Christopher Buckley's Losing Mum and Pup

At lunch I like to watch the Charlie Rose show. Today Rose interviewed Chris Buckley, son of Pat and William Buckley. Chris told Rose that he started writing the memoirs a month after his dad's memorial service. He wrote it "to hold on him longer and to work things out."
 
The interview hit several spots in my own psyche and memory (for as we grow older, memory constitutes more and more of psyche, I think). Twenty years ago I told a friend that our self-improvement path involved largely deconstructing our parents in ourselves. To understand ourselves we need to understand them and identify those parts of us that are them. Then we can theoretically choose who we want to be.
 
For years I've thought someday of writing about my recollections of childhood and life in the Philippines. There are a few more books by Filipinos about the Filipino experience but the field is sparse. The Filipinos are probably the largest minority in America about which the average American knows the least. Few Filipinos have excelled in the traditional fields that merit stardom and public interest. But its history and culture are unique in the world, not only because all cultures are unique but because of the 400 years that the country was under Western domination, first by the Spanish and later, for a shorter time but perhaps with greater impact, by the Americans. As we struggle to conserve flora and fauna I believe cultures need to be studied and preserved, especially the smaller ones nobody knows much about. It is in diversity that we can find those rare solutions when common-sense ones don't work.
 
Cat Stevens sang: "All the times that I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside, it's hard, but it's harder to ignore it." After Buckley finished his first draft, he went through the book and excised those parts he didn't feel the public needed to know. Asked by Rose why he wrote those parts, he said, "to get it out." To put ideas, and memories are ideas after all, into words is to give them being and reality. Once they exist we can throw them out finally. But the catharsis of verbalizing and realizing are in themselves creative acts. We can harness the creativity that arises from putting things "out there." Catharsis, after all, is about mobilizing energy, making stagnant energy fluid again, turning death-creation into life.
 
Memoirs, Buckley said, had to be truthful and people's lives should not be "sanitized." He made no apologies for the book. He quoted from Melville's letter to Hawthorne: "I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as a lamb."

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