Anya Yurchyshyn is the author of My Dead Parents: A Memoir, published by Crown in March 2018. Yurchyshyn received her MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University, and her work has appeared in Esquire, Oprah Magazine, N+1, Buzzfeed, Two Serious Ladies, Mod Art, Guernica, Elimae, and NOON. Yurchyshyn’s story “The Director” was included in Best Small Fictions of 2015. She lives in New York and teaches at Columbia.
On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 7pm, Anya Yurchyshyn and E.B. Bartels will be in conversation in an event at Newtonville Books in Newton, MA. If you are in the Boston area, come see Non-Fiction by Non-Men in real life!
EB: How did you begin writing in general and nonfiction specifically?
AY: I always loved writing, though I have learning disabilities that make it hard for me. Dyslexia makes me a really bad proofreader. When I was younger, I wanted to be an actress, and later I learned that was the same for Joan Didion, which made me feel cool. But writing gives me more control than acting.
I began writing seriously in my early 20s, and I was bad. I wrote a young adult middle grade thing, a novel about a young woman who had been on Zanzibar during 9/11. (Surprise! I had been a young woman on Zanzibar during 9/11.) I took a few writing courses while I was living in Los Angeles, and then I finally applied to MFA programs for fiction. I started at 28 and was surprised to find I was older than most of the other students. A lot of them seemed to think they were already great writers and spoke like they were only there because they needed time to perfect their novel (which was, of course, already close to perfect). That wasn’t me—I knew had a lot to learn. I definitely cried after more than one workshop and felt bad about being a less developed writer, but I realize now that going in humble was an advantage. I was more open to criticism and understood how much work getting better would involve. Those two years should be huge and formative, and it should be clear that they’re only a prologue to your writing career. I was happy with my short stories and got a bunch published. After I graduated, I assumed that I’d stay focused on fiction, but then I found my parents’ love letters while cleaning out their house. I started blogging about what I’d found and my experiences with grief on Tumblr. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was essentially fleshing out ideas for my memoir.
EB: Do you still write fiction? How is the process of writing nonfiction different from the process of writing fiction for you?
AY: Honestly, I haven’t written much fiction since starting the book four years ago. I haven’t had time to write anything else, and if I wasn’t working on the book, my brain was only available to Netflix. There was not some secret reserve I had available for other creative endeavors.
But I do want to write fiction again in the future; I love writing short stories. Though I think it will be a big adjustment to go back to fiction, just like switching to nonfiction was for me. My fiction is pretty minimalist, and I generally use language to shape my stories as I write them. Plot and characterization are not as important to me in my stories, and I am interested in what wasn’t said as opposed to what was said.
I love nonfiction, in particular personal nonfiction like personal essays and memoir, but besides writing the Buzzfeed essay, I hadn’t written much. I guess I had been writing nonfiction on my blog, but that wasn’t polished. Once I sat down to write the book, I really had to learn how to write memoir. The hard part for me was that memoir demands a ton of details and clarity, which is exactly the opposite of what I was doing in fiction. You don’t have to include everything in nonfiction, but you do have to connect the dots. While working on the memoir, I would always feel like I was overwriting everything, but the edits I was getting was that I actually hadn’t written enough. For example, I hate describing how people look. I kept wanting to skip over it. Also, this book demanded so much research. I spent a full year doing research after I got my book deal but before I started writing. Of course, plenty of fiction writers do research as well. I interviewed around fifty people who had known my parents and visited all these places my parents had lived and worked, and then I had to take all this information and figure out what I still needed. I definitely over-researched––I wasn’t aware I was doing it at the time, but I was always worried that there would be this one person I hadn’t spoken to who would have this one gem of information I really needed that explained everything. And my interviews went on for hours. It was great to have all that material, but it really overwhelmed me.
EB: Oh my god, story of my life. When I am researching, I always feel like I need to read every single thing that even tangentially relates to what I am writing about, and I completely bog myself down. So you didn’t really start researching though until after you’d already gotten your book deal?
AY: Yes, so, I had been writing the blog, and then I was approached by Buzzfeed to do the essay, and then from the essay I got my agents, and from there, they helped me put together a book proposal for the memoir. I think I really needed to see the positive response to the essay to believe that the memoir was worth the years it would take to write it and the effort it would take to research it. I had been doing some research on my own, but having the book deal made it possible to do so much more because I could take time off from work, travel where I needed to, and spend a month in Ukraine. Without that money up front, those things wouldn’t have been possible for me.
EB: Yeah, money is pretty crucial to writing. That’s something no one likes to talk about. And positive feedback is really important too! I feel like I am embarrassed to admit that sometimes, but when someone responds favorably to something I’ve written or tells me they feel connected to my experience, it just makes it all so worth it.
