“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it…But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations.” – Mary Shelley, 1831
On the sixteenth anniversary of my sister’s heroin overdose, my British Lit students and I discussed Frankenstein. Most of my students, a keen though resigned group of dual credit high schoolers on the cusp of graduation, had finished reading the novel, and those who I knew hadn’t still found purchase in one discussion point: Victor’s unrelenting desire to create life from death. Victor and his project charged a debate about the potential good that might result from his actions. What did Victor truly hope to accomplish? Could the novel’s carnage have been prevented if Victor had been more attentive to his creation—a childlike behemoth thrashing about the world with curiosity and a desire to overcome an appearance he did not give himself? Wouldn’t Victor’s life have been spent more pleasantly if he’d dropped his delusions of grandeur and retired to a quaint life with his family tucked in the Swiss mountains?
Anyone who has read Frankenstein knows that Victor’s passion project results poorly. Victor is a terrible, inattentive father whose neglect of an innocent being brings destruction to all his loved ones and reduces his existence to a bitter, unfulfilling quest for revenge. Victor’s Creature contained the capacity to do wonders. He’s articulate, sensitive, and intellectual. His murderous rampage is the logical result of abuse from a creator not fit to shepherd this beautiful soul into the world of man. For all Victor’s genius and technical prowess, his inability to love that which he had made, that which had been dead and reanimated through no agency of its own, led to brutal tragedy.
As a memoirist, I’m not reanimating the dead. No written work can do that. But I am recreating memories of dead people I loved dearly.
Confusing the character rendered as part of a story, even one that’s true, for the individual person is a mistake. As Victor assembled his Creature’s parts, when I write about people, living or dead, I am selecting elements to emphasize, dramatize, summarize in a person who was whole, alive, complex, infinitely more than what I can represent on the page. When I’m writing about people still living, I have the luxury of showing them finished drafts, to hear out disagreements about my portrayal of events, to talk through their concerns. The living can defend themselves. The dead can’t. I write about them without ever being certain that they’d approve. So, how do I, or any memoirist, write and reconstruct the dead without inadvertently creating a murderous, unstoppable giant bent on destroying me from the inside out?
In his memoir In Pharoh’s Army, Tobias Wolff asks, “What do you owe the listener, and which listener do you owe?” Religious belief systems notwithstanding, the dead can’t read. They’ll never know how you’ve written about them, what secrets you divulge, the private moments meant for fewer eyes and ears. They’ll never feel revulsion, fear, delight, nor ecstasy when the words you’ve placed on the page recreate their likeness. The Creature you infuse with aliveness for the brief time they flitter across the page—even when they may have acted monstrously—is never a monster. But the creature on the page can haunt if made without love. Can you, after artistically rendering the dead, confidently look anyone who loved them in the eye, including yourself, and stand by what you’ve produced?
Other writers may disagree with my level of sensitivity. When discussing ethical concerns in memoir writing, a student in my composition class asked, “What if you just don’t give a shit?” Valid question. I don’t doubt there are writers who feel fine with all their characterizations, and if that characterization causes conflict, the offended party can kick rocks. To have this artistic view is not such an egregious offense. Many writers have it, though I generally find their work lesser. Nothing rings hollower to a memoir reader than score settling and two-dimensional cardboard cutout villains. But it does beg the question—is any of this writing about the dead worth it? Aren’t there other subjects to pursue? Isn’t it torture to spend all day reliving the horrors of the past?
I’ve written about my sister’s heroin overdose. My father’s suicide. My biological mother’s aneurysm. Death in the mountains of Afghanistan. Conflicts rage in all corners of the globe, seemingly boundless death and preventable suffering, so to not write about the dead would be an abdication. Not facing my ghosts is hiding: cowardice. Nor do I want to look away. These people I love have shaped my DNA, and to omit them and their deaths from my writing would be to conceal my foundation, or worse, constrain my voice. This is something I cannot allow, even though there are plenty of days when not writing about my dead loved ones feels a hell of a lot easier than doing it.
It’s true of any story that, once told, it no longer belongs to the storyteller. Note just how drastically pop culture references screw up “Frankenstein” when used as a term to refer to a drooling, green zombie with no trace of the beautiful soul from Shelley’s novel. Just as Shelley’s characters have taken on a life force of their own, spawning numerous adaptations and instant name recognition in pop culture, so too do the characters you bring back from the dead take on life of their own.
As memoirists, perhaps we’re all Victor Frankenstein, toiling away in our laboratories, assembling dead things and bringing them back to life without their consent, then unleashing them upon the world.
Like Victor, we must be driven by the mad belief that memoir regarding the dead has wondrous capacity. Near Frankenstein’s conclusion, a dying Victor condemns a crew ready to mutiny its captain after their voyage to the North Pole turns perilous. “Are you then so easily turned from your design?” Victor asks. “Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror; because, at every new incident, your fortitude was to be called forth, and your courage exhibited…For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honorable undertaking.” Victor makes these claims after he’s suffered the disasters of his Creature, and their message is clear: the desire to make the creature, to push the envelope, to transgress boundaries as all art must, is still worthy.
Unlike Victor, we must treat our subjects with the most profound love. Preventing destruction—great or small; physical or emotional—is perhaps impossible when plunging the dead back into the world of the living. Own it. Understand that this art you make, though you need readers, fundamentally, is for you. For me, not writing about my dead loved ones would be like not breathing. But to shirk the responsibility of tending to that which I’ve brought into the world would be to engage in the same egotistical carelessness as Victor. Our creatures are fragile, so be kind, and write with love.
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Ari McGuirk is a writer and teacher. His creative nonfiction has appeared in The Line Literary Review, Superstition Review, Streetlight Magazine, and others. He currently lives in Albuquerque.
