On Privacy
by Deborah Rice
Deborah Rice is a senior Reporter and Presenter with ABC News, based in Sydney.
It’s ironic that the very act of pleading for privacy was what ensured the public exposure of one of the most intimate moments of my life.
That’s what happened when my sister M cast me as her antagonist in an account of our mother’s dying hours and submitted it for publication last year in an anthology about losing a parent, My Mother, My Father.
Introduction
by Features Editor Diana Jenkins
I always hope Alumni and other visitors to the page will be sufficiently affected by the feature of any given month that a few of you might comment, but it's not every day I receive a response that runs into thousands of words. I was especially pleased to get the following essay from alumna Deborah Rice - broadcast journalist, aspiring novelist and a cherished friend I first made at Varuna - because I was vaguely astonished when no one commented on the interview with Katerina Cosgrove. I'm so personally fascinated and challenged by issues of narrative ownership in fiction and non-fiction, particularly as it pertains to 'the family story,' that I was a bit flummoxed when no one said a word. 'Huh?' I thought. 'Why so quiet?'
Little did I know that Deb was, on the contrary, processing a riot of feelings, slowly working her way through a number of significant and very personal caves of disquiet in reaction to the interview. Katerina's bold capture and subsequent sacrifice of her family's history proved a trigger, reopening a series of tender bruises as Deb contemplated her own.
On reflection, my own response was similar, though I was still thinking about it as the potential author, not the subject. I've been urged by many people over many years to tell my story, whatever that means, because I'm what's best described as a 'breakaway': I'm the one who got myself out of a bad scene as a child and never looked back. It's a pretty good story, so I'm told, but like Deb I remain very conflicted about what it means to commit such things to paper. I worry about my version, my reality - my truth - falling short somehow, and I'm dogged by a fear that the universe will smite me where I stand for daring to speak, as though part of the deal I brokered in my escape was a vow of silence about all I felt compelled to flee. I admire people like Katerina who aren't afraid of confronting family ghosts and ghouls; I also feel deeply for people like Deb, who find themselves used as material in a story they will never regard as their own.
Families are fascinating - no wonder writers are drawn to the subject - and Deb's is no exception. I'm confident you will find the following essay as moving, thought-provoking and riveting as I did. I thank her so much for sharing it with us.
Now back to Deb.
It’s ironic that the very act of pleading for privacy was what ensured the public exposure of one of the most intimate moments of my life.
That’s what happened when my sister M cast me as her antagonist in an account of our mother’s dying hours and submitted it for publication last year in an anthology about losing a parent, My Mother, My Father.
She wrote me into history without consultation. Without disguise. Without apology.
That hurt.
At the heart of M’s story, Scrabble, was her disappointment that in our mother’s last days I drew up a roster so the daughters who were able could each spend some time alone with her. M was mystified. She seemed at a loss to understand that her self-declared role as constant companion to Mum might appear territorial or competitive or intrusive or suffocating to others in the family. In Scrabble she complained that I’d cast her as the controlling big sister, yet I felt that in her account she portrayed me as a petulant child, reluctant to share. It was as if she’d teased out our family tensions, then plaited them back into a style that suited her but didn’t flatter me.
It wasn’t only the fact that M exposed our grief so publicly that deepened it, but that she drew conclusions about my own feelings and motivations without checking she was correct.
That surprised me because over the decades both of us had proven ourselves to be reliable journalists. She and I had been careful to craft our news and feature reports for publication and broadcast mindful of the importance of accuracy and attribution, verifying facts and balancing opinions.
Indeed, soon after Mum had died in November 2011 M had written a deeply considered, well-researched piece for The Global Mail about the right to say ‘no’ to medical intervention. It had raised important questions about the drive to extend life expectancy beyond the point of a ‘good’ natural death and I had applauded her initiative.
Yet now I was the subject of a report that was speculative, unsubstantiated and, in my opinion, unreliable.
Scrabble wasn’t a piece of journalism. It was M’s creative response to a highly emotionally charged, life-changing event. Nonetheless, it was non-fiction and our real names were used. It identified me to an unrestricted readership, giving them access to an intensely private experience that I didn’t care to share, possibly even causing them to judge me because of it. It had the potential to impact on the public profile I’d nurtured and protected.
