A short version of this essay first appeared in “Take Note” section of The Writer, January 2014. Mimi Schwartz is the author of 6 books, most recently the second edition of Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (co-authored with Sondra Perl). She is currently at work on a new essay collection, When History Gets Personal, which will include this essay. Her essays have been widely anthologized and seven of them have been Notables in Best American Essays.

I write to figure life out—and consider a memoir or essay finished when I can say, “That’s it! I got it right on the page.”  But my assumption is premature, I’ve discovered, because after publication I find out new things—from my readers. What they tell me about what I wrote keeps enlarging what “getting it right on the page” means.

Take the woman who asked me to sign a book at my first reading from Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (American Lives Series, University of Nebraska Press), about life in a long marriage. The woman was my age and said in a lilting voice: “I so identified with your arguments about how much to leave the window open in February—two inches or less!” I assumed she was a New Jersey wife like me until, with more lilt, she said: “Make it out to Sister Irene.” She was a nun from Ireland. Then a young man with a ring in his nose told me enthusiastically that he was a morning person like me and his partner was a night person just like Stu, my husband. I should make the inscription to Mike and Patrick.

I expected my book to appeal to the long married, newly married, and those about to take the plunge. But the common ground of relationships was much larger than I thought. People who shared a life or knew people that did (like their parents) recognized their own experiences in mine whether they slept in a single, queen, or king-sized bed.

When my next book came out, Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village (Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press), my readers surprised me again. This time who they are, where they came from, what family stories and religion they grew up with, dramatically altered the way they responded to my discoveries in a little Black Forest village of Catholics and Jews “who all got along before Hitler.” I’d first heard about this village from my father, as I was growing up in Queens, New York. I wasn’t interested until forty years later when I saw a Torah that had been rescued on Kristallnacht, not by Jews but by their Catholic neighbors. Who were they? Why did they do it? By then, my father had died so I couldn’t ask him, and so began a twelve-year quest, on three continents, in dozens of living rooms, to find out about these once good neighbors. How did they remember and live with the past? What’s true or not about memory? Was this community special?

Continue reading “From the desk of Mimi Schwartz: What My Readers Have Taught Me”