The Ethics of Memory Writing

the writer and revenge

For nearly all my life, the thought that I might be known as a writer was a personal fantasy, but if it ever happened, I thought I would be known for my fiction. Writers of fiction have always inspired me, and I’ve had the very good grace to have met some very important ones.

When I say I’ve met writers, most assume I mean people like John Grisham, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Willie Morris, and Eudora Welty. Meeting them did indeed help me as a writer, but, at the time, I saw them as members of my Mississippi community first and writers second.

Should I ever become famous, future literature students should note that nearly all of my conversations with Eudora Welty were about how the man I was named for was a friend of her father. Being named “Boyd Campbell II” meant I probably occupied the same space in her mind as one of her characters. She was always very cordial and polite, even friendly, but I doubt if she ever saw me as anything other than an extension of her father’s friends. I was an artifact of Jackson society, an element of the Millsaps patchwork, and little else. It wasn’t her fault. For most people of her generation, that’s all I ever was. For a lot of people in my generation, that’s all I ever was.

The first Southern writer I ever read was Kathryn Tucker Windham, who wrote books in which she collected ghost stories. After that, I read “A Rose For Emily” in high school, like every other teenage student in America. The others had to wait until college, where I read them for the first time. I only read John Grisham because he was selling books out of the trunk of his car, and I was friendly with young members of the House. It wasn’t a bad book. It was awfully derivative, though, I thought.

The writers that inspired me were Science fiction writers. Among them, I’ve been blessed to meet several. D.C. Fontana, Greg Bear, Harlan Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke (by correspondence), George R.R. Martin, and most importantly Ray Bradbury.

Famously childhood friends Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen, and Forest Ackerman probably had more of an influence on shaping my life than most members of my own family. I don’t know what experience others had with him, but Bradbury was the first person I ever met who treated me not as a fan or a reader but as someone who might be another writer. Of all the important, serious writers I’ve met, none have had as much influence as this cheerful fella wearing tennis shorts, living the California lifestyle, and writing about robots and dinosaurs.

Back in Mississippi, my family communicates not in sentences but in stories. This is pretty common around here. It’s probably why I write. My sister married a boy who might be worse. One of his children is an excellent writer, and I suspect the other two are as well; they just don’t do it as much yet. Sometimes, somebody might make a simple declarative statement, but then they’ll follow it up with a story that proves their point, then somebody else will have a story about the same thing.

My sister married a boy who is close to my age, close to my social strata, and from the same zip code. Most of our conversations involve comic books, disappointing sports figures, fermented beverages, and women. The last part often caused consternation with my sister because many of those stories were about her friends.

That I wrote at all was something of a dirty secret most of the time when my father was alive. I once mentioned that I had a drink with Willie Morris, and he had nothing pleasant to say. “That’s not any kind of life for a man.” was his summation. Morris had a reputation for drinking, but so did I. If I’m completely honest, my father did too, but who's counting?

Even though I wasn’t supposed to take this writing business seriously, I never stopped doing it. I’ve journaled nearly every day since I was thirteen. Journal writing is very different from fiction writing. The point is to chronicle your life's facts and your opinion on them. Some journals were written to be eventually read by others. Mine were not.

Most of what I wrote was unspeakable. What a sixteen-year-old saw when he found a man’s body with the gunsmoke still in the air and his heart pumping out what was left of his blood through the two holes in his head isn’t something anyone should ever read, but if a teenage boy should see these things, he should have some avenue to sort out those thoughts, and for me, that was writing.

There have been times when something happened to me that was so unpleasant my mind blanked out the memory, and the only way I could figure out what happened was to go back and read what I journaled about it.

When I tell the story of my writer’s journey, I sometimes leave out the fifteen years I tried to write a blog. I leave it out because most of the “Boyd’s Life” Blog was pretty unremarkable. My most successful article was “How Big Is The Blue Whale,” which was around four hundred words and described how big a blue whale was swimming around in the ocean. It got nearly two million views. I always assumed it must have been a question in junior high school science homework that people searched Google for. It wasn’t very interesting writing.

