This book was brewing for 35 years – Melanie Brooks on the memoir that took her a lifetime to write

Melanie Brooks recently launched her memoir A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief, and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all. It’s a book she desperately wanted to write but didn’t, for a long time, know how. The journey to find the book within her is in many ways as profound and changing as the journey in the book itself. I’ll let her introduce it in her own words.

The book is set in the early days of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and mid-90s. In 1985, my father, a prominent Canadian surgeon, suffered a heart attack at the age of 42. Eight months after open-heart surgery, it was discovered that the blood transfusion he received was contaminated, and he’d contracted HIV.

At the time, HIV was widely misunderstood and public perception was fuelled by fear, misinformation and stigma. Like most patients he knew or knew about, my father anticipated he’d be dead within months, and not wanting to subject our family to the ostracism that many HIV patients were facing in that cultural climate, he decided we’d keep his illness a secret. But he didn’t die within months. He lived for 10 more years.

So from the time I was 13 until I was 23, I carried the weight of Dad’s illness and its unknowns in silence. Then 20 years after his death, I unsealed the box that contained all that unspoken pain and grief to try to understand the experience and ask the question: what is the cost of silence?

Has A Hard Silence been brewing for a long time?

In many ways this book was brewing for close to 35 years. Even when I wasn’t allowed to speak about it, it was a story I desperately wanted to tell, and I think that’s because when we are suffering in silence, all we want is to be seen. But it was also a story I carried very close for many years, not really sure what was at its core. The year my father died (1995), he and my mother published a book they’d written about their experience. For a long time, that felt like the official story. It took a painful excavation of my own memories to uncover that my story of living the experience was not the story they’d written. I had my own story to tell.

What made you ready to write it?

I came to a place where I couldn’t move forward without looking back and figuring out what that story was, and that’s when I knew I needed to start writing. I enrolled in an MFA program in 2013 with the hope that a supportive environment and community would be the keys to helping me do that. I also (thankfully) started therapy around the same time.

Finding encouragement and wisdom from other writers who’d done this kind of work and processing the emotions that surface with an excellent therapist were vital to my process. There was nothing easy about it, and I had to write without knowing where I was headed to finally find out what I had to say. From initial writing to publication, it was a 10-year project.

In your Facebook pictures (sorry, I’m v nosy!) I spotted a cutting from the Boston Sunday Globe – a piece by you, titled ‘A daughter who couldn’t ask questions is now a mother who invites them’. Tell me more.

Like so many families, the norm in mine was not to talk about the tough stuff in an open and honest way. During that 10-year period of my father’s illness, my mom and dad were doing their best to keep life as normal as possible for my brothers and me. They had the best of intentions in circumstances that had no roadmap: to protect us as best they could from the risks and consequences of HIV. I think they hoped it would lessen the overall impact by not talking about it.

For me, it meant I was left to carry the weight of emotions too big to handle alone. I know that if I’d told my parents I was struggling and asked for help, they would have given it. But in the silence and secrecy, I didn’t see a clear path for doing so.

The essay in the Globe explores that piece of the story and shows how it informed my parenting of my children and how I’ve worked to change the narrative. I recognise that we need to extend the invitation to our kids again and again to talk to us about what’s going on in their lives in order for them to feel like there’s secure space for them to do so.

I notice you did a big tour of bookshops for the launch, and managed to lose your voice too! I admire your energy. Many writers are shy of meeting people, but I see picture after picture of you signing books, talking to fans. Did that come naturally or was it tricky for you too?

I’ve been an educator for almost 30 years, so speaking in public is something I’m very comfortable with. I love meeting new people, and I love hearing other people’s stories.

I’ve waited a long time for this book to be in the world, and I want to make the most of it. The opportunities I’ve had to be in front of audiences, speaking about this story have been a gift. More than ever, I finally feel like my true self because there isn’t the barrier of this unspoken story keeping me from connecting fully with others.

This is also a story that many people don’t really know. The early history of the AIDS epidemic has seeped from our collective memory, and there’s an entire generation that is unfamiliar with the events of that time. I’m grateful for my small chance to help others understand what it was like for my family and me, for other families like mine, and for the communities most impacted by this devastating disease. These stories should never be forgotten.

One bookstore had a window display with your book centre stage, and surrounded by other titles featuring the word silence. It was a lovely idea. How did you develop such great relationships with so many bookshops?

I was fortunate to visit many bookstores with my first book, Writing Hard Stories, when it was published in 2017, and because that’s a book that discusses aspects of A Hard Silence, many of those stores were eager to have me return. That store you mention, Left Bank Books in Belfast, Maine, is one with which I have a particularly close relationship. The mother of one of my dearest friends is a former owner, and the events co-ordinator is a graduate of the same MFA program I attended. They’ve been so supportive of my process and they put together a wonderful event for me.   

Let’s talk about Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma. It looks like a self-directed learning programme in trauma memoir… was it, perhaps, preparation for A Hard Silence?

It absolutely was preparation for A Hard Silence. It began during the third semester of my MFA program. We had to complete a critical project of our choosing that was separate from our creative thesis.

Mine started as a completely selfish endeavour. I’d been deeply struggling with the psychological toll of writing into the painful memories of my story, almost to the point of quitting, and I wanted to understand how other writers who’d completed memoirs with hard topics had coped. So I sent out emails to authors whose books I’d recently read thinking maybe I’d get a few responses and write an article.

