Thanksgiving for Writers

A chance to practice observational skills

Elizabeth: In the last few blog posts, we’ve been exploring what it means to “go deeper”: the most common advice given for how to make what we write more meaningful and relatable. We discussed the possibility of harnessing the fact that the brain makes associations by following what comes to mind and peeling away the layers of meaning that may be revealed.

Since today is Thanksgiving, I thought it might be fun to consider the holiday from a perspective useful to writers, that is, as a potentially rich lode of feelings and human exchanges worthy of attention. I tend to see it as a live-action replay of earlier family interactions.

Barbara: But it is worth noting that Thanksgiving is not necessarily about family for everyone. The holiday may bring up feelings that writers can draw upon that are as varied as: experiencing anxiety about making a pie crust, feeling lonely and left out, resenting the hassle of holiday travel, remembering playing under the dining room table as a child, tapping into a sense of gratitude, feeling moral outrage at the hypocrisy of “pardoning a turkey”… or guilt about the holiday’s origin. Real feelings are what writers need to get at — any and all. And the holiday offers a diverse bounty.

Elizabeth: You’re right, of course, Thanksgiving may be considered the quintessential American family holiday, but not everyone celebrates it, and not everyone celebrates with family — their own or that of a friend or spouse. Still, for those who do, it can present an opportunity to witness family life “under a microscope.” It’s many people’s favorite holiday. But Thanksgiving is also notorious for tense emotional undercurrents or even explosive arguing.

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Barbara: From my experience with patients, I would say that holidays are often quite difficult. For one thing, there’s that image of the “ideal holiday” scene in people’s minds. And, so often, reality doesn’t live up to that perfectly joyous picture.

There is a lot of variation in how different families celebrate the holiday, but more importantly, each family’s specific ways of relating will play out at the gathering, and, if there are conflicts, rivalries, hurt feelings …. What did Tolstoy say? “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

This is not to say that any family is static over time. The holiday participants will change as family members die, marry, have children, divorce, separate, move, become estranged, and so on. And the change of characters will alter the dynamics of the gathering. In fact, watching the extended family evolve over time gives one perspective on the cycle of a family’s life…on the cycle of life itself. It’s the human story on an intimate scale.

Still, there may be major themes that persist within an extended family, even through many generations. And, the gatherings around the holiday table can also tap into memories of nightly mealtime gatherings. Virtually everyone grows up with mealtime, which is where patterns of relating over food begin.

Elizabeth: Perhaps that’s what makes Thanksgiving so potentially emotional. Yes, it is repeated annually, but it also replays the nightly ritual of the family at the table. You grow up and go off to create your adult life. But you may return on these once-a-year Thanksgivings to celebrate a secular holiday whose main ritual is to sit down and eat together. I say, “replay” off-handedly, but it really is like a play for many people, with the same props, and pretty much the same cast — often in the same seats — who tend to stick to the traditional script.

Barbara: The family at the dinner table can be an intensified version of its way of being together. Each family evolves a set of typical interacting behaviors that get repeated over and over. These exchanges become automatic. We may slip into the old playbook without noticing.

Think of it like this: when people behave in certain ways repeatedly over time, they are essentially practicing that behavior. And, with enough practice, the brain shifts away from requiring conscious control of the action to utilizing brain structures that are automatic. This is more efficient; it takes less effort, less energy. So when your sibling takes the drumstick you had wanted, your reaction is not necessarily mediated by the ways you’ve learned to handle conflict as an adult.

Elizabeth: Whenever my husband and I share a meal with his three siblings, almost immediately, the sparks fly between the three. It’s an amazing thing to watch. They are all quite old now, but the script is the same one they were using when I first met them 50 years ago. After all, by now they’ve replayed it thousands of times. Along with my husband (who’s worked hard to avoid the fray!), I‘ve been watching this drama from the sidelines all these years, and I see the siblings’ feelings about one another and their positions in the family as contributing to the development of their personalities and ultimately to their life stories. I see them as in a novel.

Barbara: Each of us comes with a biology that is unique, and then the family we grow up in affects us, along with the myriad other experiences we have, so it’s a complex combination of nature and nurture that shapes us. (Although I don’t really like to separate nature and nurture. I wish I could remember who said, “Nurture is just one form that nature takes.”)

What are the mechanisms by which experience changes us? It’s not magical. Of course, it’s biological! It’s only recently that we’ve come to understand that experience operates by changing the expression of genes in cells throughout the body, turning some genes on and some off. And, of course, experience also affects memory which is neurological.

Elizabeth: What most amazes me is the degree to which the learned responses to the family dynamic do not seem to be outgrown. With my husband’s siblings, the old grievances and competitiveness return, as soon as they take their seats at the table and as though no time has passed. This reawakening of old emotions is certainly not unusual, and many of us experience it to some degree. But from a writer’s perspective, the phenomenon deserves close attention -– it’s a signal you’re on “the road to deeper.”

Barbara: Of course, we change throughout life in a continuous evolution, but earlier versions of ourselves, earlier feelings and patterns of relating, may persist because they are deeply embedded in our behavioral repertoire, and they can come to the surface again, if elicited by the circumstances under which they were initially learned.

Elizabeth: We’ve discussed in a previous post how some intensely emotional memories are re-enacted, rather than remembered, which we explored through an incident that occurred when I was writing my memoir. My book opens, fittingly today, with my mother carving the Thanksgiving turkey, as she announced an ill-conceived plan she did not want me to question. “Don’t say a word!” was how she put it. When I was working on the scene and digging into my memories of that moment, I didn’t just remember the scene, I became again the silenced person I’d been with my parents. Revisiting the dinner scene imaginatively produced a case of writer’s block that lasted for weeks.

Barbara: The reliving of a past trauma or of a repeated, emotionally painful situation can be triggered by something that elicits the earlier traumatic experience.

One of the most vivid examples of this phenomenon is described by the writer Robert Caro. Caro was working on his biography of Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) and trying to unlock the memories of the president’s brother, Sam Houston. Frustrated that Houston was only sharing superficial, hackneyed stories of Johnson, Caro had the brilliant idea of taking him to the Johnson childhood home — which had been preserved as a museum — and the scene of their nightly dinners. He had Houston sit in his old seat, while Caro sat behind him out of sight, quietly asking questions. As he describes it in the film “Turn Every Page,” a documentary about Caro, the writer, and Ricard Gottlieb, his editor.

“It was late afternoon, almost evening, about the same time of day that would have been dinnertime in Johnson City long ago. Rays of low evening sun came into the dining room and cast shadows, the same shadows that rays of sun would have cast as Sam Houston had sat there as a boy.”

Houston was effectively returned to his boyhood, and the real, painful stories poured out in an animated enactment, almost like he was embodying first his brother and then his father, back and forth — the frightening, rancorous exchanges between them, the memories he had not spoken of for much of his adult life.

Elizabeth: Not all “deeper” material is so dramatic, of course. But sitting around the Thanksgiving table, as both observer and participant, you, the writer, can sample from a feast of familiar dialogue, intergenerational drama, and a range of emotions from long standing conflicts to present-day expressions of love and gratitude.

Enjoy Thanksgiving. We hope it’s fruitful!