In 1976. I picked up a copy of ordinary people and perhaps like many of you I couldn't put it down until I'd finished its compelling story about the painful demise about an ordinary middle-class American family. Just as compelling. However was the real-life story surrounding the novel's publication. It's author Judith guest had only begun writing seriously four years earlier when the youngest of her three sons started to school hers was the first unsolicited manuscripts accepted for publication by Viking press in 27 years and it became an immediate critical and popular success. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for 19 weeks. It was selected by for book clubs. It was serialized in a national magazine and it was selected by none other than Robert Redford for his directing debut. The film Ordinary People subsequently won four Academy Awards including best picture for 1980 rather than resting on her Laurels. Judith guest has since written another novel second heaven, which also deals with family relationships and communication problems and most recently. She has written the screenplay for Rachel River the film adaptation of three short stories by Carol Bly currently in production and post-production for American Playhouse. It is a great pleasure to present novelist Judith guest who will discuss the Mythic family. Thank you. Thank y'all for coming. When I first started to work on this talk I asked some of my friends what they thought of when they heard the words Mythic family. Here are a few of the responses that I got. the historic family the family of man The larger-than-life family famous movers and shakers. We talked about and read about the Caesars The Borgias the hearse the Roosevelts the Kennedys. The ideal or idealized family the one we all want and nobody has. the fake family the one we all pretend to have to other people the fictional family the Cleavers the bunkers the montagues and the capulets the Nelsons the huxtables the Reagan's And this last from my youngest son age 22 Ma. I do know requests. This is your speech not mine. After all I've done for that kid how sharper than a Serpent's tooth. It is to have a thankless child the leaders. Before I give you my definition I'd like to go on a little deep background here with some personal family history. My mother's relatives are Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers, the rinker's and the Sip trois. They farmed in the Delaware Water Gap in readers, Pennsylvania near Strasbourg. The railroad tracks cut across the back of my great grandfather's farm and he would Supply the train crewman with hard cider made from the apples in his Orchard in exchange. They kick Cole off the back end of the carrier as the train barreled across his property. This was how he heated the family farm house through the winners. They were poor. So was the land when I asked my grandmother what they raised on her father's Farm, she told me rocks. They had nine children. My grandmother was the oldest daughter. My grandmother's mother died soon after the birth of her last child and my grandmother took over her job. She raised her younger brothers and sisters and ran The Farmhouse. I'm certain this is why my mother was an only child my grandmother left the farm in her early 30s and came to Detroit where she met and married my grandfather. He was a telegraph operator for the Grand Funk Railroad. My great-grandfather Christian. Sip trough was a Healer word has it that families would bring their sick and injured to him for help. It was vaguely understood that this was not medical help per se the story I'd heard from my mother was about a little girl who was hurt in a farm accident. They brought her to my great grandfather and he put his hands on her and she was healed. It was all very hush-hush. Whenever I ask my grandmother to verify this she would only say oh you don't want to hear about that. My father's family came to Detroit directly from the old country Birmingham England in 1891. They were the guests and the Andrews my grandfather Harry married my grandmother Margaret in 1912. They had five children in nine years when the oldest my father was nine. My grandfather died and my grandmother went to work for the welfare department in Detroit. Her sister moved in to help her take care of the kids. She never left the two of them raised the family and they lived together for 40 years. My mother and father grew up in the same neighborhood went to the same schools and married right after they graduated from high school. It was his family that dominated the scene when I was growing up all of our holidays were spent with my father's relatives along with most of our Sunday afternoons. My mother's family was always invited and sometimes they even showed up but mostly they kept to themselves. I used to think that they just weren't very social but now I see how hard that must have been for them to find a place for themselves around that noisy crowd. My aunts and uncles were a force to be reckoned with they were good-humoured and energetic and very verbal. They would sit around the dining room table for hours talking talking talking. The dirty dishes would disappear. Somebody would scrape up the crumbs. The ashtrays would come out the coffee cups be refilled the remains of the desert would return to the table to be fought over and finished off and drink glasses would replace the coffee cups and all of this without any break in the talking kids were welcomed at this table. As long as you understood the rules if you were a bratty or whiny you were sure to be removed by your mother. If you got Brave and join the conversation, you took your chances along with everyone else. You had to be prepared to support your opinions and take the heat. They loved you a lot. But that wouldn't save you if you were full of baloney. It was something like a rite of passage in our family. It's still is they love to talk politics and current