Spilling Your Guts: Motherhood, Memoir, and What I Learned from David Sedaris
I say,
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
-Sharon Olds
People talk about publishing a book using metaphors of gestation and birth. Publication day is your book baby’s birthday. But a memoir is not a baby; it’s a placenta. Meaty, bloody, veined. If it tears from the uterus prematurely, the mother and baby die. If it stays behind after the baby is born, the mother dies. It has to come out, but only at the right time. What is the right time? I have no idea. The gestation period to make a human is about nine months. The gestation period to make a memoir, in my case, was 25 years, give or take.
Speaking of babies: my husband and I were 27 years old when our oldest son was diagnosed with autism. Our son was a baby—barely two and a half years old—and my husband and I were also babies, albeit gainfully employed babies with advanced degrees. When the diagnosing psychiatrist handed us a stapled, three-page to-do list at the end of our meeting, my husband and I looked wordlessly around the room for the responsible adult who would quarterback this enormous and terrifying enterprise. But of course the responsible adult was supposed to be us.
The to-do list was long—contact the regional center so our son could start receiving follow-up services, start working with a speech therapist, an occupational therapist, a behavioral therapist, devote as much time as possible to “incidental teaching,” which we would interpret as “devote every spare moment to setting up playdates, pointing out objects of interest, encouraging shared attention, and lying on the floor facilitating pretend play.” This was 1997, and we felt very much alone. We didn’t know anyone with an autistic child, and what most people knew about autism was informed largely by the film Rain Man. There wasn’t much longitudinal data about early intervention for children diagnosed with autism in preschool, and the data that did exist was grim and focused on all the things children and adults with autism couldn’t do, would never be able to do.
Both my husband and I were ambitious, educated people living in Palo Alto among other ambitious, educated people, so we almost immediately decided that with the right combination of unstinting effort, speech therapy, occupational therapy, behavioral therapy, and “incidental” teaching, our son would become indistinguishable from other children. From normal children, not to put too fine a point on it, because “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent” were not yet terms that had entered the common lexicon. It was not yet fashionable to come out as autistic on social media. There was, in fact, no social media to speak of.
So instead of doom scrolling, which was not yet a thing, we read books: the grim scientific literature, but also parent testimonials—accounts of autistic children who, through the power of prayer, or intensive behavioral intervention, or a combination of both, recovered. That was the term: recovered, like the children had been sick and now they were well. The parent testimonials were earnest. They were saccharine and simplistic. But the hope they offered was a lifeline, and I clung to it with both hands even as I scoffed at their artless prose.
And then two things happened. The first was that in the face of our full-court press (behavioral intervention, speech therapy, occupational therapy, playdates, incidental-but-not-really-incidental teaching), our son began to respond to us, to put together words, then sentences, to show an interest in other children. The second was that my friend Lila sent me a copy of Naked, David Sedaris’ book of essays. I wasn’t familiar with David Sedaris, but it was clear from the first page that he was my people. I had not known that kind of writing was possible: it started all comfy-cozy, like you were petting a dozing cat and suddenly the cat woke up and sank its teeth and claws into your hand, sort of playing and sort of not.
I thought, I can write like this. This is what I sound like. Ironic distance, snark, sentences that start innocuous and end with a gut punch—that’s my language. I would be like David Sedaris, but straight and Russian-Jewish instead of Greek and gay. I would rewrite the autism narrative. I would tell our story as only I could. It would be a literate, snarky, dark, funny account of what it was really like to raise an autistic child. The subtext, of course, was that our extraordinary child would also recover, though I would never use that word.
Meanwhile, life got in the way of my masterwork. I taught freshman humanities and composition at Stanford, worked at the Stanford undergraduate admission office, had two more children, opened a private college counseling practice, did laundry, drove carpool, located shin guards and cleats for Saturday soccer games, tracked down lost goggles for swim team practices, ran the elementary school book fair, wiped down the kitchen counter. Our oldest son surpassed all expectations: he attended regular school, played soccer, swam on the summer league swim team, wrestled varsity in high school, got his driver’s license. He was funny and charming and determined. He was also volatile and impulsive. He terrorized his younger brother and sister. He slammed doors; my husband and I yelled and forced doors open. When he was in middle school, the vice principal had my number on speed dial.
