There seem to be two themes in Elissa Altman’s passionate memoir Permission: one, the trauma of writing about a hitherto suppressed family event; the other, to judge from repeated words and phrases, a sense that she will never ever feel fully released from being ostracized for writing it. But the argument at the center of Permission is firm: one needs permission to write a memoir because no one owns a story. This is what Elissa Altman teaches her own students in memoir writing workshops.
One of the draws of the book is the way the two themes subtly interact, perhaps not always intentionally. There’s the author’s fierce determination to tell the truth about her paternal grandmother and there is also her continuing hurt and anger at being cut off by her family for doing so.
Memoir writing is a hot genre though not all “creatives” as Altman calls writing aspirants, will succeed, even if they take to heart her caveats and encouragements.
Nonetheless, they’ll find lots to mull over here, particularly the hard-won instruction Altman provides about the need to assess intentions and motives for wanting to write a memoir, and the importance of acknowledging – and avoiding - revenge.
Altman’s memoir opens with a compelling description of how she feels that telling about her grandmother’s life physically and psychologically damaged her.
The grandmother, a 23-year-old immigrant who had been a musical child prodigy, set out for a matinee one day and didn’t come home, leaving behind her daughter, Altman’s aunt, age 8 at the time, and Altman’s father, age 3. Three years later the grandmother returned and that’s when the family clammed up, out of shame.
Women didn’t desert their families; especially middle class women, especially Jewish middle class women. Oddly, though, the reader never learns details about what the grandmother did, where she went and how she fared.
A brief paragraph later on in the memoir notes that the grandmother was a lesbian, in an unhappy marriage and having a long-term affair, as was her husband.
In another short revelation, the author notes that she came out as a “queer” at the age of 34 – her word. None of this information is integrated into the themes of the narrative.
To the family, the grandmother’s sudden departure was taken to be a secret, though it was, as the author emphasizes, a “non-secret secret,” since everyone knew about it and since the author’s own beloved father talked about it frequently in order to understand his own fears and anxieties.
Still, Elissa’s aunt barreled down: who was she, her niece, to think she could write about it? She did not have permission.
As for her mother, Altman writes that during fights between her, with her father, her mother would pull out the abandonment card “strategically from her back pocket like a switchblade.” Some image, that.
Although Altman’s memoir here seems too long, filled as it is with repetition and a plethora of secondary source quotations, not all of them necessary, the prose is clear and includes humor, admission of flaws, and analyses of questionable memoirs such as Mommie Dearest by Joan Crawford’s adopted daughter, accusing her mother of abuse and cruelty.
Altman knows that there will be other takes on her grandmother’s abandonment of family, but she insists that she is entitled to hers. She ends on a note of freedom and love, writing that truth- telling is a “gift” we give to ourselves and one that “renders shame and destruction powerless.” She even got a tattoo on her wrist that reflects, reportedly, the last words of the poet Seamus Heaney: Noli Timere –do not be afraid.
