INTERVIEW: Elissa Altman, Author of Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create

Interviewed by Michèle Dawson Haber

Elissa Altman’s hybrid craft/hybrid memoir, Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, is the book writers new to memoir have been waiting for, even if they don’t yet know it.

Who owns a shared story and when is permission necessary are questions that can immobilize any memoirist, especially a writer just starting out, and I can’t think of anyone more suited to help writers find the courage to tell their stories than Elissa. A teacher for more than a decade and an author of three prior books—all of them memoirs—Elissa brings the necessary credentials to the table. But it is her experience of being disowned by her family as the result of something she wrote more than a decade ago that elevates this craft book from perfunctory checklist to one that is deeply thoughtful, authentic, and relatable.

When Elissa published her first memoir, Poor Man’s Feast in 2013, she didn’t fathom the firestorm it would ignite within her family. A single paragraph in that book revealed information about her paternal family history that was meant to stay hidden, though no one thought to tell Elissa that it was a secret.

Her father’s living family reacted to the memoir’s publication in the most extreme and incomprehensible of ways, cutting her off completely. No one would speak to her, she was blocked on social media, eliminated from family events and announcements, denied access to the family burial plot, and her existence as the only child of her father erased from online records.

This is every memoirist’s nightmare. In Permission, Elissa shares the creative wisdom she gained from this painful experience, which is a gift to the reader. Should any of us experience doubt or receive pushback about writing our stories—and we will—thanks to this book, we will be better equipped to deal with it.

I spoke with Elissa over Zoom in early May. What follows are highlights of what was a thoroughly engaging and enjoyable conversation.

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Michèle Dawson Haber : Thank you for writing this remarkable and essential book, Elissa. Permission opens with the inciting incident, the publication of your first memoir, Poor Man’s Feast, which contained a single paragraph about your grandmother that led your father’s side of the family to disown you. You write of this experience: “It threatened my marriage. I began to stutter the way I had as a child; it altered my creative course, took my humor, rendered me silent for almost a decade. It left me sleepless and afraid.” Is the initial reaction to such an event to look inward, to blame oneself?

Elissa Altman: Yes, I think that there’s a huge amount of self-loathing that comes along with bearing that yoke of guilt, and that is very, very hard. One person in my family in particular knew that I was going to walk around with an enormous amount of self-loathing, and she was right.

MDH: So how did this decade you referred to in that passage pass for you from the early days of self- loathing, incredulity, and inertia to a place of clarity, agency, and empathy, both for yourself and for your family? Did you pass through discernible phases similar to the five stages of grief?

EA: I actually do liken it to the five stages of grief. I went through periods that I can benchmark now, in hindsight. When it first happened in 2013, I was so shocked and so stunned, because I was very, very close to these people; my cousins were like siblings to me. I also had to deal with their rage, which was very hard for me in part because of the home and parents I grew up with, which is something I covered in my last memoir. That dovetailed into my sending them pleading emails, asking for forgiveness, and telling them that the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to hurt anybody, which, of course, is true. Then I became accusatory, devastatingly angry, and literally frothing with anger of my own. That was two years in. Between 2015 and 2017 I started to write my way through what was happening to me. My usual way of metabolizing something that’s traumatic is to write about it, even if it’s just for myself.

So, I wrote an essay about what had happened where I first questioned issues of creative permission, and I sent it off to Krista Tippett’s On Being blog, not expecting them to publish it. And then when they did, I thought, what am I going to do now? Following that, I wrote a piece about it for The Rumpus. While all of this was going on, my second memoir came out, so it didn’t exactly stop me from writing. In 2017, my mom had a catastrophic accident requiring me to become her primary caregiver, and I couldn’t turn to them for advice.

At that point, I decided that I needed to keep writing about what it means to suddenly lose your family of origin. And the thing about being disowned is that you can’t get disowned twice; at that point, my fear and self-loathing had given way to the need to shed light on what had happened to me. I was like, I’m done. It’s now twelve years out since the publication of that first memoir and I feel very much like I’m in a different place emotionally and creatively. It’s still heartbreaking and it’s still traumatizing, but I feel like my creative life is mine again.

MDH: Over the same decade, you published two more memoirs and became a teacher of memoir. How did you accomplish all this while going through such emotional turmoil, or was that part of your healing and enlightenment process?

EA: It was definitely part of my healing and transcendence, but not by design. Like many artists—writers, painters, musicians—we tend to work out trauma through the art we make. The first few years were so difficult for me that I couldn’t write at all, or at least not without looking over my shoulder. That said, when something is truly bothering me, I often take a very long time to write about it. I have to chew on it, and to metabolize it. I have to understand my own place in the story first before I can create any semblance of a clear narrative. But there was definitely a good amount of healing and transcendence that came out of writing my next two books, certainly my second book, Treyf, which was the backstory to Poor Man’s Feast. It was about the psychological, cultural, and in some cases devastating intergenerational stories that my father, his parents, and I carry and that made us who we are. I am a big believer in epigenetics. So, it was tremendously healing for me.

