Three ways to write a family history

And my top eleven recommended reads

Dear beloved subscriber of A Poet’s Work,

I hope this finds you reading on your phone while sipping your favourite beverage in a to-go cup on a train to somewhere fun.

This newsletter is the second of three contractually obligated updates from me to you. The Arts Council are generously supporting me to explore writing creative non-fiction with a “Developing your creative practice” grant. I promised them that I’d use the newsletter to share some process updates on this project with you. This will help to keep me accountable (am I doing anything?) and reflective (what on earth am I doing?).

Read on for my new universal classification system for ways to write family history and how this has influenced my approach. I’ve also included a recommended reading list with my top eleven favourite books I’ve read for this project in case you want to dive deeper. If you read any and enjoy them, or have recommendations to add to the list, let me know.

This project is, terrifyingly, drawing to a close at the end of February. I have hunted up submission deadlines and will be setting my writing sights on pastures new at that point.

Part of this project includes putting on an event at the Barbican in January. There is one ticket left. Will you be the one to sell us out? Thank you so much to everyone’s who has got a ticket. I’m so looking forward to seeing you there.

Poetry love,

Rachel x

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One of the great pleasures of this project has been reading many family histories to understand how others have turned their family stories into creative non-fiction. There are many different ways to turn this kind of material into a story readers enjoy. I’ve struggled with how to organise my research into prose and how to handle gaps. I’ve therefore been reading widely to guide my efforts. Based on my now rather extensive reading, I have come up with an unscientific universal categorisation of ways to write a family history.

1. A straight and deep history

This kind of family history follows one family line chronologically, telling the story sequentially in the context of wider historical events. It’s probably what you imagine when you think of family history. It’s a “straight” tale because it goes from a clear beginning to a clear end. It’s deep because the book is well-substantiated with evidence and detail. We know something of what the “characters” (the family members, their friends, colleagues, enemies etc) looked like, what they wore, what they ate, where they lived, what they kept in their houses, where they were born, how they died, and even their own opinions about what they did from their diaries or letters.

This type of history is only possible if you have a well-documented family with plenty of surviving letters, wider documents that reference your family (such as newspaper articles or business records), surviving objects passed down to you, and ideally a few people still alive who are willing to talk to you. The most famous example I’m aware of would be The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal. Two others I loved reading and have included in the reading list below are Inventory of a life mislaid by Marina Warner and House of Glass by Hadley Freeman. Warner tells the story of her parents setting up a famous English bookshop in the last days of the British Empire in Cairo. Freeman tells the story of her four Jewish grandparents, one of whom became a notable couturier and a friend of Picasso.

This kind of history, obviously, is easier to write if you had a famous and / or aristocratic family. I have discovered I do not, by any means, have enough material to write this kind of book.

2. A wide and gathering history

A wide and gathering history includes more people than the linear tracing of generations covered by a straight and deep history. It covers a cluster of people, grouped together by chance or relation, and their friends and family lines expanding sideways and backwards and forwards in history.

The two examples of this I read and loved are very different. The first is the The Nine by Gwen Strauss. The Nine follows the story of nine women Resistance fighters who escaped together from Ravensbrück concentration camp in Nazi Germany during World War Two. Its structuring is brilliant. It tells the story of the days of the escape in a linear way as its core narrative but each chapter focuses on a different woman, introducing her through what the author can find out about her family, friends, education and how she got involved in the anti-Nazi Resistance work that led to her detention. The book closes with what happened to each woman after the war, which the author knows in different levels of detail. One of the women was her grandmother and she was able to interview her once. Some of the other women she could meet. Still others of the Nine had died by the time she began writing and she had never met. This rich, interwoven, “gathering” structure around a group makes it possible to tell a full and absorbing story for the reader even when the evidence for each single individual might be quite slight or there are varying levels of records for each of the nine.

The second wide and gathering history I have read is Common People by Alison Light (who will be a guest speaker at Writing Hidden Histories panel event I am co-hosting on 24th Jan!). Alison set out to write a family history that captured the “common people” that made up her working class ancestors. She traces her family tree on both sides going back several generations, taking in bricklayers, Navy sailors, farmers and Baptist preachers. For many of the individuals in the book, there’s very little to go on - a name, a change of address, a marriage record, a death record, a line in the logbook of a workhouse or asylum. But taken together and in the context of the wider historical movements that shaped their individual lives, the sheer host of them form a truly compelling narrative progress through history, sparking with the moments of individuality where these can be recovered. It’s a technical feat as well as a moving story - do give it a read.

