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Kerri Kearney's avatar

Oh yes Ann! I can believe someone would never have known people from the same family were reporting on the same events! Definitely anything we write (or the stories we tell verbally), no matter how "factual" we try to be, get told through the lenses of our experiences, beliefs, etc. Everyone's version is true ... from their perspective. It's why I like to use a statement that acknowledges that. The PPD article I referred to in the blog has this statement: "Presented within an autoethnographic framework, this narrative of my experiences with PPD remains wholly my own, and only one possible interpretation of my experiences." Certainly my family would tell differing stories about that time in my life. I don't know ... maybe we should all be including a similar type of statement in the family stories we write? I will think more on that!

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Ann G. Forcier's avatar

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird comes to mind: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your story. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

Putting on my other hat of psychotherapist: Once upon a time, I saw 8 members of the same family for individual therapy because they didn't want family therapy, but did want a family therapist in the same way that one had a family doctor. Because of the area we lived in, therapists were hard to come by so we worked out rules for making this safe.

What struck me was this: had I not known they were all in the same family and reporting on same events, I would have thought they were experiencing different events and people. Which, in a way, they were. No one story was entirely factual, but they were all true.

They each owned their own story, but no one owned the larger story of how it all fit together. Yet the individual telling of each piece was important.

I remember this when I read memoirs or tell-alls -- or write my own true stories of people who came before me.

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