events and although they were not what I would call political people they didn't support causes and whenever I get asked at school whether I was a democrat or a republican, I didn't know who were the good guys and who are the bad guys the way the rest of the kids seem to there was a lot of talk about books and about music about movies about the theater and about their Collective Hobbies. All that I know in this world of bird-watching beekeeping winemaking Log Cabin building photography snakes stamp collecting and sailing. I learned at that dining room table. I don't remember much talked about sports talking was the sport. And they love to tell stories. They told him about the people who lived up the black the people they worked with people they read about in the newspapers people. They knew or used to know. This is where I got the body of knowledge that I have about my aunts and uncles my dad traveled with a tent shoulder summer. He was 14 my aunt spent millions of Summers as Church camp counselors where they behaved in ways that were anything but holy I knew the names and personal habits of all the dogs they'd ever owned. I heard the story of Aunt Belle and her newborn baby both die in the influenza epidemic of 1918. I heard about my great-grandmother who took in boarders and raise the infant son of a young woman who was living with her and who went off to work one day and just never came back. The best story the one that was always good for a Repeat Performance was called Aunt Jean and the tire thieves. My Aunt Jean my actually she wasn't my NG and she was my dad's Aunt Jean. She was my grandmother's sister was a very light sleeper and she used to roam the house a lot at night and one night she woke up and she looked out the window and she saw four guys loosening the lugs on the tires on their neighbors car that was parked across the street. So while she watched these guys loosened all the lugs on all these tires and they didn't take the tires off the car. They jumped in their own car and drove away. So my aunt she got everybody up in the house and then they called the police and then they got all the neighbors up and the cops came and they said well, this is how the tiger thieves work they go around and they loosen all the lugs on all the tires and then they go around next street in the next street in the neighborhood loosening all these lugs and then they come back and just whip the tires off the car and take off. So the neighbors turned out all their lights and my family turned out their lights. And the cops hid behind the bushes and they waited and sure enough after a little while. This pure sterile came driving down the street. They knew it was a Pierce-Arrow all these little details. I'll go with the story. They knew it was a Pierce-Arrow because the headlights were in the fender rather than between the fenders like the like most of the old style cars so down the street comes the Pierce-Arrow out of the car jump these four guys and they start busily taking the tires off of this car across the street and they wait and everyone in the neighborhood hiding behind their Windows Waits and waits in the cops. Don't do anything. So pretty soon. This guy's got one of the tires off and he's got it practically in the backseat of this car and Meanwhile my Aunt Jean who was very nervous and is sitting up looking out her window waiting can't stand it any longer and she leans out the window and she hollers drop that tire whereupon the guy dropped the tire and the four guys jump in the car and drive away whereupon then the cops come out and fire a couple of half-hearted shots after him the talk around the neighborhood was that the cops were either chicken or In Cahoots only nobody ever proved this anyway next to this crowd my solemn taciturn Pennsylvania Dutch relatives didn't stand a chance. No doubt. There were stories there who knew what Adventures they might have had or what juicy skeletons could be hanging in their closets. The point was you never talked about it. So one has to get one's family myths where one can Here's another my grandfather's brother Edgar guest went to work as a copy boy for the Detroit Free Press when he was 14 years old. In 1898 when he was 17, he published his first poem there were over 15,000 of them in his lifetime. He wrote a poem a day for 40 years and in 1952. He was named the poet laureate of, Michigan. This is my literary Heritage and I have to say that I didn't think much of it while I was growing up. They called him the poet of the plain people. He was if you will the Rod McKuen of the early 1900s. He published over a dozen volumes of verse which were syndicated in newspapers all across the country and he was much maligned by the literary critics. They said his skill was minimal and his subject matter sentimental and banal. I in my callow youth agreed with them. Although I was not above horning in on his Celebrity Status every chance. I got I remember once when he came to the Edgar a guest school where I was in fifth grade, I got the hobnob with him in the teachers out in the hall, and I thought I was pretty hot stuff. I didn't know him. Well seeing him mostly at weddings and funerals but I sure know all the stories about him how he'd never finished high school how his first books were self-published handset in the Attic by his brother Harry my grandfather who was a printer by trade. They only had enough type to set eight pages at a time. So poems with too many e's and them had to wait for the next set up. They published 800 copies of his first book home Rhymes this way his second just glad things was done the same way 1,500 copies this time. I grew up in Detroit. I lived there until I was 9 years old when my father decided to quit his job and go into the lumber business. You build a log cabin on the shore of Lake Huron and we started and he started his own paper company. He cut down trees and sold industrial-size chainsaws on the