Hello secret-bearers, secret-holders, and secret-releasers!
Secrets come in all forms, big and small. We inherit secrets, carry the secrets of others, and struggle with the burden of all they hold and how they sometimes fester within us. This week’s episode with guest Margaret Juhae Lee explores the difference between people who want to keep the past buried and those who want to set it free. We explore intergenerational trauma and how that’s often its own form of carrying secrets forward from the past. This week’s trend is about book festivals, so please follow the link to find a festival near you.
A ‘writing from the body’ book list:
What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo
Dear Memory by Victoria Chang
Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace
I Would Meet You Anywhere by Susan Kiyo Ito
Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow
Partial transcript from the show
Brooke: Hello and welcome to our show, Write-minded. I’m Brooke Warner, one-half of this endeavor, here with the other half—Grant Faulkner. And Grant, we have definitely talked about secrets before. We cover memoir and talk with a lot of memoir writers and secrets are often baked into the stories writers are circling. But lately I’ve been reading more books that are about family secrets, I guess. We read Susan Ito’s beautiful memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, and because that was an adoption story, the secrets were about her identity, especially in her case who her father was since after she met her birth mother she didn’t want to disclose that information. And today we’re talking with Margaret Lee, whose new memoir Starry Field is about the family secrets surrounding her paternal grandfather who died when he was quite young—twenty-seven years old, and who was a political prisoner in Korea, arrested for being part of the Communist movement in the late 1930s. So I got to thinking about how secrets drive memoir, how secrets fuel memoir, and I thought that would make for a great topic of conversation. Grant, I know you’re working on your memoir, and so at the risk of putting you on the spot, are there secrets that are fueling your work?
Grant: I suppose it depends on what one decides is a secret. The whole endeavor of writing a memoir has made me think about the levels I’m willing to open up on the page, because a memoir really forces that question. It’s kind of a nagging question, in fact, or a persistent question. I think one type of secret that I’ve revealed has come about just in the act of writing—meaning that I’m uncovering things as I write, and I’m finding a way to write some stories within this context and reframe them, so anyone who reads this, including close friends and family, will discover things about me. And then there are a few moments or scenes that are asking me the question of whether or not they should be included, and I can’t decide. I just wrote one scene just to write it because I thought by writing it I would have a better idea about whether to include it or not. I might be deciding right up to the eve of publication. How about you, Brooke—how are secrets playing into your work on your memoir?
Brooke: I agree with your assessment here, Grant, because in my case, too, I don’t exactly feel like secrets, but I am circling things that I feel nervous to reveal. So that act of revealing has some connectivity to secret-holding and secret-releasing. Secrets are interesting because they’re just things we decide to keep secret. I could qualify some of what I want to write about as circling secrets because my ex-wife is a survivor of abuse, and so there are always secrets in these stories. Survivors keep secrets out of fear—like fear that they will not be believed if they tell. Then other people can inherit their secrets. In my case I did inherit the secret because we were keeping it from her family—until we told them. And in the context of that telling, it was a mediated conversation with a therapist because my ex was so afraid that her parents wouldn’t believe her. So that’s just one example of a way in which secrets are touching the story I’m telling—in a kind of roundabout way. In the case of Margaret, who we’re speaking with today, her family secrets are of a different sort. Much of the story revolves around her attempts to find out what happened to her grandfather by tracking down his records, and by getting her grandmother to open up about what happened to him and what she knew. We’re going to ask her about this part of the story in our interview, but it struck me so much the way that her grandmother kept her secrets, which felt more like a default mode than anything else. Some people are just more secretive by default, less open. Some people might think that other people are not interested in their stories, so they end up taking things to the grave with them. This is a different kind of secret because it might not be a conscious choice to hold something from other people, but more of a personality trait. Just being a secret-holder, which can have reverberations on family members, of course. Grant, when you talk about Iowa I feel like I get hints of people holding their cards close to their vests. Would you qualify people’s guardedness as being similar to being secretive. Or what more would you say about how people hold things in, don’t tell. It seems like it can be regional, familial, generational, cultural—there are so many reasons people choose not to let others in.
Grant: It’s interesting because if you grow up in a small town, you grow up feeling the world’s eyes on you, so you’re sort of hard wired to keep secrets, to keep parts of yourself hidden. That’s also because small towns like mine, or maybe all small towns, tend to have very narrowly defined conventions of what’s wrong and right. So I’d say there is a well-practiced guardedness, and since the Midwest isn’t the most expressive place culturally, I think people make things into secrets without thinking about it too much. Expressing yourself is like singing or dancing. It takes practice, it takes people around you to encourage and support and receive your expression. So in some ways that’s why I’m always interested in small towns as a writer, to imagine the secrets of a place. Brooke, in the world of memoir, what are some of the other secrets you see driving memoirs? How does this show up in the stories you read, edit, and publish?
