Don't get above your raisin'

Memoirs are a big thing in the literary world now.

A memoir is an autobiography written by somebody who isn’t famous yet. The author often recounts his or her painful childhood and battle with addictions and self-discovery and blah-de-freaking-blah.

Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris have been very successful doing this. They get rave reviews and sell lots of books and make lots of money, so I guess it’s not my place to criticize them, since I do none of those things. But I don’t think it’s right to say bad things about your family, especially when they can't really defend themselves. It’s a big bowl of wrong, as Jeff Garlin would say.

Burroughs portrays his mother as a monster and his father as a brutal alcoholic. Sedaris reveals that his mother was an alcoholic. Beside the fact that people around them have questioned the truthfulness of their tales, it’s just not right to be airing your family’s dirty laundry like that. As my teetotalling not-a-monster mama would say, it ain’t a bit of nobody’s bidness.

Can you feel good about yourself if you make money exploiting your family? I don’t think so. Nobody’s family is perfect and everybody goes through hard times, some worse than others. But don’t throw your family under the bus just to make a few dollars.

I could never imagine doing that. For one thing, my parents didn’t drink, didn’t subject me to mental cruelty, and didn’t beat me when I didn’t deserve it. About the worst thing my mama did was to wash my hair in the sink, and use those bony knuckles of hers to scrub my head until I was nearly unconscious. This should replace waterboarding as a way to interrogate terrorists. To this day, I won’t let them wash my hair when I go to the barber shop cut because it brings back bad memories.

So overall, I had a pretty good childhood. But if I really think about it, maybe I do have some legitimate complaints. For one thing, there was a woman named Nell Opal who would come to our house and keep me in the summertime, when I was out of school and my parents were at work. Nell Opal was an older black woman who could cook and clean like Martha Stewart, and exert authority like Idi Amin.

My mother granted her full disciplinary control over me, which meant she would thwack me on the back of the leg with the fly-swatter when the mood struck. But the worst thing was, every day during the summer, she would lock me out of the house at 12:30. She would fix me lunch, and then I was to be out the door, and not to come back and disturb her until after 3.

That was because, from 12:30 to 3, Nell Opal watched her “stories,” which is what she called soap operas. Oh, she would work the whole time, folding clothes or dusting or shelling butterbeans, but she didn’t want to be bothered by some 10-year-old boy. So I stayed outside. If I got thirsty, I knew where the water faucet was. If I needed to go to the bathroom, the woods weren’t far away. If I got hungry – well, I held on until 3, when I could come in and get a snack. And yes, she actually locked the door.

This was, of course, a different era, when children were expected to entertain themselves. I didn’t go off to camp in the summer, or take tennis lessons, or have a math tutor come in to work with me. No, I went out in the yard and did safe things, like jumping ramps on my bicycle and stirring up fire-ant beds and blowing up army men with firecrackers.

I was reminding my daddy the other day about Nell Opal locking me out of the house, and at first he claimed to have no memory of that, and then he laughed about it! He’s going to be sorry when he gets to Chapter 7 of my memoir.

Anyway, here’s my advice to burgeoning memoir writers. Don’t talk bad about your mama and daddy, or your brother or your sister or your grandmamma. As Bruce Springsteen once sang, “Man turns his back on his family, well he just ain’t no good.”