But every author I approached not only agreed to talk to me, they invited me to visit their homes, over meals, walking dogs. I had 18 beautiful conversations about what it takes to write an honest memoir.

I recognized that I couldn’t reduce these visits and interviews to one or two quotes in an article, so I started writing them up as narrative profiles. As I did, I began to recognize that the wisdom these writers were sharing with me was wisdom other writers in this painful terrain could benefit from too. So it became a book.

And talking to these writers was exactly what I needed to keep going with A Hard Silence. I don’t think I would have been able to do it without them.

You teach a lot of writing disciplines. Professional writing at Northeastern University, narrative medicine in the MFA program at Bay Path University in Massachusetts, and creative writing at Nashua Community College in New Hampshire. How did you come to be teaching them?

I began my teaching career as a public school teacher, but when my son and daughter were born, I stopped teaching full-time. In that interim, I completed a master’s in teaching writing. When I decided to return to teaching, I needed a more flexible schedule, and my local community college was hiring adjunct English instructors. That’s where my college-level teaching started. The other university teaching opportunities have emerged from there and with the completion of my MFA and my first book, I am now able to teach at the MFA level.  

The work that most closely aligns with my memoir work is the teaching I do in the MFA program at Bay Path University. There, I’m guiding emerging writers through the process of unpacking their narratives of health, illness and trauma and shaping them into writing that is accessible to others.

I recently completed a certificate in narrative medicine at Columbia University, and I am more convinced than ever that stories of the lived experience of illness from patients, practitioners and caretakers are vital in our conversations about health and healthcare, so the opportunity to teach in this program feels important on many levels.

Although these forms of writing all have different and distinct purposes, where do you feel they overlap?

For20 years I taught creative writing at Nashua Community College, primarily a short stories class. So many of the tools we use in creative nonfiction—scene, dialogue, character, point of view, plot—are drawn from fiction and so much of fiction is drawn from personal experience, so the two genres speak to each other pretty intentionally. I loved providing a class that gave these students a chance to explore their creativity and find their voices on the page.

The classes I teach at Northeastern University are less creative and more business oriented, teaching writing skills to professionals either already in or about to enter the workplace. So many of the messages we send and receive on a daily basis depend on good communication, so I value the chance to help develop those skills in my students. This work helps me to stay current with the best practices in professional communication across many platforms. As writers, we have so many channels through which we have to communicate, so I am continuously gaining new insights and skills to apply to that communication.

Though the courses I teach are diverse, I am a firm believer that good writing is good writing, no matter the genre. We can all benefit from honing our skills in a variety of writing situations, and this work gives me the chance to do so regularly.   

Writing seems intrinsic to your nature. Has this always been so?

I haven’t always been a writer, but I have always been a reader. I loved books as a child, and that love has never deserted me. So even before I ever put pen to paper, I was learning the art of storytelling and finding comfort and companionship in words.

My interest in creative writing really developed in my last year of undergraduate studies when I took an advanced creative writing class with a professor who introduced me to wonderful writers and craft tools that enabled me to start exploring my thoughts and feelings on the page. I continued to write sporadically for the next 20 years—taking workshops when I could—but it wasn’t until I enrolled in the MFA program that I made the commitment to create a true writing life for myself.

Is anyone else in your family creative or are you an outlier?

Though no one else in my family of origin is a career writer, everyone has creative outlets. My father was a brilliant pianist and my mother is also musical, so my siblings and I all share the musical gene.

And as I mentioned earlier, my father and mother wrote and published a book together before his death, so writing was, for them, an outlet at times.

I have a brother who is very artistic, another with the same musical genius as my father, and another who has, at times, turned to poetry.

My dad was a physician— two of my brothers have followed in his footsteps—and the professional track was definitely what he emphasized for all of us. Creativity, though, had space in our childhoods as well.

What inspires you?

I am most inspired by other people’s stories. I love the chance to lean into my students’ work, to my friends’ writing, to new books on my shelves. Every time I pick up a new story, I learn something new about craft, reader engagement, storytelling, life.

I find inspiration in other creative outlets—music, baking fancy cookies. I’ve discovered that I need different, less high-stakes modes of expression to add fuel to my writing.

What do you do to unwind, shake off the cobwebs or get your feet back in the real world?

As a memoirist who writes hard things, it’s essential to find ways to step away from my writing desk to remind myself that I’m not still living the experience I’m writing about. I love spending time in nature—it grounds me in the beauty that is always around us if we take the time to pay attention, and it helps to remind me that even when everything feels bleak, I can always find something to be grateful for. A hike in the woods can go a long way in ‘shaking off the cobwebs’ as you put it. I have two Labradors, and they force me outside every day.

Exercise has always been a way I keep my mental health stable. I used to be a runner, but over the last few years I’ve been plagued with injuries, so I’ve had to give that up. But I’m finding other ways to keep active. I’ve fallen into the middle-aged cliche of loving pickleball.

My husband and I are obsessed with British television, particularly crime shows. The writing and acting are so good. We have a subscription to BritBox, and we always find something to immerse ourselves in.

Both of my children are university athletes and nothing makes me happier than having the chance to get up there to watch them play the sports they love.

Find Melanie on Twitter @MelanieJMBrooks, Facebook and on her website www.melaniebrooks.com. Find A Hard Silence here.

 There’s a lot more about writing in my Nail Your Novel books – find them here. If you’re curious about my own work, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, here’s my latest newsletter. You can subscribe to future updates here.