Writing Family Members as Characters

Who, reading Melissa Febos's memoirs, could fail to imagine her storytelling, seafaring, nightmare-plagued father? Who, reading Meredith Talusan, can forget her doting grandmother? When we write memoir, our characters are often drawn from the people we love, the people we know best—those about whom we may have said our whole lives, “They’re such characters!” So why is it that sometimes those characters appear the blurriest in our drafts? Is it possible that how close we are to someone might be the very thing that complicates turning them into an effective character? Drawing from work by writers like Sarah Broom, Kiese Laymon, Alicia Elliot, and more, we’ll analyze how they achieved the distance necessary to bring their all-too-real family members to life as characters on the page and discuss writing exercises useful for rendering our own.