side. Two years later the Paper Company went bankrupt, which did not break. My mother's heart as she hated living in a log cabin about as much as she hated small-town life in northern, Michigan. She was a city girl. And I don't think it broke. My father's either. He is a man of many moods and schemes when I was seven. He had her nearly talked into moving to Costa Rica and going into the oil business. Today at 73 he owns a grape and apple farm near Flint. He bought it after he retired from the envelope business. Then he built a house and a barn and a small Winery on the property with the help of my two brothers. My mother always thought they were going to retire in, Florida. My dad could and still can talk my mother into doing just about anything because he knows how to tell a good story. He has a way of dressing up ideas making them look amazing and ever possible. It's a gift. From my mother. I have inherited an insatiable appetite for these stories. from my father an addiction to telling them but writers don't only tell stories writers have preoccupations or themes as they're sometimes called private concerns that they write about and write about and write about It's easy to spot someone else's. That guy never thinks about anything but sex I say to myself after I read Joe Blow six novel not his real name. My own obsessions are harder for me to pin down. This is mostly to the good. There are things bubbling along inside that want your attention. The only release is to put them on the page. You don't get it from continually asking yourself. Why am I thinking about this from that you only get panic and the urge to get away and do something else for a living. Years ago. I read a novel by Iris Murdoch who's a writer that I like very much and a line of hers jumped off the page at me. There is no order in the world. There is only chance and the terror of chance. This is definitely one of Iris Murdoch's preoccupation. She writes about it all the time. It has also become one of mine or rather mind seems to involve tremendous ambivalence about it along with a desire to discredit it. I believe that this is where the character of best the mother in ordinary people originally was born. I wanted to see the way that belief would manifest itself in a person's life and how it would affect the lives of those around her. I had a lot of preoccupations when I was writing that novel. I also wanted to explore the anatomy of grief and the idea that death pulls a family together that each member supports one another through times of crisis. In fact, what I've seen of grief is that families are more often torn apart by it that people tend to withdraw and turn away from each other. If you do not believe you can survive this level of emotional pain, you will do anything to avoid it the family in Ordinary People is dysfunctional. It is also a family in crisis. It isn't only each individual that's affected by a family death the group itself Alters forever for if the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Then the whole is diminished by more than just the subtraction of that loss part. So what happens now that the family screw-up is gone who takes over the job. What if he was also the family Peacemaker what happens to all those separate alliances? Where do they go when the balance shifts? All of these questions were pushing at me at the time. I wrote this novel. This was 15 years ago when my own boys were 11 and 9 and 6. I could not imagine how people survive this kind of catastrophic change. I wanted to know how it could be done. What I didn't intend was to challenge the myth that this turning away from others and refusing to deal is how men behave in our society not women. People said why did you make the woman the one who was emotionally unavailable and the man this loving caring person sometimes referred to as this ineffectual person interesting choice of adjectives. I mean, she's such a bitch. What's the matter don't you like women or what? Yeah, I like women. I like them a lot and I truly did not see this one as a bitch but rather as a person afraid to feel She is a perfectionist someone who has a great need to control her environment and suddenly she's lost something. And it is huge and it is unreplaceable. She didn't believe this was possible. Now. She knows the truth. There's no magic and living by the book. No guarantee that there won't be another accident. There is no order in the world. There is only chance and the terror of chance. Worse, she can't trust this other kid of hers. The only one she has left. He tried to kill himself again. No reason no warning. What can she do to regain control of her life? Well, here's one option. She can simply refuse to feel about it. There is a kind of safety in the world. It lies in the flight from vulnerability. In 1979 when the movie Ordinary People came out my husband and I were in New York City on a street corner outside a theater. It was close to our East. I remember watching people line up to see this movie. I was standing there loving every single person in the line. They cared about this story. They wanted to see this story up on the screen. Then my husband saw a cardboard sign tacked to a telephone pole. It said Ordinary People is anti-woman and anti motherhood as are all scripts written by men. So, of course, my husband was Furious and was all set to rip it down, but I said no leave it. It's fine. It's great. I can not explain why I found it. So terrifically moving that somebody would put up a sign like this. Something that I created had affected someone that much and it was threatening to them. You don't bother unless you think a point of view has some power you don't get mad unless you care. I wanted people to care even if they didn't happen to see it the same way. I did even if they thought I should have told the story a different way. I was not making an anti-feminist statement with this novel. I was saying there are