Too Close to Home to Write About by Debra H. Goldstein
This is not a political rant. Nor is it a commentary on the Second Amendment, guns, or what shade of blue, if any, the sky is. I don’t care what you think about any of these things or what candidate you follow. I’m merely looking, from an author’s viewpoint, at the question of when a situation is too close to home to write about.
As
many of you know, there was a recent shooting at St. Stephens Church in
Vestavia, Alabama. Vestavia is a bedroom community which, like Mountain Brook,
a block away, and many other communities that surround the defined borders of
the city of Birmingham, gets mail whether you address it to Vestavia or
Birmingham. The church is located in the last place you’d expect violence.
There
are homes behind it and across the street is a neighborhood Publix. Catty-corner
to it is a strip center with a wonderful bakery. The bakery is around the
corner from its secondary building, which is used for youth activities and four
days a week is rented to another faith’s organization that runs a non-sectarian
respite program for individuals with dementia or Parkinson’s. The area is
affluent, predominantly white, and peaceful.
St.
Stephens and the neighborhood made national news because three elderly people
attending a pot-luck supper were randomly shot. A fourth octogenarian subdued
the seventy-year-old shooter by using a chair, tackling him, and holding him
down until the police arrived.
I
have many friends who pray at St. Stephens. The church’s now-retired rector has
spoken at many events I have attended. My husband and I know many of the
volunteers and participants involved with the respite program. In other words,
I know St. Stephens and the wonderful people associated with it. It would be
easy to steal the situation and create characters for a story or novel from
knowing the church and its members, but it is too close to home for me to write
about.
Many
years ago, author Elaine Viets was on a panel talking about her then new first
book in what is now the Angela Richman mystery series. She explained that
Angela Richman was a death investigator returning to work after suffering and
recovering from brain surgery necessitated by a series of major strokes after a
doctor misdiagnosed her. Like Angela, Elaine, too, was a stroke survivor who
was misdiagnosed. Although the story of what had happened to her was waiting to
be told, it took Elaine eleven years to write some of the facts from her
illness into one of her books. Until then, it was too close to home to write
about.
Dr.
Alexia Gordon was also on the panel. She turned to Elaine and laughingly noted
that she had been writing for six or seven years but hadn’t been able to
incorporate medicine into her writing. She was glad to know she only had to
wait a few more years to be comfortable writing about medicine.
Hearing
the two of them made me feel better. As a lawyer and judge, I hadn’t been able
to bring myself to write books or stories featuring my personal knowledge. Now,
I understood – it was too soon to write about something so close to me.
For
the past few weeks, my thoughts and prayers have gone out to those who belong to
St. Stephens and those who cannot understand how such a tragedy happened in our
community. It is a similar reaction that many had to the AME church shooting in
Charleston, the supermarket massacre in Buffalo, or the school slaughters in
Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde. As an author, my mind churns these
horrors over, but for now, these stories are too close to home to write about.
As
an author or a reader are there incidents you can think of in your lives that
are too close to home to write or read about?
