Writing a Memoir about Someone I Hardly Knew

I recently published the memoir Hugging My Father’s Ghost, about my dad, the writer Lee Rogow. The biggest challenge I faced in writing this book was that I hardly knew my father. Lee Rogow was a widely published fiction writer, drama critic for the Hollywood Reporter, glamorous man-about-town in Manhattan of the 1950s, captain of a submarine-chaser in World War II—and he died tragically in a plane crash when I was only three years old. 

Lee Rogow at his typewriter

I have only one memory of my dad, his making what he called “mish-mosh soup” in the kitchen, a blend of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle and Campbell’s Tomato Soup. Not only did I lack recollections of my dad, but by the time I started writing my memoir, those who knew my father best had passed away long ago.

I realized that in order to assemble a three-dimensional picture of my father, I would have to create a collage of different materials, many of them not traditionally part of memoir writing. In fact, the books that provided the best template for Hugging My Father’s Ghost were not works of nonfiction at all, but literary fictions.

I borrowed liberally from two authors whose writings I love: W.G. Sebald and Manuel Puig. Puig, in books like Heartbreak Tango and Kiss of the Spider Woman, stretched the limits of the novel by inserting other kinds of text into his narratives. Puig invented newspaper articles, police reports, summaries of schlocky Hollywood flicks, diaries, and letters. All of that went into his books. W.G. Sebald also used collages in his fictions. One of my favorites is the “Ambros Adelwarth” section of Sebald’s book The Emigrants, about a star-crossed gay uncle who moved from Germany to the United States. Sebald has a way of suddenly plunking a vintage photograph or postcard down into his prose that I find absolutely haunting. Both Sebald and Puig may have been influenced by earlier experiments in fiction by John Dos Passos, including his U.S.A. trilogy of novels, which feature a mélange of newspaper headlines, vignettes, and “newsreels,” as well as more traditional narrative.

In my memoir about my dad, I used all of the techniques I borrowed (stole?) from Puig and Sebald. Instead of collaging invented material, though, I used documentary material. My memoir includes a mix of my father’s World War II diary, actual magazine clippings, old family photos, a letter my mom wrote my dad after his death, and writings by my father that he never published. Carbon copies of his typewritten manuscripts sat moldering in my sister’s basement for many, many decades before I chose many of them for this memoir. (My dad died in 1955.)

 

All those puzzle pieces helped create a more complete picture of my father. But while I was fitting those pieces together, voices kept appearing in my head. Most of the time, hearing voices is not a good thing. But for a writer, it’s the best thing. Writers have to pay the closest attention to those voices, and build a comfortably furnished living room in their thoughts for those voices so they will declaim, make jokes, argue with one another, and lament. My father became a character in conversations that I could hear in my head, and some of those conversations were with me. I also included those scenes in my memoir. There, I drew more on the techniques of theater.

 

So, Hugging My Father’s Ghost turned out to be a hybrid memoir, a memoir that mixes genres. The hybrid memoir is something of a trendy term right now. I didn’t set out to do anything experimental when I wrote this book, though. I was just trying to make something with very few ingredients to work with, like when you have to cook dinner with only what’s left in the fridge. I hope readers find this book tasty. Even though there is sharp tragedy in the memoir, my father was a very funny man, and I could not have created a true portrait of him without a lot of laugh-out-loud humor. Given the emotional charge of the material about my dad, writing this memoir was certainly the most cathartic experience I’ve ever had as a writer.

Publisher’s webpage for Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry