When writing the memoir, was there a certain method you used in order to accurately recreate the past?
I began by writing scenes, piecing them together like a patchwork quilt. Memory is layered and fragmentary. The first version was more my story and less about my parents. Much of it was filtered through my child’s perception—the sensory details (I seem to have a good memory for that, and so that wasn’t hard), and the memory of the terror and the burns. As the book evolved, I interviewed my parents. My cousin, Robert, wrote long letters about the time on the farm. My sister gave me her perceptions. An editor in Montreal, Martin Kevan, helped me create four separate stories and time lines and then merge the stories. This became the aha moment and deepened the narrative. The story ends when I’m nine and then has an epilogue. It was okay to stop there. It worked. I learned to shape the book and to move back and forth between stories. When I was writing the last part of the book which moves between the four stories, an indescribable force was guiding me. These stories were aching to be told. It was a wonderful and liberating feeling.
Did the process of delving into those memories impact your everyday life?
Most definitely. When my children turned six and four, the ages that Anne and I were at the time of the accident—and I was about my mother’s age when she was burned—I experienced what is clinically called “An Anniversary Reaction.” I had panic attacks, particularly on bridges but sometimes when I was just watching my children in the playground or camping with friends. At times I felt possessed. I saw walls of fire. I had nightmares and sometimes woke up sick to my stomach.
However, for all the awful things that were overtaking me, I had tremendous love from my husband, help from counselors, and an amazing hypnotist. Bath therapy helped. (I was addicted to taking baths and still am.) I wanted to stay in the present to play with my children, make sure they were okay, to be a good mother. I exercised. And when I needed to cry, I cried. People with panic attacks often look calm to others. I was no different. It was only after my revved up system truly began to calm down that I realized the severity of what had happened to me.
How did your family respond to the memoir? Did their responses influence the story and how you chose to depict them?
My mother, in her usual practical way, went about helping me edit one of the early versions. As befits her English and stoical stock, she responded little to the material and how it made her feel. She only read a few of the early chapters. I know she secretly wanted this story out. She overcame tremendous obstacles and led a full life. She wanted recognition for that. My father, on the other hand, was too upset after I showed him a few parts of the book to read on. I shared a particularly difficult scene (his attempted suicide) and he put it down and said, “enough.” He also didn’t like the way I depicted my mother in places. But despite all that, my father has always loved my poetry and writing and didn’t say anything else that would have stopped me from going on with the writing.
My sister read the book and became depressed. It triggered some PTSD that of course it had for me while I was writing it. But she never said that I didn’t write something correctly. She recognized that we might have different takes on experiences, as siblings often do. I think she believed that I captured much of the reality as it existed for both of us.
My husband felt that it was essential that I write this book in order to continue with my writing. My daughters were at times overwhelmed by the ups and downs with writing and the material. They knew that “Mom was writing” on Monday nights and that it was important.
I don’t think I could have written this last version had my parents been alive, though. I didn’t want to hurt them.
Was the taboo subject matter of Burned a hindrance in conceiving the memoir, or did you find an empowerment in writing on a subject that had not often been explored by the general media?
At first the silence surrounding the accident from my family probably made it more difficult for me to write about the accident. However, I chose to be a writer—to explore the “dark” things in life. I studied poets like Plath and Sexton, immersed in confessional poetry, so I wasn’t going to let “taboos” stop me. However, many of the people I was close to rarely asked questions about what had happened. We were all trying to be normal. So yes, it was hard to publicize it all. In terms of the general media, there have been a number of books and movies about people who have been disfigured—Mask for one. Soldiers come back from wars every day with burns and disfigurement. I have just begun to connect with some burn organizations and will feel a great relief in opening up to other burn survivors (those who were physically burned and families of burn survivors). There are many burned people in the world who are living their lives the best they can—like everybody else. This story is unique but it is also universal. Children need to be taught early on that some people look different or act different. I met my husband at a senior center where I taught poetry and he was the director. Many of the seniors had disabilities. One of our best friends was blind; another was a mental health patient. We need to break through prejudices. Yes, burns can be frightening, but treating people as if they are less than human is more frightening.
If this had not been a memoir and you could have fictionalized some of the story, what would you have changed?
That’s a hard question. Maybe I would have whined less as a child—maybe I would have found a plastic surgeon who could truly have made my mother’s face return back to normal. Maybe my mother would have let us have a dog, and the dog would have changed our lives. Maybe I would have found a few people who dared to take my sister and me aside and talk to us about how we felt. Maybe we would have gone to an amazing psychiatrist. “It was all a dream” type of contrived story. Or like a twilight zone episode, maybe disfigured people would be the norm and all others would be the strange ones. So many possibilities!
15. March 2011 at 9:03 am
My skating is a very emotional thing that comes from the heart, never doing it for the medal.