Brooke: I do think that secrets are pretty essential ingredients to most storytelling. In memoir you will see that there are stories in which the writer is trying to get to the bottom of a family secret. So there’s something that’s a mystery, or which is newly found out, and then that becomes the driver for the story. In Margaret’s case, she always knew some facts about her grandfather, but she wanted to know more, so she set out to investigate. I’m thinking about Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance. She finds out in midlife that her dad was not in fact her biological parent, so that sets off an uncovering of how this came to be, and involves speculation about what her parents did and didn’t know, but also how they kept her own identity a secret from her. In her case she writes that she was the secret. Then there are books where the memoirist themselves are the secret-holders. This is usually to do with abuse, with family secrets that people have been saddled with. They’ve been told not to tell, so then the act of writing about those things often truly sets the memoirist free. Part of why I wanted to talk about secrets as fuel is because secrets take on a lifeforce of their own. They get lodged in people’s minds/hearts/bodies, and then the act of releasing of them is quite profound, whether you’re a person who’s trying to find out what happened, or if you’re the person who needs to do the unlocking.
Grant: I’m thinking of that saying that is often included in addiction recovery programs: “We’re only as sick as the secrets we keep.” So I think you’re right: secrets take on a life force of their own, and sometimes that life force can be self-destructive, or even destructive in ways that are hard to determine or reckon with. Margaret talks about intergeneration trauma and how that’s carried forward in mysterious ways, so I think sometimes secrets have to be excavated, like an archaeological dig. And it’s interesting how the telling of a secret can take different forms. I’m thinking, for example, of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a novel that reads like a memoir that takes the form of a letter written to his mother, but the letter, the novel/memoir, is written in English, so she can’t read it, but there’s still the need to tell his story, the secret of his life story. I think that’s the other thing about secrets: they always want to come out, and they sometimes find strange ways to come out.
Brooke: I was recently sharing about the nature of obsession in my six-month class, and talking about how we so often frame obsession as a bad thing in our culture. It’s a problem. It’s a diagnosis. But obsession in writing usually points to something that needs to be unpacked and released. Sometimes obsession can be about a secret that needs to be released. Sometimes, often, it’s about shame. And writers can even be open about something they’ve held for a long time as a secret, but the act of releasing it to a more public audience is an even bigger kind of release, like letting helium out of a balloon. I have seen the relief that comes on the other side of people sharing secrets—like the secret of having had an abortion, the secret of having used a sperm donor (and not telling the child about their true identity), the secret of having had an affair, the secret of having done something illegal, the secret of having been hurt by others. Humans have a lot of secrets. And lots of reasons for holding them. And memoir is a vehicle for letting them go, so that’s a very powerful thing. It takes us back to previous shows we’ve done on confession. It seems the Catholic Church was onto something when it came to the relief that can come through confession; it’s just their execution of how they do the confession that’s problematic. I think memoir is a much better form, and it comes with a great deal more agency since the memoirist is the one who decides each step of the way, what they’re willing to share, and what they’re willing to publish.
Grant: I like this idea of going to church and writing memoirs on Sunday mornings. I’m going to bring the Catholic Church, confession, and memoir all together, because Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions is often seen as the first memoir. And I’m going to mention one of my favorite quotes from Confessions, “Oh, Lord, Give me chastity and continence. . . but not yet.” So you can sin a little bit more and confess or write your memoir, and still get that relief. That’s one to live by. I can’t wait to talk more about a different type of confession and secrets with Margaret.
For me, this memoir is a way to reclaim family stories that were lost, and reclaim stories that I wish I’d had as a young person because now I know how important family storytelling is to identity formation. And I think that’s one reason why I felt so lost for so long—until I was in my thirties—because I embarked on this journey in my thirties.
—Margaret Juhae Lee
This Week’s Book Trend:
Book festivals are a trend—a lasting and important one in many communities. Festivals, and any kind of major event, take so much work! And if they can’t stay afloat through contributions, sponsorships, and donations, they won’t. These kinds of community events are so meaningful, so please follow the link to find a festival near you!
ABOUT MARGARET JUHAE LEE
Margaret Juhae Lee is an Oakland-based writer and a former literary editor of The Nation magazine. She has been the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University, and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korean Foundation. She is also a Tin House scholar, and has been awarded residencies at the Mesa Refuge, the Anderson Center, and Mineral School. Her articles, reviews, and interviews have been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, The Advocate, and elsewhere.