Silence Did Not Stop Me

Silence Did Not Stop Me

Terry Sue Harms 

After writing a novel, I thought writing a memoir was going to be less challenging. Not easy, but I couldn’t imagine how a story that I already knew could possibly be more difficult to tell than the one I had made up. After all, I understood the inciting incident, I knew the scenes, characters, and sequence of events, and I knew how it ended.

But I was wrong. Writing my memoir, The Strongbox, took four times longer to finish, and it presented more emotional challenges than my fiction writing ever had. Nevertheless, in both the novel and the memoir, I kept a firm grasp on the practice of showing up for the words. The memoir nearly put me into therapy a couple of times, but I kept writing. Holding the emotional gravity of my story while remaining a steadfast companion to my husband, going to my day job, and marching around like a solid citizen: minding my manners, paying my bills, and honoring the rules of the road, was, at times, a herculean task.

There was a brief period of time, early on, when I wondered if I should fictionalize my life’s story, change the details enough to hide the fact that I was writing a memoir. Those musings fizzled because life is crazier than fiction, and if I wrote what had actually happened as fiction, readers would scoff, “Oh, come on.”

Deciding to go for the truth was more frightening than invigorating. That was probably the most perilous time for getting the book written. It was tempting to turn away from what I wanted to say, just give up, put the whole subject into a boarded and padlocked cell never to be visited again.

Funny that. The I-can’t-do-this phase is surely universal. Even when I was questioning if and how I was going to approach another big writing project, I had a sense that my logic-laced pushback was just a part of the gig. It’s something writers go through.

Telling myself that I didn’t have enough time, that nobody would want to read it, or that I didn’t have enough material were all ways that I tried to sabotage a story that insisted on being told. Books get written because authors know they have to plow through that first hurdle of self-doubt. 

The driving questions in my memoir are Who was my father? And Why wasn’t he in my life? That mystery has stewed in me for as long as I have memory. Growing up, my mother barely spoke of him, and the information I received from my stepfather was that I was, as he would say, “a bastard.” I got it that the subject of my father was fraught and shameful. Then, when I was sixteen, my mother died suddenly, taking the story of who my father was and the nature of their relationship with her to the grave.

Being the unacknowledged child of a married man is not exactly the kind of story that gets told and retold at family gatherings; it’s not the stuff of legends; it certainly was not my proudest attribute. It was something I hid and hid from for many years.

I was mute on the subject. There were so few details to cling to, and that in itself was embarrassing. Until I had enough maturity to recognize that I could examine what was in the shadows, I had very little to say. But once I started poking around in those unlit places, a picture emerged. Like in art, I was able to see that there is both positive and negative space. I was then compelled to keep looking, keep exploring, keep waiting for some kind of understanding to appear. Even fragmented insights brought a worthwhile degree of comfort.  

It was through this process of seeking and discovery that the seeds of my memoir germinated. As I began to speak openly about my father search, I grew less ashamed of his abandonment and more compelled to flesh out as many details about him as I could find.

My friends wanted to hear more. They weren’t just being nice; they were clearly interested. I had a story to tell. Invariably, my opening up would allow the person I was talking with to open up about some unspoken family secret of their own. I came to see that buried rejections were as common as cut grass.

These two-way conversations with friends were cathartic. It wasn’t unusual to hear, “You should write a book.” I took their encouragement to mean that by unpacking my father story I could connect with others, and the work was meaningful enough to warrant capture on the printed page.

Having already written one book, I thought, okay, I can do this. I set out to write about my absent father not realizing how many uncharted tangents there would be. Three-fourths of what I wrote ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor. After having a solid first draft, I hired my dream editor. She got my story, and that was pivotal.

Together, we found a through line that makes this memoir move along at a good clip. It’s not a tattletale, and I made sure to keep the “me” in memoir. Over the years, I’ve learned plenty about breaking silence and healing from toxic family secrets. Finding my voice and finding the words didn’t come easily, but they came. 

—
Terry Sue Harms has been a hairdresser and salon owner for over forty years. After a childhood of illiteracy, she taught herself to read and write as a young adult, one of her proudest and most rewarding accomplishments. She has self-published two books: Pearls My Mother Wore: A Novel and Reflections Upon the Occasion of My 85th Year, a memoir coauthored with her father-in-law. Terry Sue lives in scenic Sonoma, California, with her husband. This is her third book.

Find out more about her on her website https://www.terrysueharms.com/

THE STRONGBOX

Following the unexpected death of her alcoholic mother, and worn down by the unceasing taunts of “bastard” from her hostile and mentally unstable stepfather, plucky sixteen-year-old Terry Sue sets out to find her biological father—believing this man, whom she has never met, could change her life for the better. But before she can find him, she must identify him, and the unfamiliar names on her birth certificate perplex her. She comes to realize that tenacity must run in her family, for as determined as she is to find her father, he appears equally determined to remain hidden.

In The Strongbox, Terry Sue offers readers a forthright and inspirational account of her challenges, as well as her against-all-odds successes. This decades-long personal journey reads like a detective novel, full of setbacks, false leads, jaw-dropping discoveries, and heartening triumphs. The narrative’s twists and turns also pull back the curtain on many of today’s inconvenient truths: child abandonment, multigenerational alcoholism, sexism, economic inequality, domestic violence, mental illness, and illiteracy.

Undaunted by the many blind alleys she encounters, Terry Sue forges on in her hunt for the loving care and emotional support she never received from her parents, and she ultimately finds it—but it arrives in forms she never expected.

 

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