AY: I am the same way. Both positive and negative responses hold too much power over me. Writers are sensitive, that’s just how it goes. But the response was the encouragement that I needed—both that the project had value because people were interested in it, and also that it would just be worth that much more of my time. I was nervous when I published the Buzzfeed essay—besides having that information be Googleable for the rest of my life, I was saying things that were hard but true for me. I wasn’t sure that I loved my parents. I wasn’t sad when they died. That is not a lot of people’s experience, and I knew that some people would find what I was saying very off-putting. While I am sure that was the case, strangers wrote to me and shared similar experiences and said they appreciated that I had articulated how I felt. I’m sure it will be the same with the book. It’s not a traditional grief memoir; if you had a great relationship with your parents, you probably can’t relate to a lot of what I am saying. I don’t want to push any readers away, but I hope I find readers who appreciate and understand my experience.
EB: But I think it’s so great that My Dead Parents isn’t a traditional grief memoir. People have all kinds of relationships with their families, and it’s important for all types of stories to be told because it makes people recognize they’re not crazy, they’re not alone, these are things that other people feel too. That’s what I love about nonfiction—how it connects people through personal stories.
AY: Of course. Though it was scary publishing the essay. Not that I was saying anything that had never been said before, but just when you’re the person doing the saying—being that honest feels dangerous. You are opening yourself up to criticism and opinions that are both positive and negative.
EB: So after all that work you did to learn how to write nonfiction, do you think you will ever go back to writing fiction?
AY: I don’t have another memoir in me right now. My Dead Parents covered everything in my life from age zero to forty. I would have to do a lot more living. But as I said before, I absolutely love personal essays—Joan Didion, Ariel Levy, James Baldwin. When someone can take something really personal and elevate it to something more global or universal… that’s really powerful. At some point, I would love to be able to do that. I don’t think I am great essayist yet, but I want to keep at it. And I would love to go back to short stories, though I think I am going to have to bang my head around a bit to get back to that part of my brain. So often when I was writing the book I would think I wish I could just make this up or I wish I could make this character more interesting. But now, going back to the freedom of fiction, it feels overwhelming. I have so many options, I kind of wish I had some of the constraints of nonfiction guiding me.
For now, though, I still need to recover from writing the book. Working on anything for that long is so intense. I feel like my brain hasn’t come back online yet.
EB: I totally get wanting to make stuff up in nonfiction. So often, when I was writing my MFA thesis, which was a memoir about my family’s business, I wanted to make things up. I thought it would be so interesting if the family business just went up in flames at the end—
AY: [laughter]
EB: But I couldn’t do that. You know, my one complaint about MFA programs is how they are so segregated in terms of genre. Many writers don’t stick to one genre, and you can learn a lot about one genre by studying others. Reading novels and poems is so helpful for me to learn how to write better nonfiction.
AY: I think you’re absolutely right. I understand why MFA programs are organized like that but I do think it is really limited. I ended up writing a memoir, other people write YA, everyone writes book reviews—so many of the most important writers end up doing both. It should be understood and accepted and celebrated that that’s what happens.
EB: In adjusting to writing nonfiction, My Dead Parents is obviously about your parents, but also about your sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins. What were the challenges in writing about people you love? How did you approach writing about them?
AY: You know, I really sprung this project on my family. I had been writing my blog, My Dead Parents, for a few years, but that had all been anonymous and my family didn’t know about it. Then when the Buzzfeed essay came out and I decided to put my name on it, I sent a draft of the essay to my sister and my aunt a week before it was published as a heads up, saying, hey, this is very much my story, but you are included in it by association. It was important to me that they weren’t blindsided. And once that essay was published and there was a positive response, they warmed up to what I was doing.
EB: Yeah, the essay is like a nice warm up for the book, like having training wheels to get used to the idea of the book. So, once you finished your memoir, did you send your sister and aunt the manuscript before it was published, like you did with the essay?
AY: I sent everyone in my family the chapters that they were in once I was close to the almost-final draft, pre-copyediting, and I let my sister read the whole book. I know that is not what a “real journalist” does, but, for me, that really felt like the right decision. My family was so generous with their time, especially my aunts and my mother’s cousin. Those conversations I had with them, that I write about in the book, they took days, weeks, and involved follow up emails and phone calls, and more conversations. My family really made themselves available to me, and without them, I wouldn’t have had much to say. I would have only had my perspective on my parents. Through talking to my family, I learned about my parents’ childhoods, their personalities, and what I was asking them to discuss with me, especially in relation to my mother, was pretty hard. There were a lot of difficult stories from my mother’s childhood, and also the fact that my mother drank herself to death, that really colored everything, even the happy stories. So I was asking people to sit with information that was emotionally hard for them as well as me. I was very aware of that.
Specifically with my father’s sister, she was the only person I could really talk to on my dad’s side of the family, and so I know that she felt a huge responsibility to get things right for me and give me as much information she had, including information about the things that she wasn’t even around for, that had happened before she was born. She was retelling me stories her parents had told her, and as anyone reading or writing a memoir knows, memory isn’t perfect. Memories and perspectives change as you age, as you learn more, and in my aunt’s case, she does a lot of scholarly research about Ukrainian history, so she was able to bring certain perspectives to my dad’s early life and my grandparents’ experience in Ukraine. But then she was also worried about not wanting to assume my grandparents’ experience based on what she had read elsewhere. Really, everyone in my family was very aware of the important role they were playing. And I was so grateful and indebted to them that I wanted to make sure, first, that I got everything correct. Which was not the case! My aunt emailed me to say, hey, I wasn’t born that year. Basic stuff! I was very happy to have the book fact-checked by my family and have them review how I used their quotes. They were able to provide important perspective on the information they shared.