What was missing from the blog about “Boyd’s Life” were actual stories about my life. I’ve always collected trivial facts like Cliff Clavin on “Cheers,” and my blog became a repository of that. That kind of thing is fun to write but not very interesting to read. In the newspaper business, they often kept little stories like that to fill out space where they failed to sell advertising.

One day, when I was still far too sick to leave my room, I decided to clean up one of my journal entries and post it on Facebook. I hadn’t posted anything on Facebook in more than fifteen years. This sudden appearance from the dead caused quite a stir. It’s still one of my most-read posts.

Publishing my journal entries as a publically posted essay involved some ethical considerations. When writing for my eyes only, I could say anything I wanted about somebody. All I really had to worry about was being true to myself. It often became a place where I vented and dealt with my feelings about people who (I thought) were unfair with me.

Doing that in a place where other people can read it very quickly goes from me telling a story about something in my life to a story where I’m seeking revenge. If I’m the writer, I control the narrative and can make people look pretty horrible if I want to, but that’s not my purpose.

That’s where the ethics come in. Nearly always, if I have something unpleasant to say about somebody in my essays, I won’t include their name. Sometimes, I change key facts to make it more difficult to identify them. No matter how convinced I might be, they did something terrible to me; not allowing them a way to inject their side into the story puts an entirely different burden on me as a writer.

Sometimes, I’ll make people look a lot better than they actually were because they’re no longer around to tell their side of the story.

There’s a woman I write about sometimes where many people know things didn’t end well between us at all. I never spoke to her after that for nearly thirty years, then one day, I got a message that she died. It would be really easy for me to write about why we didn’t end well, but I’d rather talk about why I loved her in the first place. I figure I owe her that much. Telling people why we fought wouldn’t make me feel any better.

Not telling the whole story probably isn’t being very honest with my readers. That’s just a chance I’ll have to take. My readers are more than welcome to the intimate details of my life, but I’d rather not share the intimate, sometimes painful, details of someone else’s life, even with their friends.

Sometimes, people ask why I don’t write about my married life. That’s probably always going to remain a blank space in the narrative of my life. I figure that’s fair.

On Sunday, I wrote a story about someone who had a damaging influence on my brother’s life. On Monday, I wrote a story about someone who had a damaging influence on my life. With both stories, I broke the whole thing down and rebuilt it several times, trying to find a way to tell the story without it reading like me getting revenge.

If I ever feel thoughts of revenge creeping into my writing, I fight it pretty hard. I want to tell my story and the things that shaped me, but I don’t want to change how the world sees anyone else. That’s not my responsibility.

A lot of my writing is self-deprecating. That’s honestly just a Southern trait, but I often use it to balance the story when I have something uncomplimentary to say about somebody else. Saying that they’re a shit person, but I’m a shit person too, somehow seems to dull the edge. At least, I hope it does.

A lot of people write memoirs and journals to build up an image of themselves and sell themselves like a product. That’s something entirely different from what I’m trying to do. When I write in memoir, I’m trying to convey something about life on this good green earth, not sell anybody the idea that I’m anything special because I’m not. At least not any more special than anyone else.

Likewise, if I write about somebody who did something to hurt me or hurt somebody I care about, it’s not for revenge—I’m looking for a way to describe why anyone would damage anyone else and what impact it has. Life can be painful. It’s part of the narrative. I struggle to tell the narrative without passing judgment.

If I ever wanted revenge for something somebody did to me, I got it when I survived their best shot. Being able to take a punch, even a really painful one, can bring a person a lot of peace in life.

The stories I tell my family are very different from those I publish online. Sitting at Amerigo, celebrating my birthday, if I want to call somebody a motherfucker, I’ll call them a motherfucker. My family will either agree or disagree, but my responsibility there is very different.

Some people say my stories are a lot more interesting when I’m willing to call somebody a mother fucker. That’s probably true. These aren’t characters, though. They’re real people. It’s not right for me to call somebody a mother fucker without giving them an equal platform to tell their side of the story.

I’m still hoping that one day, I’ll be known more for my fiction than anything else, but for the time being, these memory essays are pretty interesting, and I’m getting fascinating feedback. The ethics of writing non-fiction are different, though. I work pretty hard to keep that in mind.