Recently, presidential candidate Mitt Romney quipped that his wife, Ann, was born at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. While the media ignored that quaint little factoid, focusing instead on Mitt’s next remark, the one where he said that no one had ever asked him for his birth certificate, the details of Ann’s birth actually caught my attention.
That’s because I was born at Henry Ford Hospital, too. And it occurred to me that not only was Ann Romney born in the same hospital as I was, we have other things in common, too: We are both the mother of sons, we both like to ride horses, we both color our brown hair blonde, and we both have Welsh ancestry.
What else, I wondered, did little ol’ me, an a-political mom, wife, and writer in the Midwest, have in common with a woman who could become our next first lady?
I decided to do a little research and find out.
After Ann was born, she grew up with her family in Bloomfield Hills, one of the five wealthiest cities in the United States. After I was born, I spent three months in foster care in Detroit before I was adopted by my parents, who lived in Battle Creek. Where Purina manufactured their dog food and a quarter of families lived below the poverty line.
Ann did well in school and so did I. She at the private Kingswood School, a National Historic Landmark with forty acres of formal gardens attracting tourists from around the world, and me at seven different public schools scattered around the Midwest. My family moved around a lot while I was growing up.
But no matter, because at least Ann and I both went to college!
She attended Brigham Young, a private religious university where students follow an honor code forbidding them to consume alcohol. I attended Michigan State University where I received high marks in journalism and helped haul trash cans full of sand into the basement of the TKE House for a January blizzard beach party. A six-kegger.
After college Ann became a housewife, marrying Mitt in a ceremony at her parents’ Bloomfield Hills home, then hosting a reception at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club. Among her guests was our future President, Gerald Ford. President Richard Nixon sent hearty congratulations to the newlyweds. After college, I worked as a reporter for an un-unionized daily newspaper, earning $180 a week, then married my long-time boyfriend in an outdoor ceremony. Among the guests at our wedding was Big Joe, an amateur bartender who treated guests to his signature cocktail, the “Mountain Dew Me.” My dog, a shaggy mutt from the humane society, congratulated me by jumping on my dress.
Now it’s starting to seem like Ann and I don’t have much in common, after all. But wait, Ann gave birth to five sons and I gave birth to three, plus have two stepsons from my second marriage, so there’s that. She and Mitt recently celebrated their 43rd wedding anniversary; my first husband and I divorced three months before our 20th.
As a wife to Mitt, Ann has pursued charitable endeavors, many of these aimed at helping underprivileged children. Ok, so what if my sons were on the reduced school lunch list for a while. Ann can still relate to me in other ways, right? Take, for example, our shared love of horses!
In her free time, Ann enjoys horseback riding and I did too. Although I ride Western, she competes in dressage and earned medals from the U.S. Dressage Federation. And she has a California trainer to help her import new stock from Europe. And one of her horses, Rafalca, not only won a spot on the U.S. dressage team, but even competed in the 2012 Olympics. While I got a second job as a waitress and saved my tips to buy a pole barn kit, fencing and two mixed breed horses. Maybe Ann and I could have gone riding together, except that middle class people like me can’t afford to keep horses anymore. Or get our hair colored regularly, either.
But at least we still have our Welsh ancestry in common, right? Ann is proud of hers and I’m proud of mine, too. According to the New York Daily News, Ann’s grandfather emigrated from Wales to Detroit in 1929 and went to work in the car industry. It was a pretty good decision, too, considering that her family’s personal fortune is now about $250 million.
I contacted the adoption agency and learned that my birthmother’s ancestors also emigrated to Detroit from Wales. But that’s really all I know. At least it explains my freckles and my good attitude in the face of adversity. And by adversity I mean my checkbook: My personal fortune varies month to month, depending upon my balance. Right now it’s $1,847.
For a minute there I thought that comparing myself to Ann was an exercise in futility. That the only thing we really had in common was that we were born in the same Michigan hospital. I don't begrudge her her wealth; far from it. I'd love to have access to that kind of dough. I just think that people who live in the White House should be able to relate to the people who don't And I'm not sure she can.
But then I learned one last thing about her. When she was Massachusetts’ First Lady, the Boston Globe criticized her for being, “largely invisible.”
Geez, Ann, I know exactly how that feels.
I guess there is one more thing we have in common, after all.
Believe me, I’ve checked, and when it comes to revenge writing, the universal advice is, Don’t Do It. Ever. Do Not Do It. Don’t even think about doing it. And if you do somehow manage to fantasize about doing it, even in private when no one is looking, well, you should just stop. Right now. Writing out of some twisted and infantile need for revenge, the conventional wisdom goes, is bad form, bad news, and just plain bad juju.
“If someone is writing to take revenge, or embarrass or punish someone, it’s not going to be a very good book. It’s immoral, and it’s bad writing,” says Heather Sellers, author of, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know.
“It is a natural fantasy to imagine getting even with someone by exposing them in your memoirs, and revenge can fuel great writing, but for the most part complaints suffer like bad novels from one dimensional characterizations and an overly simplified Manichean vision of the world,” says Tristine Rainer, in her classic how-to guide, Your Life As Story.
I didn’t read it myself, but I have it on good authority that Donald Rumsfeld’s 815-pager, Known and Unknown, falls prey to the exact problem Rainer explains.
There are, of course exceptions. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough when reading Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World. She balances confusion and youth with focus and revenge and the result is a memoir I devoured. Most of us are no Joyce Maynard though; we were not on the cover of the NYT magazine as a teen, and didn’t spend strange months in rural New Hampshire with iconic literary hermits.
Marion Roach, the author of a readable and newly published guide on memoir writing, The Memoir Project, has a list on her blog of eleven no-no’s to observe when writing about one’s own life. They include tips like don’t make your writing only about you, don’t give readers a boring list of events, and don’t complain. By my calculations, pushing back against an urge for revenge factors in on numbers three, four, five, six and eleven on her no-no’s. That’s almost half.
And yet, and yet. I feel myself slyly protest this “No Writing For Revenge” rule, hypnotized as I am by the sheen on a cold antipasto platter.
Salt, vinegar, and red meat. Yummy.
Ah, Revenge, that tasty appetizer before the power steak, served bloody. Because however fleeting, exacting revenge with words will make the writer feel strong and back in control. For about ten minutes. Ten glorious, fang glinting, back-arching, howl into the emptiness minutes.
But then what?
The real problem of acting on this dark urge in print is not only that it’s wrong. The real problem is that by doing it, you’re using someone else’s story to tell your own. Writing for revenge gives away your literary power, instead of claiming it.
Joan Didion says that writing itself is, “an aggressive, even a hostile act.” True. Writing dares to say I’m here, I matter, Listen to me. But aggression and hostility are emotions that move a story forward; while bad-mouthing –i.e. revenge- is just the soggy leftovers.
This topic has some resonance for me, after winning Creative Nonfiction’s Anger & Revenge personal essay contest. I was – am- thrilled the editors selected my work. And, a bit daunted, too. My submission detailed what happened to my wedding dress after my twenty-year marriage ended. How to reconcile my own two personal essay writing rules – 1) tell the truth, and 2) don’t give your power away to anyone else – with being recognized for something many writers I respect say is forbidden?
I spent not a small amount of time wondering about this internal conflict. The conclusion I reached was this: I wrote the piece not for revenge, but to offer my mother an explanation of what happened to the wedding dress she and I hand sewed together, more than two decades ago. And that is just as good an impetus to write as any other. Right?
After reading this, then being horrified by this, and finally this too, I feel I must offer a personal response, in the form of five women who have lived long enough to actually have something important to say.
Here, in no particular order, are five "rhymes-with-bold" biddies who kick ass.
1. Helen Mirren, assasin
2. Joan Didion, change artist
"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."
(From The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir which won The National Book Award in 2005 when she was 71.)
3. Madeleine L'Engle, explosives tech
“One day while I was happily pretending to myself that I was Madame Curie, I blew up the lab.”
(From her address to the Library of Congress on Nov. 16, 1983. At 15 she was pretending to be Madame Curie; when she addressed the Library of Congress, she was 65. And had won the Newberry Award, the USM Medallion, the Smith College Award, the Sophia Award, the Regina Medal, the ALAN Award the Kerlan Award and was President of the Author's Guild.)
4. Diane Wakoski, truth teller
"You ride a broken motorcycle, You speak a dead language, You are a bad plumber, And you write with an inkless pen."
(From her poem, "Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch," published when she was about 50. Backstory here.)
5. Dora Hain, trailrider, trailblazer, ukulele player, long-distance swimmer, sport fisherwoman, campfire chef, and my maternal grandmother.
"Cryin' about it will get you exactly nowhere, Mard. Now, do you want to swim across the lake or go pike fishing?"
This is my hero, who's yours?
I got a little nostalgic yesterday and I blame it on two things: The New York Times and my impending milestone birthday.
An article in the newspaper's Style Section introduced a handful of photogenic brainiacs and their recently launched online magazine of literary criticism, The New Inquiry. Bravo, kids.
It's an old story, buffed and polished for the internet. Shunned by the establishment, these younsters started their own literary gig. Marcel Proust did it once, and so did Queen Christina of Sweden, The Bluestockings got their thing going, and these ruffians did, too.
Yours truly has fond memories of following this same bliss. Back in the prehistoric year that was 1998, I helped get this going concern off the ground.
On April Fool's Day that year, Victoria Sutherland, Anne Stanton, and I plotted to launch a book review magazine to give independently published books their due. It still amazes me that I was standing at the top of the escalator at BookExpo America in Chicago just two months later, eager in my new lime green suit to hand out copies of our first issue of ForeWord to the rising throngs. And boy, did they take them! And read them! And visit our booth to subscribe! We had launched!
Then, some spoil sport called security.
Apparently even back in 1998, you couldn't occupy such high dollar real estate for free. No, the book fair had a protocol for guerilla marketing like this and said protocol involved a fee for exhibitors who greeted attendees with swag. And no quarter was given for high brow literary swag, either.
But no matter. Even two of McCormick Place's thuggish rent-a-cops couldn't wipe the triumph off our faces that fine day.
Tomorrow I turn 50. And you know what? I've still got that lime suit.
What's your gig?
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