Judy Bolton-Fasman is the author of Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets. Her essays and reviews have appeared in major newspapers, essay anthologies, and literary magazines. She is the recipient of numerous writing fellowships, and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

This month’s guest Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviewer is Jane Kokernak. She works and teaches scientific writing at Northeastern University. Her essays have been published in Pangyrus, Bellevue Literary Review, Technology Review, Medium, and elsewhere.

JK: Your memoir, Asylum, seems to have its roots in a creative master’s thesis you wrote for the Columbia MFA program, in the form of a collection of linked fiction stories. How did you reframe those stories into a substantial nonfiction project? What inspired that shift, and when?

JBF: I love this question because it covers so much of my writing life. I earned my MFA when I was very young. And, like many young writers, I wrote fiction that was heavily autobiographical. I didn’t necessarily find this to be creative—I felt lightly fictionalizing my life was almost cheating. But many of these stories in my thesis were about my dad. So, even as a young writer, my father as a fascinating character was already in my mind.

Eventually, I realized that I wasn’t a fiction writer. It took a long time for me to come to terms with that, because my MFA was in fiction writing. After I graduated, I tried to write a novel. And I just stopped writing altogether for a while. I regrouped after I had my children, which was about seven years later. For a long time I wrote a parenting column about my kids (with their permission), and then stopped that column after eight years. I couldn’t write about their dating life! That was when I realized my voice was best expressed through creative nonfiction. I started taking classes at GrubStreet, in memoir, creative nonfiction, and essay writing. I just felt myself, writing in that voice.

JK: How did you conceive of Asylum as a story, a nonfiction one?

JBF: Asylum is speculative nonfiction. And I have my own definition of that. What I had going into the book was a set of facts and a set of speculations, and I merged them in my narrative. For me, they yielded a profound truth that felt completely right to me.

JK: Your relationship to language and culture is prevalent in Asylum. Is that something you’re conscious of as you write?

JBF: It’s intentional. Sometimes I’m only half Cuban, but sometimes I feel completely Cuban. My mother’s identity was very germane to our family and very dramatic. The first time I felt really Latinx was when we went to Miami for three months. I already knew some Spanish; my maternal grandparents didn’t speak any English. That trip to Miami is where I really started to think in Spanish and to really feel Latinx, understand the culture, and feel part of the culture.

The language is very important to me, and it’s natural for me to lapse into it in mid-sentence. Sometimes there are things I can’t express in English, even though I wouldn’t consider myself a native speaker or even a fluent speaker at this point. Now, my mother unfortunately has dementia, and she lapses into Spanish. I don’t keep up with her as well as I did. So losing my Spanish makes me very sad. I wrote an essay about a year and a half ago called “Losing My Spanish.”

JK: The intersectionality of your identity is a thread running through Asylum, in the flow between languages and culture in the narrative.

JBF: In the book there is also a meditation on the Kaddish and my commitment to reciting it daily in Hebrew after my father died. Judaism is also very important to me along with the traditions and languages. Speaking Ladino, a 15^th century version of Spanish, which has a smattering of Hebrew and Portuguese, separated us from other Jews when I was growing up because Sephardic Jewry wasn’t well known or understood then. It would drive my mother crazy when people said, “Oh, if you don’t speak Yiddish, you’re not Jewish.” Ladino is a very interesting language. It’s the reason my mother’s family went to Cuba, from Greece and Turkey, because they didn’t want to learn a totally new language. I can almost understand it, but it has a lot of Portuguese-like pronunciations. It’s the language that Maimonides spoke.

JK: The child narrator in the book is always observing, always studying. As a child, you often found information that was tantalizing but inexplicable, and you didn’t have the context to make sense of it.

JBF: Nor the vocabulary. When I found that picture of my father when he was in Latin America, I didn’t understand it. I didn’t have the intellect or the vocabulary to link things up. But I was curious about it, and I never forgot about it.

JK: In one of the later chapters, your father discloses to you that he is “lonesome.”

JBF: My father was much older and very standoffish. I was scared of him when I was little. But you know, he softened, and he mellowed as he got older. And we got close, at the end of my teenage years and into my 20s. I’m only sorry that we couldn’t continue that relationship because of his Parkinson’s disease and passing. Part of the impetus for me to say the Kaddish in the traditional way, which I write about in the book, was that I wanted to continue a relationship with him, even if it was posthumous.

JK: Your first job, after your MFA, was as a researcher in a watchdog group. Could you say more about what that work meant to you?

JBF: That job was very formative. I tracked right-wing groups. At the time, I was one of the foremost experts in the country. It was a prescient job. I learned a lot about our country, and I learned a lot about anti-Semitism. I was also exposed to a segment of America that I never knew existed. I saw how hate can have various permutations. It seeps into Holocaust denial, or it’s couched in pseudo-scientific language.

JK: The job resonated with your self-description as a girl detective.

JBF: When I was a kid, I heard about these books, the Judy Bolton Mystery Series, and I thought it was so cool that my name was on the cover of a book. My parents also shaped that identity because I seemed so curious, and I asked so many questions. Everybody plays a part in their family; I was the curious one. So that job after my MFA continued my detective persona.

