LITERARY ARTS Liz Scott by Rose Swartz
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memoir could be easy to write. Or a memoir should be easy to write. But what if the memoir was about your family history, your father abandoned your family when you were very young, and your mother was a narcissist who confabulated fact and fiction at every turn? What if any evidence of ancestors or living relatives had been hidden from you for nearly your entire life? Writing a memoir then would not be so easy at all. Yet Portland writer and psychologist Liz Scott has managed to pull together an engaging, haunting, and sometimes hilarious account of her family history. In the process, she compiles photographs, letters, lists, conversations, anecdotes, and memories to tell all she can about her family’s disjointed past. Her memoir, This Never Happened, came out earlier this year on University of Hell Press. I had the chance to speak with Scott a few weeks ago about her process. ELEVEN: I read your book last week while I was camping alone in the forest. I have to admit, there were parts of the not-knowing that really scared me. Writing something like this seems like such a daunting task. I wonder how long you’d been thinking of writing this book, and secondarily, how long did it take to actually write? Liz Scott: Well, I’m 72, so I’d say about 70 years. I’d been thinking about it for a long time. I blocked the [urge to write] though because my mother’s greatest desire was to be a famous writer and I wanted nothing more than to be nothing like her. It wasn’t until after she died in 2005 that I started really thinking about it. It was hard because everything was so scattered. There wasn’t really an obvious narrative arc to follow. It took a couple years to come up with a way to approach the whole thing. The writing of it took three years. 11: You’ve written short stories and essays as well. Do you find it easier to write fiction or non-fiction? LS: I’m not very good at story, so writing essays and the memoir are easier for me. The fiction form that comes most easily to me is flash fiction because whatever arc there is is a tiny little arc. I’m a psychologist, so I’m always interested in what’s underneath the story, what emotional truth there is… Writing my own story was easier in a way because I knew the material, but it was obviously not easy because it’s difficult material and I had to really ask myself if I was ready to be this… bald out in the world. 11: Because there were so many unanswered questions about your parents and your family, did you feel compelled to include everything you could find?
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Photo by Julie Keefe LS: Yes. I wish I could have found more. Everything that’s in the book is what I’ve found. I found out after my mother’s death that she was the youngest of 8 or 9 kids. I’ve tried to do Facebook searches to find these people with no luck. Since she was the youngest, her siblings I’m sure are dead, but I probably have tons of cousins out there. And my father’s been dead a long time, and he was estranged from his family too. One of the challenges was trying to make peace with the amount of unanswered questions. I went into it really hoping I could quench some of that need but in the long run I had to make peace with the fact that I will never really understand. 11: About your decision to arrange the book nonchronologically: was that related to the fact that you don’t have all the facts? As a reader, it helped me believe you more… not that I find the book totally unbelievable but I come from a family of over-sharers, so it’s like the polar opposite. The shuffling of time helped me get into the story more… LS: I don’t think there’s a particular narrative arc to this book, but I think there is an emotional arc. So I’ve got 75, I guess you call them chapters, though some of them only have one word, and what I did was I put them on index cards and lay them all out on my living room floor, kept moving them around, trying to find an order. I would just write whatever came to me and finish that piece. I knew when I wrote the Passover piece that’s where I wanted it to end, so I almost went backwards. I think of the [chapters] as flashbacks because the story does start before I was born. The flashbacks are not chronological either. I think there’s a chronological-emotional arc that overrides the story arc.