MDH: In the same vein as, “you can’t be disowned twice,” did you say to yourself, “Aw fuck it, I’m telling the whole story now!”?

EA: Well, no. I was still careful, and I went to great lengths to be fair, which I think is very important. But I still had to tell the story more extensively in the second book. Because so much of it was backstory that took place before I was born, I had to tell it from a place of conjecture because I couldn’t tell it with certainty. Vivian Gornick has that great quote: “For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.” That’s something that I hold very close. I wanted to see these people as they were, as fully fleshed-out human beings with all their vagaries, rather than the sum total of the actions that might or might not have been regrettable, and that were passed down to me in stories about them. That was very important to me and still is.

MDH: How can we know when we’re crossing a moral or ethical line when writing about another’s trauma? That person may feel quite passionately that if I, as a memoirist were to write about their trauma, I would be invading their privacy, which they have a right to, I would be harming their reputation, which most certainly is linked to shame, and I would be standing in their place telling a story that is not mine to tell. Is it possible to recognize these feelings as legitimate but not representative of an ethical line being crossed?

EA: That’s a great question. Yes. I have strong feelings about what constitutes the stories that we are allowed “to tell.” That’s a question that comes up in my classes all the time. This is probably a vast oversimplification, and like anything, is not binary—it’s always this way or no way—but if you are directly touched, impacted, changed, or if your worldview is what it is because of something that happened to someone else, and that thing makes you who you are, like the texture of your hair and the color of your eyes, that is also your story to tell. On the other hand, you cannot borrow someone else’s history if it in no way touches your own. For me, I know in my heart if I am stepping over the line. My wife is also my primary reader, and if I have stepped over the line, which is inevitable for every writer, she’ll tell me.

MDH: Do you show any of your subjects your writing before you publish?

EA: I absolutely do not, and the reason that I don’t is because sharing-as-requirement is a moving target. Whenever I’m asked this question, I tell the story of poet and writer Honor Moore, who is the daughter of the late Reverend Paul Moore, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese in the city of New York. In his own memoir he alluded to his bisexuality. He couldn’t really write about it directly before he retired, so he left Honor, who was already writing at that point, all of his papers in the care of the Episcopal Church. He likely knew she was going to write about her relationship with him.

And she did brilliantly and continued the narrative excavation of his history and bisexuality. She gave a galley of the book to each of her eight siblings, and said, if there is something that upsets you or disturbs you or you need to have changed in the book, please let me know. I believe only one of them came back to her and she made whatever change was requested. The New Yorker excerpted it and three of her eight siblings, despite having seen the galley, famously pilloried her in letters to the editor. All of which is to say: it is a moving target. Nothing is a guarantee.

MDH: In one of your earlier chapters, you write about the imperative of emotional resilience, I think this speaks to the courage to create in your subtitle. What do you mean by this?

EA: Anybody who writes memoir or personal essay is exposing themselves, and there’s the possibility of exposing other people as well. For better or for worse you are putting yourself out there. All artists put themselves out there. Even if what we are writing is for our journals alone, we’re still putting ourselves out there—because when we put pen to paper, our stories become real and take on their own breath.

I also think that not everything is meant to be shared; not everything is meant for public consumption. And so, when I talk about emotional resilience, I think that there always has to be a kind of creative demilitarized zone around you that you fashion for your own safety, like a bumper on a bumper car. A lot of my students are writing about traumatic experiences. In order to write about trauma without re-traumatizing yourself, you need to truly first understand whether what you are writing is in service to the story, is out of retribution, or because you’re venting your spleen.

MDH: In your chapter on risk, you talk about magical thinking, the idea that even if we write about other people in the kindest of ways, and even if we’re telling our own story and not theirs, there’s always a risk that someone we value will be lost to us, and we shouldn’t imagine that it might be otherwise. Do you think every memoirist, no matter how prepared they think they are for the fallout, discovers after publication that they engaged in magical thinking?

EA: I think so. I think that anyone who sits in an office or at a desk or in a coffee shop writing is effectively creating a universe (and it doesn’t matter if you’re writing fiction or nonfiction). Somewhere along the line I made the discovery that women memoirists (and this is, of course, a broad generalization) will often chew on their fingers and sweat and torment themselves with doubt. Meanwhile, my guy memoir friends say, “I don’t understand why you’re fretting—just write it! And if something happens, just apologize!” It’s a very different take. Writing anything is risky. As Dani Shapiro famously said, “Nobody ever says, ‘Yay, there’s a memoirist in the family!’”

