What I know about writing

I walked into my parents’ house Friday evening after the day’s long drive to Hilton Head. Mom had promised me roasted chicken for dinner when I arrived and boy, was I ever hungry!

But when I walked in and called out, “Mom, Dad, I’m here!” I didn’t smell garlic, rosemary, and olive oil, just the scents of the cleaning lady having done her job that day.

Mom and Dad, Gary and Jody, Jeff and Claudia sat in the living room. Jeff approached first.

“Jim,” he said, two deep vertical lines between his eyebrows, “we have to talk to you about this writing nonsense.”

Mom stood up and wagged her index finger at me. “This has got to stop, Jim. You can’t be writing about us and sharing it with those San Francisco liberals. Have you no shame?”
Dad spoke up, shaking his head left to right. “What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to drive a wedge in this family, break this family apart by telling stories about us?”

Mom went back to her vodka on ice and sat down. “You’ve exaggerated every one of our Jimmy stories, sometimes beyond recognition.”

Claudia, always a voice of reason, asked, “Couldn’t you just have changed all the names and tweaked the stories a little more?”

Gary added his consensus-building voice to the fray. “What I’m hearing today is a lot of anger, Jim, and I think it’d be best if you just cooled it for a while.”

The barrage continued. Only Jody didn’t speak up.

“You told the whole world about some of our inner feelings, some of our anxieties. How dare you tell the world all our secrets!”

“And you misquoted me on a number of occasions. I don’t like it.”

“Your little stories always came from your own, selfish point of view. Never one of ours!”

“And then you made up different characters and shifted things around just to suit your purposes.”

“This has to stop, I repeat: this has to stop. We’re doing an intervention here, Jim. Seems to me, if you’re going to write about what you know, you can’t ever write again. So put that poison pen down …”

I loved my family, but I wouldn’t give up my pen. Maybe I just needed to go back to the masquerade that fiction is completely … fictional. Maybe no one would complain then. I couldn’t wait for the next Round Robin session to start.