people like this in the world and some of them are women. to be honest I had a lot of trouble with her too. She refused to come clean with me about what she was thinking usually at crucial moments in the narrative. I understood her son Conrad. I always knew what he was up to. And Calvin her husband to although his passivity was something that had to be pointed out to me much later. Some people even had the nerve to call them wimpy. I was horrified at that to me. He was just a good guy struggling to come to grips with his life. I know a lot more about those characters. Now. I know the reason for bests in accessibility and for Calvin's wimpiness and Conrad's tremendous anger turned inward on himself. You see the truth is Writers Do not write to impart information to others. They write to inform themselves. They write to find out what they know about their own preoccupations and what they still need to know for this information. They have two sources the world around them in the world within. In the gray wolf annual three essays Memoirs and Reflections. I read a wonderful essay. I read a lot of wonderful essays in this collection. The one I want to quote from is an essay by Barry Lopez where he talked about the purpose of Storytelling. He said it was to achieve Harmony between the exterior and the interior landscapes. Believe me. It's a lot easier to collect material from the exterior landscape than from the interior. For that you only need good hearing and a good memory my hearings going but a good memory. I've got a couple of years ago. I was given a speech in Detroit and a guy came up to me after the speech and said you probably don't remember me. My name is David Rice. I used to live across the street from you on Freeland. What did he think? I had Amnesia. He lived across the street from me for 5 years. I had a crush on him the whole time. Even when he used to do me wrong, he when he used to say stuff like you dumb freak from Battle Creek. I said, yeah. I remember you David. You're the guy who kicked me in the stomach on my 10th birthday. Remember we were standing on my front lawn. I believe it was a Saturday. You seem shocked at my total and instant recall of of such a trivial event. Actually, it was the first time I ever had the wind knocked out of me if there's anyone out there whose childhood was so sheltered that you've skipped that experience. Let me tell you about it. You think you're going to die and it's taking way too long. As I recall this only put a slight damper on David's and my relationship just for a day or so. I had a good reason to remember him but it makes no difference. I remember everyone who lived on that street. I could go up one side and down the other and name every house even the ones who didn't have kids. So I asked him if you remember the the victory garden that we had out in the vacant lot behind Mount Carmel hospital. Nah, he didn't remember that you remember the fort we dug and my dad came out and told us not to dig it any deeper it was too dangerous the dirt might fall in so then Jimmy Leonard went and erected on us. So we took his garbage cans and dump them all over his front porch. Nope. He couldn't recall that one. I started thinking maybe he had Amnesia. Anyway after I laid a few more of these memorable incidents on him, he went limping off a beaten man. I had remembered the guy under the table. I wonder sometimes why these memories take up so much room in my head why they have a tendency to push out the names of people I met yesterday and what happened to me last week. Maybe it is just that they have you in the same way that the friends you make in those early years. Do they are simply the ones who got there first. This is the easiest part of writing recall. The hard part comes when you take that material you've called up and remember it that is you put it in different order you combine it with other newer information you have so that it is actually changed and you no longer see it in the same way you did when you first start it up there. What I know about the interior landscape is that to get at that material you sometimes need a blowtorch and a 300 watt Spotlight and a pickaxe and the longest piece of string in the world to tie to the nearest tree. So you're sure you're going to find your way back. The trouble I had with Beth Jared and Ordinary People had a lot to do with my own refusal to get out the pickaxe and turn on the 300 watt lamp. However, that as Tolstoy says is a tune from another Opera writing is many things. It is crafts and Imagination and insight and hard work and magic and myth and escape and therapy and storytelling and a hundred other things going on with a specific writer at the specific time. That is why our writers relationship to material is so very different than a readers. And that is why literary criticism often feels so irrelevant to a writer. Of course, it's never irrelevant when someone's pointing out your flaws and your weaknesses. I've read reviews of mine and winced who the guy was right about that one. This can even be helpful at times. Although it's pretty painful. But criticism isn't always that clear-headed when it takes the form of now, here's what I would do with that material if it were my material then it is no longer useful to the writer when somebody says that my response is always no kidding. So go do it and I mean that in the kindest way to take a set of characters and a situation and make happen what you truly believe would happen is an honest and a worthy endeavor. There are as many versions as there are people in the world if I were running this show. God I wish I were running the show I would push for more versions this first novel of mine was in fact my second novel. The one I turned to after abandoning another in despair the old I never want to tell this dumb story in the first place. So I'll just take this box of crummy notes and papers and I'll throw it out. Oh no. Well, I'll