Fiction Advocate | Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Liz Scott
I am so honored and pleased to share this wonderful interview with Fiction Advocate with you, dear reader!
Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Liz Scott
Published February 11, 2020 by Fiction Advocate
Liz Scott is the author of This Never Happened: A Memoir and Lies: The Truth about the Self-Deception That Limits Your Life. Her essays have been published on The Millions, the Powell’s Book Blog, and The Next Best Book Blog, and her fiction piece “Solstice” was the winner of the Berkeley Fiction Review . In addition to being a writer, Scott is a licensed clinical psychologist who earned her PhD in 1980. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
EB: How did you start writing in general and nonfiction in particular?
LS: This might be a long answer.
EB: Go for it!
LS: I spent my childhood wanting to not be like my mother. She was a writer herself who had some modest success, but she wanted nothing more in life than to be famous as a writer. So, I don’t think I ever let the option of being a writer even enter my mind until much later in life. My husband died in 1999 and an old friend who was also a widow suggested we do something we’d never done before, just as a way of infusing us with some new energy and life. We decided on taking a week-long writing workshop that I’d heard about for years, and I was bitten by the proverbial bug. In fact, the genesis of one of the chapters of my book came to me in that workshop. It would be years before I started on this project though. I joined a writing group and spent years writing short stories—a form I love—and was grateful to have many of them published in literary magazines. At the same time, my friend Bridget, who took the writing workshop with me and is also a psychologist, suggested we write a self-help book together. We had such a blast collaborating on that book, I must say. The memoir and the essays that followed it came much later.
EB: And how did your book This Never Happened come about?
LS: I had always told stories about my mother and can’t count the number of times I heard, “You should write a book!” But along with the almost phobic reaction I had to the notion of being a writer there was frankly so much emotional noise in my head around my relationship with my mother that there was little space for creative musing. It was only after her death in 2005 that I began to vaguely entertain the notion, and as time passed, I got more and more interested in the idea. I think I started writing the memoir in earnest in about 2016.
EB: A lot of memoirists have said they can’t write the stories they want and need to write until after someone has died. It’s interesting, though, that once your mother the writer died you were able to finally fully find yourself as a writer. Having a parent who is a writer is tricky! Anne Fadiman has written and spoken about that.When writing about your mother, did you ever turn to her writings for reference?
LS: I mention in the book that I took very few things that belonged to my mother after she died. One of those things was a box of her writing: a zillion short stories—none of which were published, I believe; copies of newspaper columns; poetry—unpublished; and a 600-plus page unpublished novel. I’ll say this: she was persistent and she had a particular voice, but—and this is of course nothing I would say when she was alive and I even feel a little guilty saying this now—her writing did not inspire me and as a writer she is not one I would turn to for reference.
EB: When I teach classes on writing memoir or other personal nonfiction, my students often ask me how to deal with holes in their memory or in their resources—for example, what to do if someone has died without sharing everything about their life, or if there have been long-running family secrets that you don’t know the truth about. This is obviously something you had to deal with because of your mother’s PTSD and narcissism, which you write about in the book. How did you handle when you encountered a lack of information while writing your memoir?
LS: Oh, boy, did I ever have to deal with this!
EB: [laughter]
LS: There were two big challenges for me. First of all, I have a terrible memory. I only have a handful of actual memories I can call up without being nudged. This seems to be a family trait, actually, shared by my sister and both my grown daughters. I often wonder if it’s something about the way our brains are wired in this family or if there’s a more psychological explanation.
And second: our parents gave us no information at all about their families, our heritage, their histories. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Zip. This was really the impetus for the book—trying to understand at least some of the many mysteries of our family. Also, my mother really wouldn’t have known the truth if it bit her in the ankle so turning to her for information was useless. I have a chapter in my book of the frustrating, infuriating and heartbreaking tease of her offering information when she was on her deathbed.
EB: I both loved that chapter and was so frustrated by it!
LS: Me too, frustrated to distraction!And since I had so little information I made use of photos and letters and newspaper articles and anything else I could find to help fill in the blank spaces. I am sad to say that the truth of many family secrets will most likely never be revealed.
EB: My students also always want to know how to handle contradictions in memory and accounts of events. I love how in the very first chapter of your book, you directly state how your mom would contradict herself or deny facts. How did you grapple with these contradictions while writing?
LS: My mother was most certainly not a reliable narrator. And as I said, I have a poor memory. But I think memoir is different than autobiography in that it is more about the emotional truth of a life than a factual recounting. This is my story, in that it is my impression and my emotional truth of the experience of my family. My sister would tell a different story as, of course, would my parents.
EB: Good point. Also, contradictions and secrets and holes in memory can actually make for great tension in a story. When I interviewed Cameron Dezen Hammon for this series, we talked a lot about manufacturing tension in a memoir by playing with the timeline and order of events. I love how your book is made up of a series of short vignettes that bounce around from different times and places. How did you come up with this structure? Why did you settle on it?
LS: I’m so glad you liked that. This was such an interesting aspect of creating this book for me. First of all, along with my poor memory I have a short attention span, so what worked for me in writing this book was to not worry about a timeline or order of events and just write a stand-alone chapter about whatever was present for me. I told myself I would worry about ordering them later. I ended up with 72 chapters, some of them only one word or one sentence. I knew when I wrote the chapter that would become the last chapter that it was where I wanted the book to end, even though I still had more chapters to write. When I thought I had a complete piece of work, the challenge of ordering was the next task. I must say it was a fun project, figuring out what to do with these 72 chapters. I put each title on an index card and spread them out on my living room floor, shifting the order multiple times, asking the advice of my writing group, shifting the order again and again.
EB: Yes! I am always telling my students to do this! I am obsessed with using index cards to figure out structure! I appreciate you saying that because now they won’t think it’s just me being crazy, that other people do it too.
LS: I have a strange affection for index cards myself! It was such a helpful tool for me. My book does not really have a narrative arc but it does have an emotional arc and that’s what I hope I’ve achieved in arranging the chapters as I have. Also, this is the way memory works, right? It’s not linear and orderly. Our minds naturally skip back and forth in time organically.
EB: So true. Alex Marzano-Lesnevich has talked about how this is why they chose to structure The Fact of a Body in the way that they did. In addition to feeling like a memory-collage, your book has been described as an “archaeological dig,” which reminded me of Grace Talusan’s memoir The Body Papers, because she also uses photographs, letters, and other documents throughout as a type of familial evidence. Can you talk a bit about your decision to include these elements, and how you decided which things specifically to include and which to leave out?
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