The Undressing

One of the students in the writing class I teach, talking about her nervousness at how her family may react to the memoir she's writing, quoted her mom as saying, "In this family we don't air our dirty laundry in public."

      I could almost feel the shudder going around the room. Every one of us knew what that meant: trouble. Whatever was screwed up in the family would surely be made worse by the prohibition against talking about it. Of course, this was a room full of writers, and writers like to expose things. It was also a room full of San Franciscans, who aren't known for drawing the curtains of propriety around our lives. (There was a mock algebra problem being emailed around several years ago: "If a couple in San Francisco walk 2.3 miles at 1.8 miles per hour, how much time will they spend discussing their relationship in public?") But still, the basic idea has become the norm: that family loyalty shouldn't trump sanity, that someone trapped in a dysfunctional situation should expose it. It's the best escape and it helps other people who are similarly trapped.

      Go back a few generations, of course, and this was still a widely distrusted idea. Go back to the early 20th Century and you'll find a whole culture wrapped around the idea that not only should we not air our own families' dirty laundry but none of us should ever air any laundry. The police and the courts would get involved if you tried to talk about sex, pregnancy, prostitution, or venereal disease in a public forum, except in the most excruciating of indirections. The dominant idea of the culture, at least around sex and family behavior, was that if something disturbed us the best thing to do was not mention it. Some argued that not talking about it would make it go away: if children never heard about sex (or alcoholism or gambling or any other vice), then it would simply never enter their minds and they'd never do anything we didn't want them to. Even those who didn't buy that idea, however, held to the notion that discussing something in public somehow places us morally in league with it. It's like Republican foreign policy: talking to your enemies gives them some sort of nebulous "legitimacy" that somehow strengthens them. But refusing to meet with them will surely, eventually, make them buckle.

      Ghosts of that idea still persist, as in "abstinence only" sex education. But even that requires us to explain what we want kids to be abstinent from. And that "only" is a tacit acknowledgement that there are other ways. And it's still sex education—attempts at which used to get people thrown in jail for years. Ultimately we have all, wholesale, embraced the idea that the nitty gritty of human behavior, the messiest parts of our psyches and our family lives, can be and should be talked about. You're only as sick as your secrets, we say.

      This is a vast change, a revolutionary change, with countless results and implications, and yet we don't look at it much. Not historically, at least, not as a series of events, of a series of billions of choices we've made as individuals that have added up to a few huge choices we've made as a culture. It's almost too vast—too fundamental and at the same too everyday—to get our heads around it. What I want to do with this book (I'm slowly realizing) is cast a little light on that change, enable myself to see it a bit more clearly, by isolating a set of stories that illuminate it. I've found some very compelling stories of a set of people who took big risks to open the curtains, and who found their lives sent spinning in unforeseeable directions because they did so; people who effected the change and were affected by it.

      The people themselves are weird and interesting, and their stories are wild, but I want us to be able to see through them and glimpse that vast story we all engage in every time we tell a truth that those old family voices might rather silence.