Family

I’d like to start off my post with a small confession: I admit that while reading Maus, especially Maus II, I was far more interested in the concentration camp stories than in Art’s present-day interactions with his father. Maybe it’s because I found Vladek Spiegelman far less annoying in the past than in the present, or because I got tired of reading about his arguments with Art on every other page, but at one point I realized that even though Vladek’s experiences in the Holocaust were sometimes terrifying to read about, I still enjoyed those scenes more than Art’s experiences with his father. I think this reaction is probably a result of my lack of empathy for Art in his struggle to become acquainted with his father. Surprising as it may be, I actually have very close relationships with both of my parents. And I’ve been close to them for a long time. I somehow missed the stage of parental hatred/daughter rebellion during my period of teenage angst, and since I have no reason to dislike either of my parents aside from the expected generational differences, I really love them both and am rarely (if ever) as annoyed by them as Art was by Vladek. So, I can’t empathize with Art. I can sympathize with him, since Vladek is pretty annoying and I wouldn’t like having him as a father in his old age, but I just don’t have the parental tension going on in my own life. For some reason I felt that this was a necessary fact to declare. Perhaps because some of my other classmates are contemplating their own family histories, and I find that those are so different from my own.

Another confession: I really can’t decide what family story I would want to write about. I’ve brainstormed a few but none seem to fit. The most compelling one for me is my mom’s biography, not because she has accomplished anything that would seem incredible to anyone else, but because I think she has had a fascinating life that is worth hearing about. She was born in California, grew up here in the Bay Area, went to college in the early 1970’s and experienced all of the craziness of the hippie era, then moved to Washington, DC and started working on Capitol Hill as a press secretary for various congressmen. Then it gets slightly less interesting when she moves back to journalism (her original career track), but in the meantime she’s also writing a book, having kids, and experiencing the struggle of raising a family. I don’t think that this would be a compelling story for many people to read, so I probably wouldn’t tell it like a traditional story (ie in written form). I would probably focus on her younger life, when she was in college and then working on the Hill, and I might end with her marriage (which seems like an oh-so-traditional narrative arc, but it just fits so well). Thinking about the 70’s, I really want to turn the story into a large, colorful painting, because that’s how I often envision that era: like a giant blur of bright images. I feel like I could convey many different events on one canvas, and I could more easily evoke the feelings and atmosphere of the 70’s in painting. But if I were to attempt to tell my mom’s whole story from, say, 1970-1983 (encompassing her life from the beginning of college to her marriage), then I might go for a more comprehensive medium. Painting seems too ambiguous and too instantaneous to convey a story that long and involved. In that circumstance, I would probably create a graphic narrative to tell her story. Writing it out in prose just seems too boring, since I can think of so many great images that could accompany the writing. Also, because my mom is a writer, I would probably want to stay away from that medium while telling her story. It might feel like I was stepping on her toes too much. That said, I would certainly use a lot of her personal essays while writing, and I would obviously interview her to get all of the necessary information. Actually, that might be the biggest challenge: convincing my mom to divulge her deep, dark secrets from the 1970’s. But those stories would also make for the best graphic narrative. And, ironically, it’s a narrative that she probably wouldn’t write herself.