Family Sayings

"Absolutely, and, you know, the words matter so much to her. I really connect with that. It’s such an interesting book and when you described it just now in terms of its silences it made me think how, really, this book is about negative space. This is a book about her family and her life and yet she so rarely appears. She is hardly ever there, on any page. There are only really two moments where, all of a sudden, she’s there, she mentions herself. One is where she says simply: ‘I got married’ to Leone Ginzburg, after courting for a while. And that’s, really, the first time we realise that there must have been a girlhood for her, a time when she was a student, growing up, learning things. But for her, the story is always about all these other people – brothers, sisters, parents, aunts and uncles. Another example comes later, when her husband is executed in prison, and she gives us just one sentence about it. And it’s not that she didn’t think about it, obviously. But I think for Ginzburg it’s about negative space – for her, withholding information is a way of communicating feelings. This is a work of discipline, it’s all about restraint and rhythm and repetition – the family repeats certain key phrases throughout the book, for example – and these things all give a sense of continuation, of the passage of time. You don’t need the author to say ‘And I experienced it like this… and I was changed by this event and then that event’, because you feel it yourself in the way she writes. The absence of ‘I’ is clearly one of the things I find so attractive, and in the case of Ginzburg it is truly astounding. ‘We’ is a comforting thing. And there is a history to it, too – I was talking to one of my students the other day who grew up in Iran. She said they use ‘we’ too, rather than talking in the first person. In China it’s the same – even if it’s something that only you did, you would often say ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ – partly just to have a shared responsibility, to not be singled out for anything. It’s a cultural thing – in China you’re not expected to brag about what you have and haven’t done – but also, yes, from my experience it’s a political thing. People are more politically tuned, so you’re not likely to say ‘I do this’, it’s more a case of ‘We all do this’, which carries the implication that it is the correct thing to do. “ for Ginzburg it’s about negative space – for her, withholding information is a way of communicating feelings ” It’s such an interesting thing to come from Chinese to English, a language in which ‘I’ is probably the most important word; it feels like people always want to use ‘I’ and stress the ‘I’ in every situation. It’s a jump for me. I don’t miss the ‘we’ because that ‘we’ is, while comforting, also a kind of dehumanising gesture, a way of hiding the self; but I don’t feel comfortable with the ‘I’ either. Yes, and it’s funny that you talked about Little Virtues because I was re-reading those essays and I was thinking how she probably used that ‘we’ a little differently to how I would use ‘we’. I find her ‘we’ very comforting, and you can tell she is comfortable, too; but if I used it, it would sound and feel different – the word carries so much cultural and political weight. It’s so true, and, you know, the other day someone said to me, ‘In your book, you’ve created such an unsympathetic picture of your mother.’ That took me by surprise – it probably shouldn’t have done but it did. Often if we write about the flaws of a character – especially in memoirs, where you might have a flawed mother figure, or a whole flawed family – it’s to suggest that you, the ‘I’, are the victim of these flawed circumstances. But as I see it, the reason we can write with sometimes brutal honesty is because these people matter. For Ginzburg, too, she is so full of affection for the people around her even when, or especially when, they are in conflict. For example, when Ginzburg’s mother complains about her bad parenting, about how the children don’t have shoes on, you know that this is a true relationship between a mother and daughter; between two mothers, in fact. This is a relationship with a lot of complications and the relationship can’t be simplified into ‘good mother-daughter relationship’ and ‘bad mother-daughter relationship’. I worry sometimes that therapy language can sneak into literature, and here Ginzburg really works hard against that – there’s none of that language in Family Sayings ."