The fact that M hadn’t checked her assumptions was even more wounding because it reinforced for me a long-held grievance: that my older sisters had for many years presented my family to the world as a reflection of their own experiences, assuming our collective story was universal and uniform. If they were lacking in ball skills, the Rice children all lacked ball skills. If they were Catholic we were all Catholic, whether we chose to identify as that or not.
On reflection, it’s not surprising.
My three sisters sat in the crown of our family tree well before my lower branch even began to bud. Elizabeth, born first, was severely intellectually and physically disabled so the identical twins, M and Cecilia, were up there as ‘eldest’ by default. For those two, their early experiences of the world were almost always shared, their responses mirrored and reinforced by each other. At first it probably didn’t occur to them that a non-twin experienced life differently, without that reassuring double-check.
Two brothers came next, eighteen months apart. By then Mum had five children under five. It wasn’t until almost four years later that I was born.
It was a huge age gap, when the others were so tightly teamed. At first I was too young to join in their games, then very quickly they were too old to play mine. They could all ski before I could walk. They could all swim when I couldn’t even dogpaddle. They went to the same primary school together, then each had the support of a sibling at secondary school; I was effectively an only-child all through my education.
The twins’ seniority was significant in terms of every childhood milestone, so it was natural they assumed a position of authority. But from my point of view they seemed only able to imagine themselves as central characters and never as side-players. They were the Margie-Cee Show, as Dad dubbed it, and they knew how to dominate the family narrative with their boisterous story-telling, growing louder as they laughed and interrupted each other, or argued. It wasn’t that they purposely drowned out other voices, they just didn’t seem to hear them. When they doubled up like that they were a sum that was greater than its parts.
In my eyes, M and Cecilia also dictated who we were as individuals, all six children in the family. We were pigeonholed into personality traits and family roles that were more myth than reality – and sometimes inspired by jealousy and resentment rather than by sustained evidence or special insight. There was the Peacemaker. There was the Extrovert. Predictably, I was labelled ‘spoiled’ at times, as I was so much younger and unwittingly commanded my parents’ attention when others craved it.
So I grew up feeling defined by others and disempowered because of it. My big sisters regularly spoke on my behalf, without being invited to do so, or asking my permission.
I don’t think my experience was unique – I’ve compared anecdotes with enough people from other large families to tell me that it wasn’t. I don’t believe my sisters intended to make me feel devalued. I also have to concede that my behaviour probably impacted on their self-esteem just as deeply and as often.
To be fair, it was probably Mum who set the stereotypes, although I didn’t realise it at the time. It later irked me that she encouraged a family hierarchy as outmoded as a marriage in which a husband spoke for his wife, though she rarely allowed that herself.
But the result was that I became intent on escaping the dynamic as soon as I finished school. So I spent the best part of the next decade living thousands of kilometres away from my family.
It wasn’t until I returned home that I started to see what I must have overlooked in my childhood. The twins weren’t one double-headed bossy-big-sister monster, but two separate people who had diverse beliefs, interests, experiences and achievements, as well as very different personalities. Had they changed, or had I?
Even now I stand justly accused of sometimes still unfairly conflating my memories of M and Cecilia in a lazy family shorthand.
But five years ago Cecilia Rice did something that required great courage: she wrote a book that had the potential to blow apart our family. Always Liza to Me was subtitled A memoir for my silent sister. Through it, Cecilia dared to speak on behalf of our disabled sibling Elizabeth, acutely aware that others in the family might not agree with her interpretation. Instead of being secret about it she asked each of us, including Dad, to preview her manuscript and contribute to it. That was a brave step, because it meant she was answerable to every one of us for the words she included or omitted. It wasn’t just a case of linking separate stories, as in an anthology. It involved meticulous editing and review to ensure the various viewpoints were accurately conveyed, as she interlaced them through her central narrative.
It was a remarkable achievement, both in terms of writing and relationships. Cecilia gave each of us space and respect.
What became clear was that identical, shared incidents were experienced and remembered differently, depending on how they’d impacted on our individual lives and shaped our psyches.
Cecilia summed it up in the first line on the first page of her book.