JK: What was your approach to dealing with all the stuff of your life and your parents’ life? How did you create meaning from it?

JBF: The book took almost 16 years to be published. When I started, I intended it to be a journal of the year that I said the Kaddish. But that felt like it was a very internal, a personal document, just for my family. I realized, to be a book, I needed a narrative arc. I had to work through many variations. I had to write my way to the story I wanted to tell.

The research process also gave me more of an arc, and a purpose. I think, to some degree, every memoirist is a detective. To assume that persona helped me to plot out the narrative. But I knew I didn’t want the book to be necessarily chronological, so I worked with a developmental editor to make it more thematic.

JK: You write some lovely, lyrical passages, like the one at the end of the “Silent Symphony” chapter, where you go from describing the specific experience of learning violin as a child to a reverie on a particular kind of silence. How did you shift into this kind of writing?

JBF: Again, I wrote my way to these perceptions. I then revised my way to them. Some of them were low-hanging fruit where I would find a metaphor or get meaning from it. There was an excerpt based on that chapter published in the Boston Globe Magazine. My violin teacher from that era actually read it and wrote a lovely letter to the editor.

JK: Besides your former music teacher, have you heard from other readers about how your book has affected them?

JBF: Yes, a lot of women have written to me and said that pieces of my childhood traumas resonated with them. The book was featured in my alumni magazine, and classmates wrote to me, particularly a couple of people from a writing classes I took in college, and said they were proud of me. An old boyfriend from Columbia, who I was quite fond of but never thought I’d hear from again, wrote to me that he liked the book. I was very honored.

JK: As I read your book, I felt I had entered this time and place I didn’t know existed. Even though you and I are close in age, I had a strong sense that “this is Judy’s story.” Were you conscious of presenting a world in such detail?

JBF: Early on, I was thinking about details as supporting the story, but later I realized those details were a crucial part of worldbuilding. I understood the two went hand in hand. Specificity is so key in any creative writing. Details locate things for the reader, and for the writer, too!

JK: While we’re on the topic of drafts and revision, tell me more about how your book changed through the process.

JBF: Toward the end, I finally was able to see it as a book. Before, it was scattered pieces that I worked on. I have to give a shout out to my developmental editor, Jami Bernard, because it was a joint effort. Once there was a completed draft, ready to send to an agent, I saw the book for what it was.

I wrote the last chapter at the very end of the process, in 2019. Bear in mind, my father died in 2002. It takes a long time to bring things together. That chapter includes a lot of the themes I was working toward and trying to present to the reader.

JK: I’d like to hear more about this idea or approach of “writing your way to it.”

JBF: You know, as trite as it sounds, writing is 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. You don’t sit down only when you’re inspired. You sit down to work; it’s a job. What I’ve been saying in a lot of my talks is that I published this first book, technically, when I was 60. I’d made other attempts at books, manuscripts tucked away in laying in desk drawers. But I was 60, and this was my first published book. I encourage people, especially women, to keep going.

If you’re taking notes in your iNotes on your iPhone, that’s writing. If you’re sketching something on the back of an envelope, that’s art. It’s a cumulative process. Your life is cumulative, and your art is cumulative. Don’t give up on your art. Keep writing those notes—they point to something.

JK: Thank you for saying that. Here’s my last question. In your journey to solve the mystery, and I think your mother’s family called them secretitos…?

JBF: Secretitos. Little secrets.

JK: Yes, little secrets of your father’s life. So, you have published Asylum. Have you turned your imagination and curiosity to other mysteries?

JBF: That’s a great question. I don’t want to say too much because, you know, writers are superstitious, but since my mother kept interrupting the narrative, I’m drawn to writing essays about her. And I’m hoping to turn them into an into a coherent narrative. With any parent, your life is intertwined, for better or for worse. And I want to explore that because our relationship was so tumultuous. I want to explore her life. What made her the way she was? What made me the way I was?

JK: Do you have any advice for first-time memoir writers?

JBF: I want them to know that a memoir doesn’t simply unfurl. It takes a lot of work, and it takes a lot of perseverance. I want people to feel comfortable about that, to know that they’re not the exception if they’re not getting their book done in two, three, or four years. It’s a long process, and I learned a lot writing Asylum. I learned a lot about how to work; I learned a lot about craft. Still, you always have the book hanging over you. Is this ever going to get published? But if you can push that to the side and just learn from the process, that is helpful to the writing and to the writer.

JK: What memoirs are mentor texts for you—ones that inspire you, or reveal something important about the form?

JBF: I’m very attracted to poetic language. I like Beth Kephart—she’s a gorgeous writer. Lia Purpura is wonderful—I took a workshop with her this summer, and it left me brimming with ideas. And a memoir that really affected me was Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance—a book that also revealed a huge secret. I loved her methodology and how she came to it in sequence and in steps so that reader could easily be with her with each revelation.

JK: What is a favorite quote you’ve read recently from a favorite non-man author?

JBF: I love this quote from Joan Didion:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

That’s an apt manifesto for the memoir writer.