just stick it in the back of this closet and I'll throw it away later syndrome. After Ordinary People was published. I hauled it out from the back of the closet. What's this second heaven? Okay, I'll give this baby one more shot. And again here. I am writing about dysfunctional families three of them this time only these families are no longer in crisis to have been split by divorce and won by separation. And essentially this is a novel of divorce. Of husbands from wives of children from their parents of people from those received ideas. They've been taught to believe our Eternal truths IE those myths of our society that help it to function with a degree of efficiency. Some of these myths are that all parents love their children that if you work hard and do your best you will be rewarded. That marriage is made in heaven that there is some ideal family system out there that bears The Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Then there are the individual family miss the ones that relate to specific attitudes and behaviors of that smaller Society within the larger one. Here's a sampling of some of the myths of the family that I grew up in. Life is tough. But if you're strong you can make it. Intelligent people should be able to work out their own problems. Nobody needs expect to be happy all the time. Don't be too showy with your emotions. You cannot overestimate the influence of these first messages. Pessimists tend to be get pessimists deniers baguette deniers those who see life as an adventure and essentially benign will pass that view on to their children. I'm speaking here of the raw material of the unexamined life. But of course, there's no such thing books movies teachers friends other's ideas and opinions the whole body of One's Own experience all that will intrude. Still what each of us sees depends so much on the power and focus of the individual lens and the way that lens was first ground. That feel of absolute permanents around it is what makes change so difficult for all of us. So what happens when some of those Eternal truths do not conform to one's own experience in the world when ultimately you have to decide whether to believe in the myths or believe in yourself. This is a subject that I know I will never be tired of writing about we make decisions about how we will survive in this world way back when we're toddlers before we're able to think they are valid sensible decisions at the time, but they are based on insufficient data. In order to change the way we look at things we must rethink and redecide break those old habits and try to find a new view. It's tough work not for sissies. I wanted a vehicle for exploring all of this. I also wanted to write about the structure of a family about Spirit over ritual. about content over form What makes a family exactly does it have to be blood if people care for each other and support each other through good and bad times and are truly committed to helping each other. Doesn't that constitute a family? I had some basis for believing in a wider definition of family life. My great-grandmother raising Horace the abandoned baby and her boarding house. My great aunt Jean taking care of my grandmother markets children. My grandmother Emma becoming mother to her own brothers and sisters. But my real preoccupation was with how you get out from under a repressive family system. When you are part of it when it's all you've ever known. How does it happen that you finally come to realize that you deserve something better? What decisions do you have to make in order to Free Yourself at what personal cost? So first, I wrote a short story about a boy who runs away from an abusive father and moves in with a woman. He's met at school a woman who is recently divorced from her husband of 20 years these two men the boy's father and the woman's husband are alike in a lot of ways. They are both controlling guys who ran very tight ships. But cats husband is a benevolent despotism. There is such a thing and she had no desire to get out from under. Her husband was the one who left. So here I have two characters one who's trying to find himself by running away and one who's trying to figure out how she can live her life when she no longer has anyone to tell her what to do. Well, I found out pretty early on that. There was no way I could get through this novel without eventually encountering the father of this abuse kid. a man who sees everything in terms of black and white who cannot tolerate life's ambiguities a religious fanatic with a Fanatics need for power I didn't really expect to have a problem with him. I thought I understood him pretty well and yet every single scene. He showed up in was stilted and artificial and wrong. I knew it and I couldn't seem to make him come across with any dialogue that sounded authentic and the more I worked him over the worst got until I was ready to give up on him and just have him running around in the background of the story. I was going to stop trying to make him. Be real. So one day when I was discussing this with a friend of mine. Another novelist, of course, they are the only people you can talk to about this stuff their eyes don't glaze over and they don't keep looking at their watches. Just when you get to the good part. Anyway, my friend said I know exactly why you can't get anywhere with this guy because you hate his guts and he knows it and he ain't going to give you nothing. Another of the many hard lessons a writer has to learn that you cannot write beyond your own awareness and you do not gain awareness by sticking to your opinions and being stubborn and unmovable. Anytime I have a preconceived notion about a character and it is Ironclad. That's what I'm in trouble in other words anytime. I have the answer before it's been a question. I usually find that I'm preaching I'm determined to push this opinion on to my reader no matter what and it shows. Here's another