MDH: While you’re warning the reader of the risks and recommending they go in with eyes wide open, you also say, even if the worst happens, something good comes out of it: “It was the most extraordinarily painful, frustrating, devastating, excruciating, traumatic experience of my life. And yet it was a gift.”

EA: That’s right. You know, there is no gift like the gift of clarity and the gift of transcendence. Not the Emersonian transcendence of course but being able to look back at a situation and really get your arms around the truth of what it was and why it was. Every family comes to the table with something that is carried from generation to generation. As I wrote about in my second book, Treyf, unpacking the immigrant experience of my paternal grandparents was key to understanding my father’s story and my own.

My grandfather came from Ukraine, and my grandmother came from Romania, and they believed that they had to be perfect to exist in modern America, which is extremely common among immigrants. My father got a little bit of that, but my aunt got it in spades and then passed it along to her children. The gift for me was really seeing and understanding how perfectionism can completely ravage a family on almost every level, from financial to emotional. When you see somebody walking around in metaphysical armor their whole lives, you don’t really get to know who they are until they take the armor off. I was able to finally see that and to see it with love and compassion. That was a huge gift to me. As I always tell my students, you will come through the other side of writing memoir most likely having learned something you didn’t know going in. And that is, in and of itself, a gift.

MDH: When did you first realize that your experience of writing about and being disowned by your family could be the subject of a book? Did the focus or intention change from the time that you conceived of this book to the time that it reached its final form?

EA: That’s a great question. I realized it after I wrote those first two essays in 2016, and then when I started to teach. The subjects of permission and story ownership were front and center in my mind because I was living them in real time, day in and day out. But I also came to understand that in my workshops, this was the question on the minds of my students: what am I allowed to say?

I have taught traditional workshop-style classes with twelve people around a table, or during COVID on the Zoom screen, and in much larger workshops. Across the board, everyone that I have ever taught has said to me, there’s this thing that I feel like I must write, but I can’t because someone’s going to vaporize, or I have to wait until all parties are dead. And it didn’t matter who the person was, or how skilled a writer they were.

I had a student who was a National Book Award winner, and one day after class I asked her if she was thinking about moving to memoir. She said, “I am, but there’s this thing, and I just don’t know.” I asked, “Where is everybody?” And she said, “Oh, they’re dead.” And I realized then that people can be dead for centuries, but that’s how strong a hold family myth and legend have. And then, of course, I had to deal with the students who were writing because of retribution. And I started to think this is a longer piece than an essay. That became pretty clear to me around 2019.

In terms of the evolution of the book, it started out as a craft book, and I got two thirds of the way through it and realized this is not going to make any sense unless I offer some context. Luckily, I had a brilliant publisher, and I wrote to my editor, Josh Bodwell, and said, “this book wants to be something else.” And he said, “just let it be what it needs to be.” Not all authors are lucky enough to hear that from their editors.

MDH: I think we have a tendency as memoirists to assume that what’s obvious to us is equally obvious to non-writers. As in, duh I’m not a hermit, I interact with other humans as I go about my life—how silly for someone to expect my memoir would include only mentions of me!

But for the person holding the published or soon-to-be-published book in their hands, seeing themselves in its pages, and imagining thousands (they’re probably imagining 100’s of thousands, ha!) of strangers reading about them, this is neither obvious nor consoling. Do you have any advice on getting our loved ones to see things in a different way or should we not even try?

EA: Oh, I absolutely think you can try. In early May, I was on stage at the Montclair Literary Festival with the writers Lee Hawkins and Omo Moses, and Lee was talking about tracing his family history to the plantations on his father’s side. His father was resistant to talking about it, but Lee sat down with him and had a long conversation about the importance of telling the story, and his father seemed to understand why the story had to be told.

I think that it’s hard and complicated to see oneself in the pages of someone else’s book. It almost doesn’t matter what the writer says, because what it does to the subject is it metaphorically takes their car keys away; it takes the reins out of their hands. We are, every one of us, very invested in our own patinas, in our own veneer that we create for ourselves. We want to be looked at in a certain way. We want to be thought of in a certain way. That is part of the human condition. You can delude yourself, but this other person is writing about how they see you and how the world might see you, and it can be undoing and shocking, and that’s a very difficult thing to swallow. It’s never easy.

Words of advice: Be kind to yourself as a writer and be kind to the people who are in your pages. No cheap shots, no retribution, no revenge. Ever, ever, ever. Revenge writing results in flat characters and a diluting of the story. It makes the writer spin in circles, and it keeps the story from moving forward. It makes the reader have to schlep through the poison of someone else’s unfinished business, and that’s just not what they’re there for. If gaining revenge is why you’re writing, then you need to honestly reevaluate your own motivation and intent and examine them closely.

MDH: It’s been a real pleasure to read your books and speak with you today. Thank you, Elissa.