Finding the Emotional Center of a Memoir

When I began writing what would become Restrung: Fatherhood in a Different Key, I knew two things.

First, I knew I wanted to dig deep into the emotional fallout from my father’s death from cancer when I was in college—the grief of losing him, the emotional absence I felt from him when he was alive and which so many sons feel from their fathers, and the struggle not to pass down that emotional absence to my own son—all loosely tied together by the idea of music as a nurturing, sustaining life force. 

(5 Tips for Figuring Out the Structure of Your Memoir.)

And second, I knew I needed a new office! There was too much natural light in my home office, too much calming greenery visible through the office windows, too much potential interaction with my wife at her nearby desk. No, I needed a spare, dark isolation chamber to summon to the page the churning emotional stew that swirled in the empty spaces deep within me. So I converted a windowless storage room in our basement, with its single fluorescent ceiling light that cast the space in a sallow, bilious hue, into an office of sorts. I put a desk in there, a chair, a Replacements poster, and a bottomless supply of Kleenex. It was perfect.

With the workspace squared away, I turned to the task of actually writing.

Certain things came relatively easily given how the passage of time facilitates emotional processing. Nearly three decades had passed since my father died and so I found I could get my arms around the grief I experienced in losing him. I could put on my headphones, turn off that noxious fluorescent ceiling light, and blast the music of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, and be right back in my law school dorm room shortly after he died. As I listened, I remembered how during that period I’d needed the howls of rage and self-loathing that grunge represented like a plant needs sunlight only in reverse. It was the darkness that sustained me.

Same for writing about becoming a father. My son was 14 when I began writing Restrung. I was years removed from strapping him into a Baby Bjorn like some oversized gingerbread man come to life and hiking with him in the nearby hills with sweeping views of San Francisco Bay. Years removed from inevitably bawling up there to the point where I’d bring a bandana in anticipation of the waterworks as I looked out at the sunlight sparkling on the deep blue water and thought about my father, about how I wished he could have met my son, and how I didn’t want to die on my son and leave him to grow up without a father. By the time I put the proverbial pen to paper, I’d fully internalized the line from Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love that “Perhaps that is what it means to be a father—to teach your child to live without you”; understood that my father taught me to live without him—not by dying, but by not being around when he was alive; understood that I too wanted my son to learn to live without me—but not that way.

Other things were less accessible to me. Most importantly, the question of why my father had been so distant. Why he’d largely absented himself from my life by choosing his work over me. Decades later, I still couldn’t quite fathom that.

So I turned to the family archives—boxes of documents and memorabilia of uncertain provenance gathering dust in various storage bins—to learn if any clues lingered there. I also read a lot of memoirs, biographies, and interviews of my musical heroes to try to understand their relationships with their fathers.   

A document I discovered and an interview with a musical icon helped me answer the vexing question of why my father was so emotionally distant.

The document is a memoir of sorts my father’s father—my Grandpa Dave—drafted when he was 87 years old. It’s 43 single-spaced typewritten pages. Of those 43 pages, less than half a page, a mere six sentences, is dedicated to my father: his date of birth, where he went to school, who he married.  

That’s it. My father’s life reduced to a clipped, dry as dust summation, utterly devoid of emotion or affection. No adorable stories of my father as a kid, no reveling in his foibles, no mention of family vacations. An appendix describing the exact location and coordinates of Grandpa Dave’s burial plot (to which he repaired at the age of 94), receives as much ink as my father.

Instead, Grandpa Dave spends nearly his entire memoir discussing in excruciating, highly technical detail his professional life as a lawyer, a career that, according to a note my father wrote to Grandpa Dave when he was 15, kept them apart: “I hope that someday you will devote a little more time to the family than you do now,” the boy who became my father wrote. “I hope in the days to come that the family will be together more often.”

Reading Grandpa Dave’s memoir, with its nearly singular focus on work and career, it dawned on me that of course my father was himself obsessed with work and climbing the corporate ladder. He followed his father’s example and spoke a language he knew his dad understood.

Another clue came in the form of an interview given by Chris Cornell of Soundgarden. Cornell had an atrocious relationship with his father, an alcoholic prone to violence, a man Chris so despised that he’d eventually take his mother’s maiden name. Yet when Chris, who hadn’t seen his father in over 10 years, was asked in an interview, “If he came to you and said, ‘I’m an asshole, I fucked everything up, I want my son back,’ that would melt your heart, right?” Chris immediately replied, “Of course—I would absolutely forgive him.” Didn’t pause for even a second.

I came to believe in the course of writing Restrung that sons feel an almost primal need to forge connections with their fathers. It’s a need that probably goes back to the cave man and is as strong as the need for fire.

My father was no exception; he wanted to feel close to his father, to feel recognized, appreciated, and loved. If that meant sidelining his family and working every day as if it were April 14 and he a CPA, well, that’s what had to be done. And so that’s what he did, as naturally and uncritically as Cornell answered that interviewer’s question, his high-flying career as a mergers and acquisitions attorney a subconscious journey to close the most important deal of all. 

Writing Restrung helped me see that if absence is something we inherit, presence is something we have to choose—again and again—until it becomes the only legacy we leave behind.

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