‘Veritas. The truth is a complex composite, ambiguous and sometimes elusive.’
When we were younger, the accepted family wisdom was that Liza was difficult and she weighed down the twins with some special responsibilities, but that we all loved her nonetheless. I don’t recall Mum ever allowing a divergent opinion; I do remember being reprimanded by her and made to feel guilty on the rare occasions that I broke the unspoken rule and complained about Liza.
So it was with trepidation that I confessed to Cecilia for most of my life I’d feared Liza and even hated her. I told her that remembering my childhood encounters made me feel ill because they conjured an old dread of the physical attacks that had left me bleeding and bruised, as well as sick at heart. More than that, they reminded me how betrayed I’d felt by Mum because she hadn’t protected me and later in life had laughed at me for still being distressed about Liza’s cat-and-mouse stalking.
Although I felt relieved to admit my treasonous secret, I also felt guilty - until my brothers made similar confessions. It was cathartic. We had said the unsayable. We had demonstrated that there could be more than one truth. We had set the record straight.
As the publication date approached, the designer selected for the cover a photo of my five siblings which pre-dated my birth. Cecilia was rightfully concerned that it could make me feel left out and trigger old resentments. So she balanced the omission by including, as a preface to her narrative, an excerpt from one of my pregnancy journals which recounted my fear of having an abnormal child.
Cecilia crafted her manuscript to acknowledge a multitude of realities and the inclusion of all our voices made her memoir far more powerful than if it had been written from just one perspective. It allowed a conversation around a kind of ‘survivor guilt’ to open up within the family and outside of it, as many readers responded with stories they’d kept hidden until Always Liza to Me gave them permission to shine a light into their own dark worlds of damage and despair.
That experience told me I belonged with my brothers and sisters, but they finally respected my right to define myself.
So years later, when M wrote Scrabble, it felt like a betrayal.
Why hadn’t she allowed me an opportunity to offer feedback before it was published? I suspected she feared I’d demand alterations and dictate how they were written.
Of course, it’s one thing to invite comment when you’re a journalist working to produce a comprehensive report about a public issue. It’s another thing entirely when you’re a creative writer who’s sculpting a personal story that needs a dramatic arc. Opinion can kill inspiration; facts can be inconvenient. It’s better not to know, so wise not to ask.
I thought I understood the dilemma: I’d faced it myself.
When I was writing my unpublished novel, RESISTANCE, I borrowed heavily from Dad’s experiences working on the international standardisation of electrical wiring during the closing years of the Cold War. It worried me that he might take offence that one of the central characters, who was clearly modelled on him, was portrayed quite unsympathetically. I’d turned him into an egotistical, traitorous adulterer.
I felt I couldn’t take the manuscript to a publisher without allowing Dad to read it first, though I had no idea what I’d do if he raised any objections. Waiting for him to die certainly wasn’t going to be an option – he’s now 90 years old, but still riding a motorbike and cycling to tennis each week. I think somehow I felt it would be okay to defame him, so long as I did it up front rather than behind his back.
As it turned out, Dad was flattered that I’d chosen him as the inspiration for my creative efforts. I should have known!
Coming clean delivered an extra, unexpected benefit: Dad made technical corrections and provided me with interesting primary materials that greatly assisted my next draft of RESISTANCE.
There was another person I needed to consult, too.
In writing RESISTANCE I’d incorporated some of the very sensitive experiences of a close friend. It was something I did subconsciously at first, until I realised that witnessing her physical and emotional pain was impacting on my writing. Then writing about it became a way of dealing with the helplessness I felt at her suffering. I doubt she would have chosen to be exposed in that way, but she read the manuscript and didn’t ask me to change it. That was an incredibly generous act.
If RESISTANCE makes it to print, others may seek to identify themselves in the narrative - it never fails to surprise me that people can read themselves into a story even when there’s no reference to them, overt or covert, intentional or unintentional. At most, the minor characters in my novel are amalgams of a variety of people I’ve known and imagined. But I have erased a few negative characteristics just in case anyone takes offence. Even though it’s a work of fiction.
Call me fastidious. Call me uptight, even.
So I was compelled to read Diana Jenkins’s September Alumni Interview with Katerina Cosgrove about the ownership of family history and the sometimes catastrophic results of taking confessions and recollections into a public forum.
Maybe it was just the baggage I brought to my reading of it, but despite ‘all its possibilities for misconception and confusion’ Katerina Cosgrove seemed incredibly unconstrained about mining other peoples’ stories for her novels, The Glass Heart and Bone Ash Sky.
Wow. I was immediately envious of her attitude.
Then quickly conflicted.
The interview led me back to those questions I’d been asking myself over recent years. Who owns a story? Who has the right to tell it? Who has the right to reinterpret it?
When Scrabble was on the way to publication almost two years after Mum died, M emailed me a copy as a courtesy, but making clear the content was non-negotiable. Maybe she thought the same way I had about RESISTANCE, that she could publish whatever she liked so long as she was up front about it.
I had a choice to make. I could harbour the feelings of offence and frustration that threatened my relationship with a sister I loved, or I could cut the tethers that bound me to tired old emotions and blow into their sails.
Blow out the pain, blow away the sadness, send that ship to the farthest ocean.
But grief is not kind.
Only weeks after Mum’s agonising death, my eldest brother had been killed in a motorbike accident and all breath had been stolen from me.
Many months later, I was still struggling to fill my lungs again and Scrabble threatened to deplete me further.
By writing publically about what I wanted to protect, M had vindicated the very demand for privacy that had puzzled her.
It still astounded me that anyone would question the need for a person to have time alone with someone they love, especially when they’re dying. It annoyed me that the story seemed to demand I justify the stand I took. It disappointed me that I was portrayed in a way that disturbed my final memories of Mum. It left me feeling robbed of my own voice, my own sense of self.
I felt a strange discomfort, as if I’d been paraded naked in someone else’s skin. Exposed, but invisible.
When I was a child, Mum had loved to buy lottery tickets. But each time she’d made her purchase she’d taken care to enter the letters NFP in the appropriate box. Not For Publication. It had been to protect her family. When she won (which she never did), no-one would know our address, no-one would be given the opportunity to kidnap us and hold us ransom. That had been the fate of other winners, with tragic results.
When M emailed me a copy of Scrabble I wanted to scrawl NFP in giant letters across it, to protect my own experience of Mum’s dying from being discounted. Because my truth was different to hers.
While M had stood guard in Mum’s last weeks and days, I‘d had no hope of farewelling my mother.
My mother.
Not our mother, not my sister’s mother, not anyone else’s mother.
What M didn’t appreciate was that Mum had always acted differently towards me when others in the family were around, paying obeisance to the old hierarchical order that demanded I be defined through reference to my sisters and brothers instead of being seen as an individual. It was especially so when M was there. But when Mum and I were alone together our relationship was set free.
That’s my truth.
No-one can confirm it or deny it, because it was the fact that Mum and I were the only ones present which made the difference notable. Our private relationship couldn’t be corroborated or described or witnessed by M or anyone else. Some things, through their very nature, can’t be shared.
As Mum had descended into dementia over the previous decade the lines between who was mother and who was child had been blurred. I’d found myself adjudicating disputes over biscuits and car seating between an eight year old, an eleven year old and an 86 year old. All three fought for my attention. Nothing illustrated that more than the day towards the end when Mum was clinging to me and I was holding her forehead as she vomited into a green hospital basin, and the school rang to say I needed to collect a child from the sick bay.
But it wasn’t quite the role reversal others might have imagined.
In our private moments Mum and I had long ago become equals, two adult women with some common interests, experiences and opinions, as well as many differing ones. There was no need for hierarchy. Either of us could mother the other.
Yet in Mum’s last days I felt M was trying to reduce our relationship to the obsolete model from years earlier. She bounced me on her knee in front of Mum, called me by the diminutive ‘Debbie’ that I’d rejected decades ago and referred to me as Mum’s baby in her presence, talking as if I couldn’t speak for myself. She seemed to need me to play the role of someone who was less articulate and worldly-wise. Maybe it gave her comfort, as if it restored order to our family. I knew it wasn’t ill-intentioned, though to me it felt as if M was putting me in my place. I could have objected, but I knew she was fragile, and Mum was easily disturbed. I didn’t want to upset either of them.
But I became even more determined to stick to a roster that ensured M wasn’t always in the room trying to define how Mum and I related to each other. Mum was already confused by dementia and pain, I didn’t want her last impressions of me to be someone she didn’t recognise. I wanted us to share a few final hours in our truest way, woman to woman.
So when I read Scrabble I felt once again reduced by M’s words. She’d described me as a frightened, fragile child and decided that I was replicating my childhood in those last hours with Mum. She couldn’t have been further from the truth.
In fact M had cast us all as vulnerable, innocent children in her story and I’ve come to realise that must have been how she saw herself. Maybe she just assumed, once again, that her take on the experience was universal. It’s hardly surprising that she was bewildered when I won our death-bed game of Scrabble – I hadn’t played my role as the baby, the least knowledgeable.
I was sad that M hadn’t been able to understand my plea for privacy, my need not to be interpreted.
But I believed in free speech.
And I didn’t come off all that badly in her story, despite being her main antagonist.
Anyway, she’d made it clear she wasn’t going to change it.
So, choking back a lifetime of tears, I managed to compose a short email in response: It’s beautiful.
At the launch of My Mother, My Father I could have been angry and ungracious. Instead, I chose to celebrate my clever sister who appeared in the company of some illustrious authors. I jokingly introduced myself as M’s nemesis, to the surprise of some other writers who confessed their own family members wouldn’t be attending that night. They’d become estranged years ago, due to disagreements over public exposure of private stories.
Maybe I lost nothing through M’s success. But I did learn to censor myself when she was around. I skipped one family gathering, fearing being scrutinised and analysed; before the next one I checked with her that anything said and done would be kept ‘off the record’.
Aware that M was still writing about death, I was far more careful about what I revealed in her company when both my partner and I faced our own mortality early this year.
As for the past, I decided it was best not to scratch that wound.
But then the interview with Katerina Cosgrove appeared on Varuna’s Alumni Features page and I was unsettled all over again. The subject matter haunted me. The wound started to fester and seep.
So, for the first time since last year’s launch of My Mother, My Father, I took the anthology off the shelf, opened it and read M’s story.
To my surprise, my role in Scrabble was far less significant than I’d remembered. My original impression of it must have been swollen by vanity and indignation.
There was affection in what I read, and a respect of sorts. Indeed, I’d been promoted: I was M’s counter-balance, a position usually reserved for Cecilia. M also wrote that she accepted what she’d previously dismissed, my claim that Mum was a different mother to all of us.
There was a great deal of truth in Scrabble: a lung cancer death is a barbarous one; any death can knock relationships between siblings out of balance; no matter how many siblings you have, ultimately you go through the death of your mother alone.
The story accurately detailed the end-of-life shutdown we’d witnessed.
Death is such a taboo subject – readers can only benefit from the insights in My Mother, My Father, so I commend it to them.
But there’s no getting past the fact that in parts of M’s account I’m infantilised, and someone who should know better has drawn incorrect, simplistic conclusions about some of my last moments with my mother, presenting them to the public as fact. As if there can be no other reality; as if my own voice doesn’t count.
Ultimately, that says far more about M than about me.
Fair enough. Scrabble is her story. She can tell it any way she wants. She can even refer to it as our story. But it will never be mine.
Did the three Bronte sisters ever feel this way? They drew on material from their lives together and their family relationships when they wrote their novels and poetry; there must surely have been some conflict over who used their shared stories, and how. They must have debated interpretation and application and disagreed about nuances. They can’t have been so perfectly in harmony, all of the time, that one – or two – didn’t occasionally claim the high moral ground.
Well now I’m claiming the high moral ground.
But I could easily lose my advantage, because I still don’t know which side I’m fighting on.
As a writer I would command my sisters not to allow their creativity to be constrained or contaminated by anyone else’s expectations. As a sister I would urge all writers to take care.
So have I run this essay past my sisters? Cecilia, yes. M, no. Call it writer’s revenge, if you will.
Do I want M to take offence? No.
Do I want her to take heed? Most definitely.
In memory of Jeanette Marie Rice 28 January 1925 – 17 November 2011.