Reality Television, Baader-Meinhof, & More About Memoir

Until recently, I had never watched a reality TV show. It's not that I'm above bad TV; there is some bad TV I love. But I never have much time for watching TV, and I didn't think reality TV was likely to be my thing. I find it excruciating to watch people be awkward or embarrassed (this is part of why I also rarely watch sitcoms). I assumed that reality television would have a lot of that kind of thing, and that it would be tacky and stupid and full of people being mean to each other.

Recently, though, it occurred to me that I had let this whole cultural phenomenon pass me by, and so, sometimes, late at night, when there's nothing else on, I have been dipping into reality TV. I've watched 10 minutes of Hoarders, 7 minutes of Dance Moms, and as much as 5 minutes of several other shows. Usually that's all I can handle, because it's pretty much exactly like I imagined.

Last night, though, I watched an entire episode of Toddlers & Tiaras. And I might watch another one sometime. It was exactly like I imagined it, and yet...I kind of liked it.

My thoughts on Toddlers & Tiaras:

1. One of the moms named her daughter after the calamari she craved during her pregnancy.

2. Was that one mom really that nasty, or was she playing it up to get screen time?

3. I thought the mom who worked as a wrestling "ring girl" and raised extra money by putting out a sexy calendar of herself was actually quite awesome.

4. I was amused by the winking-at-the-audience way the show undercut the moms' claims about their daughters. "The thing is, Destiny is just a star! She absolutely sparkles!" Cut to Destiny, slumped against a wall, finger shoved up her nose to the second knuckle. Or: "Camari loves doing pageants. She has a total understanding of what it is, more like a 6 or 7 or 8 year old would, she's so mature, and this is just absolutely where she wants to be." Cut to montage of Camari's assorted tantrums as her mom tries to get her to practice her moves, tries to get her into the makeup chair, tries to get her dress on her.

5. The biggest prize you can win in any given pageant is a thousand-dollar savings bond, yet one mom said she had spent over $30,000 on pageants in the last two years, and another one admitted that she had maxed out the family's "emergency" credit card on pageant stuff.

6. The biggest surprise for me was that I thought these kids would actually be talented. I mean, I thought they'd be precocious little hoofers, a whole generation of Shirley Temples. But they were pretty much like any 2- or 3-year-old you've ever met. Their moms usually went on stage with them and pushed them around like little rhinestone-bespackled sacks of meat during the "beauty" portion, and during the "disco" portion, when they were supposed to dance, they usually stood around blankly until their moms, signaling from behind the judges or standing on-stage prompting with whispers, reminded them to do their "moves." Their "moves" were a handful of gestures their mothers had taught them--blowing a kiss, doing a John Travolta disco point, shaking their chubby little hips, putting their hands under their chins and batting their eyelashes--which they did at more-or-less random intervals and which were universally unnatural-looking and somewhat disturbing.

7. The show followed three girls, but there were quick-cut montages of the other contestants. I really wanted to know more about the boy doing the disco bit.

8. One of the girls had a white ring around her mouth because she wouldn't take her pacifier out when she was getting her spray tan.

9. I really missed an opportunity not getting the Tiny Tornado in on this.

Speaking of the Tiny Tornado, a friend posted this to my Facebook wall:

On the one hand, it's perfect. On the other hand, it makes me feel that I could have been more creative in coming up with a pseudonym for her. Who knew "tiny tornado" was a cliche?

Or it's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

So, two days ago I wrote a little stub about memoir and the tension between Art and Relationships. Hit a dead end in the writing, and I still don't have a place for it to go. But I do want to say a bit about the possibilities.

What got me thinking about this issue is that I attended a panel of memoirists at the Festival of Faith & Writing last month, and this question came up. The panelists were asked about how they handled writing about real people, how they dealt with the possibility that what they wrote would hurt someone's feelings, violate their privacy, make them angry. What made me sit up and take notice was that all of the writers on the panel gave priority to their relationships over their writing. They came at this question with an underlying premise--"relationships should be respected" that was the opposite of the one I was acculturated to, "your art is the most important thing."

So each of them had developed strategies for preserving their relationships. One gave her manuscript to people and asked for feedback about how she had written about them, though she reserved to herself the right to make final decisions. Another actually gave some people veto power, though she was an extreme outlier. Many made specific changes to protect people's identities, creating composite characters or putting one person's words into another's mouth. One woman gave a single character all the thoughtless and hurtful things her friends said to her after her daughter was born with Down Syndrome, for instance.

One writer made such dramatic changes to people and situations that I thought she had crossed a line and was no longer writing memoir. For instance, she took a conversation she'd heard two adults have and, in order to disguise their identities, put it into the mouths of two imaginary children on a playground. To me, inventing characters and settings wholesale is fiction.

I was interested, though, to hear them say that much of this was pointless anyway. One writer, after carefully disguising someone, was surprised that everyone figured out who she was anyway (though she refused to confirm their guesses). Another got her brother-in-law's approval for her book, but after it was published he told her that it was different actually having it out there rather than just reading the manuscript, and there were things he regretted allowing her to include.

The other piece of all this is that I feel quite differently about this issue than I did when I was young. I have, in recent years, even found myself relieved that certain pieces were never published, or at least never published in any place my family might happen upon, because they would have hurt my mother, and right now in my my life, I don't want to hurt my mother.

I know people who remain estranged from their families of origin, and for good reason. But I also know many people whose relationships with their families have evolved. I'm one. My parents, for instance, are never going to match up with the picture of ideal parents I have in my mind. But over the years, I've learned to do a better job of taking them as they are; they may not express love in the ways that I craved as a child, but as an adult I can see the ways that they do express it. Despite their failings, I've become very fond of them--not just loving them in the automatic way that children love their parents, but fond of them. I like seeing them. I enjoy spending time with them. I respect them--my mother in particular was an extraordinary young woman who made her own way in the world at age 16 with purpose and intent and discipline.

I have a friend whose childhood was undeniably bad. But she has a pretty good relationship with her father these days. She says, "The thing is, he's a much better parent of grown children than he was of young children." These things are complicated and they change as we change.

As a middle-aged person, I am glad that I didn't recklessly burn any bridges during that young adult time of feeling that my parents had failed me in every possible way. Because my parents, love them as I do, are not the kind of people to get over that kind of thing.

I still have to wrestle with these issues. I am a writer, and the thing I write about most often is my life. This means that if you are in my life, even briefly, I will almost certainly write about you. Sometimes people like this--if I spend time with your kids, I will probably write something about your kids, probably privately, and sometimes I send a collection of what I've written to the parents and they think it's great. On the other hand, sometimes I mention something that seems innocuous to me and it hurts someone's feelings. Or I think I'm being funny and the humor doesn't come through, and they're offended. No one has stopped being my friend because of this, but I know that some of my friends--I'm thinking of one in particular--have a love/hate relationship with my tendency to write about them.

And there are a few things I absolutely long to write about and can't because David doesn't want me to. He is a very private person and is remarkably patient with my tendency to hang our laundry out to dry--indeed, he loves my writing and is my biggest fan--so I try to respect those few things around which he has drawn a line. I try. And I almost always succeed.