in the last 24 hours
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09/22/09
I'd settle for just having a small but vocal group of commenters on this site stop demonizing mothers, gleefully hating our children, assuming we're all nanny-exploiting a-holes, and accusing us of being baby-obsessed twits. If the smart, educated, liberal women here can't cut mothers a break, why should the greater society?
08/31/09
I struggled with my gender identity (and here, I bitterly laugh, as I still do, but I have found somewhat healthier ways), and she rooted through everything I wrote, forbid me from seeing my absolute best friend (who was also my girlfriend, which while she didn't know, she suspected and used this as a basis). I had my last suicide attempt at about 16.
If my mother wrote about that and broadcast it to the world, I am fairly certain I would stop speaking to her. I would want nothing to do with someone who wanted to profit off my pain. It was an awful period of my life, and while I'm certain it was no picnic for my mom, it's not her story to tell. It is mine. And I do tell it; it's not a huge secret. But I control who knows and what they know the best that I can, and if she were to publish it, that steals any power I have to protect myself away from me.
It's wrong, plain and simple. It is obscene, and I feel for this kid.
08/31/09
Heh. Wanna bet she rethinks that?
08/31/09
Jake sure was a terror, alright.
08/31/09
I feel for Jake and selfishly glad my father's work was never published.
08/31/09
I think if you poke fun at yourself just as much or more as you do your family, that's something. But that may not be appropriate in the case of writing about a family member's addiction.
08/31/09
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08/31/09
One option that a lot of authors do well is to focus on the same issues you feel in your real family in (fictional) stories about other people and their families. That seems to be a good choice.
08/31/09
Then again, I find a lot of memoirs to spring straight out of narcissism anyhow. Some are interesting and useful, yes, but a lot of memoir writers seem to consider their experience unique and especially tragic or gifted or sexy or whatever, when in fact their experience is common to many. I think you have to be a very talented writer to pull it off.
08/31/09
I was okay with this.
08/31/09
The thing is, publishers want everything to be a memoir nowadays. There has to be a personal story. I wanted to write a Marina Warner-style cultural history and was told it was no good, had to be at least partly a memoir, otherwise no one would buy it. Was that patronising to book buyers, or do we all need a personal hook to draw us in?
I dunno, I love John McPhee, and he doesn't seem to need to bring his autobiography into a book about geology.
08/31/09
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08/31/09
And selfish.
Hell, I ask my teens permission before I even mention him on my blog.
08/31/09
08/31/09
And I've been skeeved out by memoirs that are more about family struggles than the individual author's story since Running with Scissors.
08/31/09