I was about three years into my college counseling practice at that point, working with tightly-wound, extravagantly accomplished high school students (and their equally tightly-wound, extravagantly accomplished parents). They measured success by an entirely different yardstick: AP courses, test scores in the 99th percentile, résumés that would make most adults weep with envy, and, of course, acceptance to colleges so selective that to be admitted was more difficult than for a wise man to enter the kingdom of heaven. (See: needles, camels.)
I no longer wanted to write the triumphing over autism story. We had done that, sort of. The story now was about living on both sides of a cognitive divide so deep it sometimes threatened to swallow me whole. Parents confided that they were in an absolute state over whether their child would get into Stanford while I was en route to a parent weekend in a wilderness therapy program in Utah. I have real problems, I wanted to scream. Also, the good schools that we all moved to Palo Alto for? The toxic achievement culture? The teen suicides that everyone talks about for 24 hours after they happen and then never again? This. Is. Not. Normal.
But then, who was I to throw stones? I was taking money from families whose extravagantly accomplished children would have, at best, a three percent chance of being admitted into Stanford. Stanford’s current 3.7 percent admit rate is an average; it means that half of the nearly 60,000 students who apply get in at a higher rate and half of them… do not. The ones who get in at a higher rate are recruited athletes, children of wealthy donors, national science competition winners, faculty and staff offspring, applicants from underrepresented parts of the country and the world. The ones who get in at a lower rate, or not at all? Average excellent students from Palo Alto and its environs.
And yet: everyone’s college list looked the same. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the UC’s (but really, only UCLA and Berkeley), the other Ivies, MIT, Caltech. Tufts. Duke. Carnegie Mellon. Is Johns Hopkins (most recent admit rate, 6.5 percent) a safety, a student wanted to know. Get over yourselves, people! I wanted to scream. Out loud I said, “No, it’s really not.” The student asked, “But what if I take seven APs my senior year?”
I was not like them. In high school, I smoked cigarettes behind the auditorium and wore too much black eyeliner and got a C in physics my junior year, a development which pissed off my parents to no end and fazed me not at all. I could not understand this single-minded focus on getting in, on beating the odds. “I understand the chances are very low,” a parent would say to me. “But there’s a chance, right?”
Me, I was not a sheep, a slave to status, a try-hard. I did not think the sun rose and set on where my children went to college. My oldest son had gone to college—against all odds, I might add, to a school not commonly on the college lists of Bay Area students, and that was just fine with my husband and me, which proved that we were not like everybody else, didn’t it? Except that in his third year in college, our son developed suicidal depression and had to take a medical leave and was picked up by the Highway Patrol on the Golden Gate Bridge, where he said he was just sightseeing but we all knew better, and was put on a psychiatric hold, and our world unraveled completely, and suddenly it became blazingly clear to me that we were like that. We were exactly like that.
The ancient Greeks called this peripatea—a fearsome reversal, a leveling realization that the problem is not other people. It’s you. You’re the contagion ravaging Thebes, your hubris led your agreeable-seeming wife to stab you in the bathtub, you scoffed at other parents enrolling their children in SAT bootcamp and thought, I’m nothing like them, while enrolling your own child in speech therapy and occupational therapy and spending all your free time on incidental-but-not-really teaching. You were the one who asked the diagnosing psychiatrist whether there might be a chance—yes, you said, you understood that the chances were low—that your son would be indistinguishable.
The stakes were different, sure—acceptance to Yale vs. acceptance, period, going to the best possible college vs. being able to live independently—but the fierce urgency was the same. We all wanted what was best for our children, or what we thought was best for our children. So did the parents indicted in Operation Varsity Blues. In an interview four years after her indictment, Felicity Huffman said, “I felt I had to give my daughter a chance at a future.” Read that again: had to.