quote. I got from Barry Lopez truth reveals itself. Most fully not in Dogma, but in Paradox, irony and contradiction. So, where was this guy when I really needed them. Well, I finally finished second heaven and when it came out I was asked to do a publicity tour which involve going to several cities signing some books giving newspaper and radio and TV interviews. One of these was on a radio Drive show in the late afternoon, you know, when people are riding home in their cars heading home from work, so I got to the station and this woman took me down this series of long dark narrow hallways to this tiny Studio door. I remember thinking that That this was what a rabbit Warren would look like. I knew I'd never be able to find my way back by myself. So she opened the door and she introduced me to this guy and I went inside and I sat down across from and he's wearing these big headphones out to here and he takes them off and he looks at me and he says so what's this book about anyway? I'm always sort of nonplussed at this question. Let's face. It. All writers are nonplussed at this question. Nobody knows how to answer it. At this particular time owing to the particularly rotten relationship. I'd had with this novel. I felt like saying it's about seven years of my life. So what's it to you buddy? But I didn't I tend to get very vague when people ask me what my books are about I say stuff like oh it's about people. It's about life the pursuit of happiness. So I say this to him he looks at me and he says we'll just tell me the plot Leah. What you don't want to do is tell somebody the plot. Have you ever told anybody the plot of Romeo and Juliet. It sounds like a True Romance comic. But I did it so I gave him this brief run through trying to make it sound interesting and then he looked at me and he said yeah, well, I'll tell you I never read fiction. I mean, I'm sure it's got some kind of value. I don't know now my wife as she reads fiction all the time. She loves it. She eats it up me. I'm only interested in facts figures dates history, you know the truth. After which he flipped the switch and we were on the air. So when the show is over and I came home my husband who happened to be driving home from work at the time said to me what in the hell did that guy say to you before you went on the air because you were furious at him. I was what did I say? I having so much smoke coming out of my ears that I didn't hear anything of the interview at all. My husband said not what you told him the way you told him. I know that tone. You were ready to kill him. Well. That was a long time ago. That was five years ago. In fact. I'm not mad anymore. I quit being mad actually. Just now. Right after I told the story. I've been waiting five years to tell this story. out loud to a large group of people It feels a little like murder murder By storytelling. Anyway, what I found most annoying about this guy wasn't his not reading fiction and being so darn proud of it. But rather his idea that there isn't any truth in it. Where do people get this flaky notion that fiction isn't truth. True suggest a certain Conformity with fact but facts are only pieces of dead matter. They have no Vitality. No life of their own and that's a fact truth is the bigger picture the thing that connects and energizes and completes a set of facts. There is no greater thrill for an artist. No greater evidence that truth is present than to have someone say That book you wrote. This is my story and you told it exactly right Barry Lopez says distinctions between fiction and nonfiction are sometimes obscured by arguments over what constitutes the truth. The first distinction is to separate the authentic from the inauthentic. He then goes on to tell an incident that happened to a friend of his and Alaskan Indian who was hunting Wolverines from a snowmobile. The guy had followed the animals tracks for several miles and finally spotted the animal up on the crest of this hill where the Wolverine was standing looking back at him. Then the Wolverine went down over the next Hill and he followed him a while farther and came up over the next Crest and there was the Wolverine again just staring at him and this happened several times until he dipped down and he came up over this Crest and all of a sudden there was the Wolverine bounding straight at him and it took a flying leap and it landed right on his lap in the snowmobile. So in his frantic haste to get out of the way, he flipped the snowmobile and was scrambling free and the Wolverine jumped out the other side and then it just sat there about five feet away looking at him. He told Barry afterward that he actually had plenty of time to reach for his gun, but he didn't do it and the animal and the man just stared at each other for a long minute after which The Wolverine turned and walked away Lopez's comment was myth which we tend to regard as fictitious or merely metaphorical is as authentic as real as the story of a wolverine in a man's lap. He then talks about how he told the story to another Indian friend of his from another tribe and asked what the other man thought of it. The man had nodded his head and said, yes that could happen. This is what I have to feel about the stories that I write that they could happen for me. This is what constitutes truth it is what the term Mythic family means to me the people in these novels are as real as my noisy aunts and uncles sitting around a dining room table and they are more real than my Pennsylvania Dutch relatives who I hardly know. What all that is. I have a collection of facts about them, but very little truth. So, how can we learn to distinguish between the authentic and the inauthentic in our own fiction between what's truth? And what's not? Well, it ain't easy but speaking as a reader I sure can tell the difference when I see it. I can read pages and pages of phony dialogue phony motivation phony reactions and then suddenly something