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

On Being the Child of a Writer

I have met a few writers who are children of writers. I believe that all of us with writer parents live with our progenitors’ careers and work as constant companions. It’s both a huge advantage and a somewhat of a burden to have a writer in one’s ancestry. On the one hand, it legitimates one’s claim to being a writer—this isn’t the first time that a literary career has emerged in this family. In a way, it’s as if your dad is a tailor and you want to become a tailor. If he could learn the trade, why can’t I? But of course, there are fewer good writers than good tailors. Or are there? The disadvantage: you are constantly comparing yourself and being compared to your parent.

My dad, Lee Rogow, was a successful writer. 

Lee Rogow, serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II

                    

My dad wrote short stories for magazines in the U.S.A. that published fiction in the early 1950s. His stories, many of them based on our family life, appeared regularly in Esquire, Harper’s, Colliers, Ladies Home Journal, and other magazines. Rarely in the New Yorker, though he did publish in the Talk of the Town section. His short stories weren't quite edgy enough for that magazine, or maybe he never tried to publish his most artistic stories, since they were on topics that he might not have wanted to write about publicly. My dad wrote an interesting story about adultery, for example, which he told from the viewpoint of the other woman. He never published it.

My dad also wrote many reviews of plays, books, and movies. For years he was the drama critic of the Hollywood Reporter, and during that period he and my mom attended every opening night on Broadway. After the final curtain, they hurried to the Western Union office in Times Square and my dad telegraphed his hastily drafted review to the West Coast—where it was three hours earlier—in time for his article to appear in the morning paper in Los Angeles.

After my dad’s theater review was done, he and my mom would have a late supper and sip martinis at Sardi’s on West 44^th Street, where all the reviewers and producers would congregate till the newsboys burst in with the early edition of the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, The Sun, and the Mirror with their reviews, which usually determined if a show would be a hit or a flop.  

Lee Rogow writing

Based on my dad’s experiences reviewing opening nights, he also wrote the draft of a screenplay. The story was inspired by Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva, and her relationship with her mother. Maria Riva appeared in a Broadway play that my dad reviewed. To avoid comparisons with her mom, Riva never used the name Dietrich or mentioned her mother in her bios. Her mother was equally circumspect, trying not to overshadow her daughter. Of course, their connection was well known. At the daughter’s opening night on Broadway, Dietrich couldn’t resist making a grand entrance in a beautiful dress when the audience was already seated, eclipsing her daughter. My dad based the screenplay on that incident.

Tragically, my dad, Lee Rogow, died in a plane crash in 1955 at the age of 36. His career went unfinished, as did his screenplay. My dad had sold his screenplay to a Hollywood studio, but he never had a chance to complete it.  He also had a draft of a book of short stories he was planning to send to publishers.

Part of my motivation for being a writer has to do with a need to complete my dad’s career. I think that desire also motivates to some degree my first cousin, Steven V. Roberts, who has written many books, including My Father’s Houses, where he writes a lot about my dad; and From This Day Forward, which he coauthored with Cokie Roberts.

My dad and I in a photobooth, circa 1954

One thing about having a parent as a writer is that, even though I lost my dad when I was three years old, I feel I know him well. Reading his writing, I see his sparkly wit, at moments a bit forced. I sense his intellect, and his deep and complex feelings for his role as a father. That’s one distinct advantage to having a parent or ancestor who is a writer: you get to know that person through the writing in a way that is extremely close, closer than any other occupation could bring you. Here’s a passage from that story I mentioned earlier, the one about adultery that my dad never published. This occurs near the end of the story, where the other woman finally has it out with her married boyfriend, whose name is Spence:

“You just want to be charming, irresistibly charming, so that everyone loves you. Your talent for this is high octane, my boy. You can charm the birds from the trees. But you cannot be all things to all men—or to all women. You can’t have it all your way, flitting between two worlds, and finding them waiting for you, unchanged, every time you arrive. Sometimes, Spence, it’s kinder to have a scene. Have it with me, or have it with her, but have it.” What a strong female character! And this was in the early 1950s, when almost every TV show showed women in aprons baking chocolate-chip cookies around the clock. My dad was a man who appreciated a strong woman, and in that, I take after him.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka