Unafraid of the Dark
SOME YEARS AGO, in a workshop, I wrote about my sister’s self-destructive adolescence. I recounted her recklessness with boys and alcohol, the anger that erupted like a geyser inside her, and her hell-bent desire to run away—which she did by joining a traveling carnival when she was 16. The scenes brimmed with my own shock and confusion, and, as difficult as the subject matter was, I was sure it was the best thing I’d written. But in class, a writer I deeply respected made some general comments, then leaned back in her chair. She nudged the manuscript on the table away, as if proximity itself was a problem.
“It’s too much,” she said, shaking her head sadly.
Instead of feeling drawn into the narrative, she was repelled by it. The worst part was that I had no idea how to fix the problem: the story was the story, wasn’t it?
So when I had a chance to take a class from Heather Sellers and interview her about her work, I was eager to learn. Sellers is no stranger to writing about difficult family relationships. Her memoir You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know recalls a childhood that bounced between her mother’s home, where open windows, phone calls, visitors, even pictures on the wall were objects of her mother’s deep paranoia, and her father’s house, where he drank gin for breakfast, wore women’s underwear beneath his clothing, and disappeared each night, leaving his daughter to fend for herself.
In the afterword to her book, Sellers reveals that finding a way to write about this material didn’t come easy. She describes some of the reactions she received from her writing group to early versions of her manuscript: “How could you live this way? … It’s too raw.