comes along and you just know every word every line is informed and real. There is a kind of energy brought to the page. That is simply not present when the truth is missing. I don't know how to interpret what I do as a writer. I only know that what is authentic and autobiographical to me in my novels is emotional content. I talked earlier about a writer's preoccupations and how these preoccupations often don't reveal themselves until after you've written about them. Then you can look around and say now I get it. Well what I get about my novels now is that they are first and foremost stories about the emotional life of a set of characters how these people feel about things and what they are doing or not doing about these feelings. And what I have realized about my own family that energetic Taki group sitting around the dining room table. Is that this is the one thing nobody ever talked about? No wonder I'm obsessed not only in my fiction but in my real life. I grew up believing that it was just not civilized to feel too much one way or another about things that in fact, it was tacky to display excess of emotion whether Joy or sadness. And anger will anger was out anger meant that you had lost control and this was just not acceptable in that very English household. Well, the problem with not expressing one's feelings is that one becomes confused about whether or not one is actually feeling anything about anything one being me. So I decided early on that. I was going to have these feelings and I was going to talk about them except the one thing about Family Miss is not that you must live by them, but that they do exist go against them if you like, but rest assured you will feel plenty guilty about doing it and you will also feel like a foreigner at times I say feel like a foreigner because I know I'm not a foreigner in that family, but feeling is different than knowing. This is the confusion that arises when emotions are not given a place at the table. They don't go away. They keep trying to get their elbows up there. Sometimes they have to do it by masquerading as thoughts. Sometimes they have to turn into something physical just to get release. There was never a lack of volume or activity or energy at that table. There was so much feeling trying to get discharged that there wasn't room at the table to deal with it all. So when people ask me why it is that I only write about dysfunctional families. I suppose I could say it's because they're more interesting which they are. They offer more variety. I could also cop my buddy Leo Tolstoy is line from Anna Karenina all happy families resemble each other each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but the fact is I write about them because they are what I see and what I know all families are dysfunctional in some ways. How can they not be they are made up of people who are each and every one of us dysfunctional to a degree. We keep trying though. That's our job. I told you at the beginning of this talk that my grandfather had died when my father was 9 years old. My grandfather was only 32. He had a congenital heart defect something that today you replace with a plastic valve and the guy goes on forever. The week before he died. He took a leave of absence from his job at the Free Press and he and my grandmother packed up the car and took the five kids up to Harrisville, Michigan. It was only 200 miles from Detroit. But in those days it was a stopover in Bay City a two-day drive when they got to Harrisville. My grandfather went to bed and he never got up. He died a month later. My grandmother shipped his body home on the train packed everyone up left this favorite vacation spot of theirs to come home and look for a job. For sister Jean the one who moved in to help her take care of the kids was 28 at the time and in love with a married man. She had an affair with them over the next 20 years and fought with my grandmother over at the whole time. Of course, none of these things that I discovered until years after my grandmother. My grandmother's death. How did my grandmother manage emotionally all those years? Why didn't she ever marry again? Did she ever want to did she have an opportunity and my father how did he deal with this death and becoming the man of the family at 9:00 and my aunt did she ever resent her role as second mother did she use it as an excuse not to marry? This kind of emotional truth is the part. I can never get it with the English side of my family. They have their own version of oh, you don't want to hear about that. It's a look they can't believe you'd be so crass in this way. I don't know them any better than I know my Pennsylvania Dutch relatives and they're in of course lies obsession. Years ago, I started a novel around all these questions not a collection of facts rather the truth of my family history not a reporting on but a search for these truths. It's hard. I thought the other two novels were hired. But this one just sits there looking at me waiting for me to figure out what it is. I want to say about it all. That's how writing always seems to me like pieces of my life seven years or three years or however long it takes. I wait to connect the dots make the association's see the thing as a whole. And though it doesn't look like it. I'm also racing against time to get to the end before the beginning is hopelessly out of date because you are changing all the time and writing changes you I didn't feel the same about Beth at the end of ordinary people as I did when I started it. I thought when I started this family would solve its problems. They would be a Reconciliation they all live happily ever after. I also kept saying to myself. No way would two people separate over a difference of opinion about how to deal with their son. But the longer I wrote on it the more complicated these problems became or rather the more they revealed themselves as much more complex than I had