3. A history of absences

This is the kind of family history you can write when you really don’t have much to go on. It’s what I thought I would write when I started the project.

The example that inspired me was In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale. Stepanova and Dugdale are both poets as well as prose writers. In Memory of Memory focuses more on the writer’s search for her Russian Jewish family history than what she finds. It centres on the frustrations and absences she encounters. Stepanova visits a house she believes to be her family’s ancestral home and has a profound emotional experience outside it, only to realise later in the day that she visited the wrong address. She searches in fields full of thorns for an abandoned graveyard and her partner has to call her back, afraid how much she’s tearing up her legs. There’s a lot of ekphrasis. The only concrete materials from her family history are letters she includes and family photographs she describes. These tell a story that does thread together but is also still full of mysteries. Overall, the book takes you into the experience of loss Stepanova felt while trying to find the history, rather than telling you a clear family story. It was my favourite that I read and I highly recommend it. She said somewhere in the foreword or acknowledgements that it took her most of her life to be ready to write it.

So what have I done?

I don’t have enough material, and perhaps also skill at this stage, to produce a full-length book on my family history. I’ll be working on a long essay as the final output instead. And, perhaps predictably, I can’t decide between any of these three approaches so I’ll be cherry picking my favourite parts of each. I want to include the straight story of my family across generations as far as I can, supporting by a reaching history pulling in genealogical details and wider historical movements to show how far my family history was “typical” and a product of social forces, and also some of the personal absence and loss I’ve encountered while putting the project together.

A final thought - the position of a creative non-fiction speaker differs greatly from that of a poet. In poetry, I think the speaker is generally perceived as describing only their subjective truth. A poet does not ever know for sure. They speak from a place of doubt and that suits me very well. In a poem, a ball can be described as red one minute and blue the next, so long as it's emotionally true to the subject and speaker. The seeking after a level of actual and verifiable truth that even creative non-fiction requires makes me truly nervous and has been a fascinating challenge.

As classified under the new Rachel Lewis TM universal classification system

Straight and deep

1. The Hare with the Amber Eyes: a hidden inheritance, Edmund de Waal - a potter traces the story of his family’s collection of netsuke over the last one hundred and forty years

2. House of Glass: the story and secrets of a twentieth-century Jewish family, Hadley Freeman - a fashion journalist traces her four French Jewish grandparents and their extraordinary lives before, during and after World War Two

3. Inventory of a life mislaid: an unreliable memoir, Marina Warner - a historian and novelist tells the story of her parents’ marriage and their adventures in Cairo at the end of the British Empire

4. Homelands: the history of a friendship, Chitra Ramaswamy - a journalist befriends a Jewish man at the end of his life and together they tell his story of escaping Nazi Germany and resettling in the UK

Wide and gathering

5. The Nine: how a band of daring Resistance women escaped from Nazi Germany, Gwen Strauss - follows nine women in the Resistance over the ten days of their escape from Ravensbrück concentration camp and their lives after

6. Common People: the history of an English family, Alison Light - the story of the many branches of an English family stretching deep into time, following the Industrial Revolution, the introduction of Baptist preaching and much more

7. Three Women, Lisa Taddeo - Taddeo spent eight years interviewing three women, learning the stories of their desires, sex lives, hopes, and disappointments, in order to tell them intimately. Not exactly a family story, but an unbelievable gathering.

A history of absences

8. Dante Elsner, Maia Elsner - a grand-daughter pieces together her grandfather’s life story from interviews, recollections and the extraordinary legacy of paintings, drawings, sketches and pots he left behind. This could also, arguably, be “straight and deep” as it follows the story of one man with quite a lot of detail behind it, but so much of the story navigates what can’t be known, and draws on the visual archive to tell it, that I’d put it in here.

9. In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova - a walk into what it feels like to trace a family history of loss and absences, following her Russian Jewish ancestors.

When I started out, I didn’t understand the sliding scale differences between family history and memoir so I read some great pure memoirs as well. My two favourites were:

10. Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight, Alexandra Fuller - a memoir about growing up on family farms across various countries in Africa; just a fantastic and totally mad and moving story, very well told.

11. Original sins: a memoir of faith, family and addiction, Matt Rowland Hill - a memoir charting Matt’s growing up in an extremely religious household, how he entered addiction, and his recovery.

If you read any of these and enjoy them, do let me know!