DURING MY MONTHS as an expectant father, I declared I would do things differently from other writers once my baby was born. I would not exploit her existence for cheap copy. I would not objectify her by writing about her. I would not make use of fatherhood to score easy emotional points in articles.
I showed Herculean dedication to my stated goal . . . for six whole days. On the seventh day of her life, I wrote a newspaper column in the form of a letter to my newborn daughter. It made people cry, which I attribute to the simple fact that there can be nothing easier than provoking tears by publishing loving words from a father to an infant in a newspaper.
Was I ignoble? I hope not, but I can’t be sure. Writing about personal matters is an authorial minefield. It’s safer not to, but the temptation is very great because the reward can be substantial. You have a wonderful opportunity to write something that really touches and reaches people because you are speaking directly about experiences that everybody goes through. On the other hand, you must also face the fact that you could mortally embarrass yourself, the loved ones you write about, and the ideas you care most about. Tone is everything here. Make a mistake in tone, and you reap the whirlwind.
Exhibit A: Bill Clinton’s My Life. Its opening sections are full of folksy stuff about Aunt Ollie and Mammaw and Papaw, told in a prose that seems to drawl the way Clinton drawls when he’s trying to be a Man of the People. (If you want to read a long passage about what Aunt Ollie served for lunch on Saturdays, turn to pages 14 and 15.) There are people who will lap this stuff up, and I don’t doubt that in 40 years a future president of the United States will say he learned all he needed to know about politics by reading his first edition of My Life back in high school in 2004.
But in his tributes to his mother, Bill gets–how shall I say this?–a little creepy. Even that young future president may find himself squirming when Bill turns his attention to Virginia Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire Kelley. He calls his mother “beautiful” on at least 10 separate occasions, but he uses the word in a way that doesn’t quite sound like a son talking about his mother. It all builds up to this interesting and discomfiting passage:
This, I think, is a good example of how not to write about loved ones, even in an autobiography. Of course, Bill Clinton is unembarrassable, his wife is incomprehensible, and his mother left this vale 10 years ago, so they’re probably all beyond suffering the agonies of words that are a bit too revelatory for most readers.
I DON’T KNOW whether I’ll write about my daughter in the future. My vow not to do so was one of those pledges made in attitudinizing ignorance of what the actual experience of having a child would be like–and the way it would change my perspective even after only six days. She made me think about perspective, how (God willing) she would one day be an adult and might look back on the week when she was born and wonder at the strange issues that consumed America’s attention. The Laci Peterson murder? Madonna’s kabbalistic children’s book? Even the 9/11 Commission?
As for me, I was born on the day the Bay of Pigs invasion began and ended, which certainly doesn’t sound particularly auspicious. Just before my mother went into labor, my parents had dinner with the parents of one of the editors of this magazine and they all got into a vicious political argument. This clearly presaged my entry into the contentious world of argumentative intellection.
I found out about that only recently, just after my daughter’s birth. My parents never wrote a word about my arrival into the world, but my father tells me he spent his time in the waiting room writing an article on telegram slips. My mother couldn’t write anything that night, because she was otherwise engaged.
–John Podhoretz
