Richard Hoffman discusses his memoir “ Half the House,” and the art behind it.
From Richard Hoffman's website:
“Against the back-drop of post-war,
blue-collar America, Half the House tells a story both
intensely personal and universal. Depicting his family’s struggles
to care for two of his brothers who are terminally ill, Hoffman also
recounts the horrific abuse he suffered in secret at the age of ten
by his baseball coach. In a memoir Time magazine called
“spare and poignant,” the author explores the ways in which grief
and rage become a tangled silence that estranges those who need each
other’s love the most, and demonstrates the healing power of
truth-telling in both the personal and public spheres.”
I had the pleasure to talk with Hoffman
at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Somerville, MA.
DH: This memoir certainly wouldn't be
considered a journalistic account.
RH: I don't think there is anything
journalistic about it. It is a series of scenes that form make a
narrative. I came to this as a poet. I believe the sentences should
sing. And if they don't—the memoir is insufficiently artful.
DH: I see you used a Camus quote in
your memoir, “ Freedom is not to lie.” Did you achieve this with
your story of childhood sexual abuse and its aftermath?
RH: I have a lot of freedom for having
written it. You are not free if you have to lie. Silence is a kind of
lie. You have to make ethical decisions about what you will write
about people. To say you shouldn't write anything is nonsense. A
student reminded me once that I said, “ If we are made of memories,
then we are made of each other.” That comes with a lot of
responsibility to be fair to people.
DH: How would you suggest creative
writing students go about starting their memoir?
RH: The key is to write about a place
you felt safe and secure in. Everybody had a place to go to feel safe
as a kid. Maybe you had a favorite tree to climb, etc... To write
about this connects you to your interiority. And from their you can
go anywhere. You can go outward from this. You are more in touch with
yourself. Where most memoirs fail is with the “ I.” The
characters are not fleshed out. The character doesn't have a sense of
his or her self. The reader will not have the sense who the character
is at that moment in time.
DH: And in your memoir there was an
underground crevice that you kids used to go to.
RH: Yeah. We used to go into the
sewers. It was like a big concrete room. People are always in a rush
to tell people what happened to them. And what happened to them is
not as interesting as getting to know who you were then and now.
DH: You organized the memoir by years.
Why?
RH: I couldn't figure out any other
way.
DH: Did the memoir go through many
drafts?
RH The memoir took me 15 years to
write—so yes, a lot of drafts . You know I never meant to write a
memoir. I was and I am a poet, basically. The book started out as
scenes. It bodied forth on its own. When I realized it was to become
a memoir I panicked. I thought I am not a prose writer—I don't know
how to make a story. My skill as a poet worked for a memoir—after
all it's all about language, isn't it?