I, too, felt like there was no other choice: push our son as hard as we could so that he could survive on his own after we were no longer around to help him. And it worked: he regained his equilibrium, he graduated from college, he works, he has his own health insurance. He beat the odds. We threaded the needle. But the aftermath of the decisions my husband and I made—to push him as hard as we did, to have two more children, each of whom struggled with depression, anxiety, and learning differences, to live in Palo Alto, with its excellent schools (though not, I should note, excellent for all students), to write and publish a memoir detailing all of the above—still haunts me.
Google “how to write a memoir about family,” and the word that comes up over and over again is “tricky.” All families are messy; everyone is entangled with everyone else. Take David Sedaris’ writing about his family: his loopy grandmother (“the fish, he have a suicide”), his chic, chain-smoking, alcoholic mother, his cheapskate father, his five siblings. One of those siblings, Tiffany, didn’t want to be written about, but he did it anyway. Tiffany struggled with mental illness, with substance abuse, with emotional swings so intense that “one day she’d throw a dish at you and the next she’d create a stunning mosaic made of the shards.” When she died by suicide, he wrote about that too. When you’re a writer, everything is material. Right? Right?
My children gave me permission to write about them, but who am I to hold their pain up to the light? Except that their pain is my pain too; their story veins my story, my expectations thread through their lives. My parents, who emigrated from the former Soviet Union when I was nine years old, placed expectations on me that run through the expectations my husband and I held when we moved to Palo Alto because of its tree-lined streets and its excellent schools. I wanted to tell the truth about our family. I wanted my children to feel seen. I wanted to say out loud what no one else would: that the fixation on prestige was destroying a generation of young people, that we need to reconsider how we quantify success, that our children’s path is not our own. More than wanted to: had to. For years, I lived a bifurcated life, soothing, knowledgeable college counselor at work, anguished, anxious, frenetic mother at home, helping other people’s children, midwifing thousands of college essays into the world, encouraging my students to be authentic, to be audacious, to tell difficult truths. I did this, and all along, the story I wanted to—had to—tell grew and swelled until I couldn’t keep it inside any longer.
All three of my children were born by cesarean section; I’ve never experienced the urge to push during childbirth. But the urge to publish? That I know well. Between September 2020 and April 2021, my agent submitted the memoir to over 70 publishing houses, and one by one, each of them said no. In October 2021, an indie publisher said yes; the earliest publication date was in April 2023. So I waited and edited and waited some more and freaked out quietly that I was ruining my children’s lives, that giving permission was one thing and having your most vulnerable moments splashed across the page was another, but by then it was too late to change course.
About a month before my memoir was published, my oldest son was visiting for spring break and asked if he could see an advance copy. I should mention here that the title of my memoir is The Golden Ticket, so called because the golden ticket is a complicated thing—an object of desire, a token of admission, an invitation to trouble, a be-careful-what-you-wish-for gilded rectangle. He started reading it that evening and then went to his room, continuing to read as he walked down the hallway. The following morning, he came into the kitchen disheveled and slightly wild-eyed. My husband and I were making breakfast. “I stayed up most of the night finishing your book,” he announced. We looked at him expectantly. My heart was pounding.
“It’s really good,” he said.
At 27, shell-shocked in a stupidly sunny doctor’s office (offices where bad news is delivered are often sunny), I could not imagine that our son would ever acquire meaningful speech, know that we were his parents, understand what a hug was, live independently. Crippling depression almost took him away from us. Raising him undid us and lifted us in ways we could never imagine. And now this child, this man—who exceeded every expectation—looked at us and said, “And I know what the golden ticket is.” A pause, a tentative smile. “It’s me.”
The world is a broken and beautiful place. There are no responsible adults. All we can do is make mosaics out of shards, tell the stories we have to tell before we bleed out, try our best not to hurt each other.
About the Author
Irena Smith is a college admissions counselor, former Stanford admissions officer, writer, and mother of three extraordinary children. She emigrated from the former Soviet Union with her parents when she was nine years old, and in spite of her fierce insistence that she would never, not ever, learn English, she went on to earn a PhD in Comparative Literature and taught literature and composition at UCLA and Stanford before transitioning to college admissions and writing. Her recently published memoir, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays, explores the duality between the ambitions of the tightly-wound students she counsels and her efforts to help her own children as they struggle with developmental delays, depression, and anxiety.
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