I have friends who have written about people who are alive and it hasn’t gone well. Their families have been really upset with what they wrote. But, to me, there wasn’t anything I needed to say that was so important I felt I had to keep it in the book against their will. If there was something that they thought made them sound insensitive or selfish, for example, I was more than happy to take it out. I didn’t want my family to feel misrepresented in any way considering how accommodating they had been of my project. And, really, the things in the book that would most upset my family were the things I was saying about my parents, and I was comfortable with having that responsibility.
I was really surprised that no one in my family said I don’t want to talk to you because I don’t want to be in a book. Honestly, I am not sure how I would feel if someone approached me and said I want you to be in this story but you don’t get to have authority over the story.
EB: How did your sister feel about you writing about her? She plays a large role in your memoir.
AY: My sister was so supportive from day one, even though we had slightly different experiences of our parents. She just rolled with it, and really did everything she could that she thought would be helpful for me.
EB: Oh, wow. That’s really generous of her. Also, I know you said you checked all of your family’s quotes, but did you send quotes to be verified by other people you interviewed as well? In particular, I am thinking of the private investigator you worked with in Ukraine.
AY: I only quote-checked my family. Partially because everyone else’s identity is obscured; I changed everyone else’s name, so what they said couldn’t be tied directly to them. And also, because mostly everyone else I interviewed in Ukraine didn’t speak English as their first language, it would have been hard for them to correct what they said. But all of those conversations were recorded, and everything I put in the book was an actual quote.
EB: Got it. So was researching and interviewing people the most difficult part of writing My Dead Parents? In general, what do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?
AY: Definitely the logistical things. Tracking down parents’ friends, sitting with family members and interviewing them for days—that was exhausting. It was so information to track. And, you know, my father had been dead for 20 years and my mother had been dead for two when I started researching, I was asking people in their 70s and 80s to remember things that had happened decades before. Having to rely on other people for information was hard, especially recognizing that their memories hadn’t prioritized this information the same way that mine had, because these weren’t their parents; my parents were their coworkers, roommates, friends.
And just the nuts and the bolts of the writing. I was able to be more artful with my own experience, but trying to figure out how to take all this information from my parents’ childhoods and figure out a way to synthesize the facts into a story with a narrative drive and have it not be boring. Creating moments, scenes, even just sentences that are doing something a bit more than just stating basic information.
EB: Yeah, when you’re playing around with your own memories you can slip into what is almost fiction territory, but when you’re working with other people’s quotes, you can’t do that.
AY: Definitely. Also, finding my nonfiction voice was challenging. The nonfiction voice that I settled on that came out of me was very straightforward, it felt right and true to myself, but I needed to make sure it was compelling to my reader.
EB: Also, going back to what you were saying about research, I find it so hard to figure out what to include and what to edit out. So many things I want to keep in just because it took me so long to figure it out and I am proud of that research—but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is crucial to the story
AY: Oh my god, my first draft was 40,000 words longer than it needed to be. That is not a good thing. That is not what an editor wants. I had a whole chapter on my father’s career, as if anyone reading my book was reading it to learn about merchant banking. But I had known so little about his career and I was afraid of my own authoritative knowledge that I wanted everyone to know everything I had researched, to prove to my readers that I had become an authority.
EB: I feel you.
AY: But I wasn’t able to make those decisions while researching, and I was so afraid of leaving something out, which is why I over-researched so much, and then, when I was writing, I wanted credit for doing the work. But your own poor time management is no one else’s fault.
EB: [laughter] I know exactly how you feel. Patricia O’Toole calls it research rapture, when you want to include all this stuff just because you discovered it in your research.
AY: Oh, I know all about that. I was contracted to write between 90,000 and 100,000 words, and I turned in 140,000. The final book ended up being about 96,000.
EB: Wow.
AY: But I had to keep cutting back and asking myself, how is this helping the story at all? And it was painful to lose all that, to get the information and write it and then cut it out, but it started becoming obvious what needed to go.
EB: And what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?
AY: Being able to say exactly what you think and feel. It’s great if you can say that artfully, that’s always the goal, but just really being able to say this is what I think and feel. Fiction doesn’t do that or, I think, shouldn’t do that. I don’t think fiction authors should have an agenda though they certainly have a perspective. But when writing nonfiction, I liked having the opportunity to say exactly what was inside of me.
EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a woman writer?
AY: It’s hard because since I didn’t study nonfiction in school, my favorite memoirists are everyone’s favorite memoirists, like Mary Karr. But I have settled on a paragraph from Beryl Markham’s West with the Night:
We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know—that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.
E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Toast, The Butter, xoJane, Ploughshares online, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. E.B. has an MFA from Columbia University, and she runs an interview series on Fiction Advocate called “Non-Fiction by Non-Men.” You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, see her tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com.