originally understood them to be and the more I saw that this was a division between two people that was fundamental. This wasn't about child rearing at all. This was about how to people wanted to live their lives. It was the same with second heaven. I still don't know all that I want to know about autonomy about why people have a need to hurt others in the same way that they have been hurt. But I know more than I did when I started that novel back in 1971. My characters have a tendency to slouch toward Bethlehem in fairly simple outline. The longer. I write em on them the harder they push to expand that original definition and they insist on being who they want to be. I'm always sort of embarrassed by that essentially romantic view of novel writing, but it's true. process is all when I was young I read books like old-fashioned girl made his little house the five little peppers and how they grew and Pollyanna. I loved each one of those books right along with dombey and Son Oliver Twist The Fall of the House of Usher and good old Grimm's Fairy Tales. Those last with essentially pessimistic views of family life did not alarm me in the least. I ate them up in fact. So where does this Theory come from that an act of Critical examination is like an act of Destruction that when you look at something and say now here is a flaw and here's another and another it is the same as saying the whole thing's going up in Flames. It is not the same what the artist does is reveal his or her own perceptions and say it's to others does this make sense to you. What do you feel about this? for myself When I write about dysfunctional families, my focus is not on the dysfunction, but on the challenge, what can we do to change some of these things? How can this be fixed the stories and pictures that we make are merely attempts to reproduce it as realistically as we know how to do in other words to tell the truth the whole truth not just the good part. The idea that the family as an institution is in a state of Decline and that proof of this can be seen in the artist view of it's darker side. Well forgive me, but this seems presumptuous a family is not on the verge of Extinction. It is not fashion like French chocolates or the hula hoop. Families here to stay folks no matter what the artists or philosophers or talk show host happened to think about it. The mark of an institution in disarray is when it cannot bear the focus of this critical eye when its members have to pretend that everything's hunky-dory all the time. The thing that destroys is not looking closely but a refusal to look at all. The family is an indie Kline the family simply is and the measure of its Health lies in the willingness of all of us to examine it in its entirety. As for the idea of real people measuring their own success against the images being created by artists. I can only say that art is not life art imitates life. Not the other way around. I would like to tell you one more story about my family several years ago after I had given a speech a woman came up to me and asked me if I was related to Eddie guest. I told her that I was and she said I knew it, you know, he wrote about Ordinary People Too. It is thus that we come full circle with our own histories. It had truly never occurred to me before that moment in all the years. I've been writing. I never saw this thing. That is so obvious to me now that it amazes me how I could have ever overlooked it. And something even more amazing. I've heard all these stories about Uncle Edgar since I was old enough to pay attention to them. But the first time that I ever used him in a speech was a couple of months ago, and I wanted to use some of these facts and I wanted to check the accuracy of them. So I went to my Edgar gas file where I have articles and poems and items that I have collected over the last 30 years or so. Mostly they've been sent to me by friends and mostly they've laying in this file pretty much unread I found a pamphlet in their published by the Masons. He was a Mason it was published like in 1950 and it was a short history of his life and his work along with a few excerpts from some of his verses. This is an excerpt from a poem that he wrote called real people. mmm they live in modest houses and they work from day to day and the papers never noticed what they do or what they say for they're always keeping busy at life's commonplace Affairs planning futures for their children and what golden dreams are there's the backbone of this nation is the happy heart of throng of ordinary people who go swinging right along I swear to you. I had never read this poem in my life before. I read it two months ago. I'd never even heard of this poem yet. I am as certain as I can be that this is no accident. I suppose someday. I'll be going around giving speeches telling people how I actually did lift the title for my first novel from a line of one of my uncle Edgar's poems. That'd be like me to do that. I wish now that I'd known him better. I'm always interested in how my fellow writers handle the moment of creation for me. It is so disturbing. It disturbs my whole life for a long time. I viewed that as a weakness as evidence that maybe I wasn't really up to this job. Now. I see that it is a necessary part of the job. Maybe even the purpose of the job. It better be disturbing or what's the point? We're not a camera we do more than just take pictures. The toughest part of writing lies in holding all of these various truths in Balance to believe in them all simultaneously. It's also the toughest part of living. Several years ago. I read a novel by Maria Cardinal called the words to say it. Where I found this quote until you learn to name your ghosts and baptize your hopes. You have not yet been born. You are still the creation of others. It is toward this naming and baptizing that we all move no matter what our jobs are. I'd like to wish us all well in our travels. Thank you.