How Freedman Really Found Out Who She Was
Samuel Freedman, author of Who She Was, visited the students at Baruch for an intimate session, in which he brought us into the mind of the writer. Freedman explained the process of reconciling not only the roadblock of the writer’s split brain, torn between emotion and craft, but the conflict of mixing up the different elements of a traditional memoir as well.
Freedman started off the session with an anecdote that dealt with his consumption of a half of a duck’s brain while on a visit to China. In a true writer’s style, he tells the story so vividly and fluidly that as a child of a Chinese household who has seen a fair share of duck appendages, it is hard not to imagine the horrific sight of a duck’s head split clean in two. The story catches you off guard and Freedman utilizes this to dive right into the idea of the writer’s split brain. Freeman explained to the audience the process of reconciling the emotion and the technique or craft that go into writing. In terms of emotions, Freedman felt the need to do penance by writing the novel about his mother, Eleanor, while the craft involved finding out about his mother’s life story because he truly did not know all that much about her.
Freedman described the meticulous and arduous research he did before putting his mother’s story together. He relied on family stories, especially those that described the extent of the poverty in which his mother lived. Addressing the issue of poverty was significant for him because the living conditions that arose from being impoverished had a huge effect on his mother’s life. The necessity of becoming the household breadwinner meant that Eleanor had to forego her academic career at City College’s downtown campus to work full time. To obtain facts and tidbits for the story, Freedman did extensive research. He looked at social security records to get an idea of how much money was actually being brought into the household in which his mother lived; college scholarship research provided the fact that Eleanor’s scholarship was revoked because she was no longer a full time student; and various people who had close contact with Eleanor told him invaluable information about the mother he never knew.
Informants, like Freedman’s Aunt Fanny and Uncle Seymour, Eleanor’s siblings, were interviewed to help him create her story. As Eleanor’s sister, Fanny offered many stories about her and even gave Freeman a piece of jewelry that an old boyfriend of Eleanor’s once gave her. This in turn led to other sources, including the old boyfriend Hy and a former love Charlie’s widow. Primary sources including photographs of his mother and pieces like the bracelet from Hy all contributed to what Freeman referred to as the structure of the story. The music, movies, books, and news of his mother’s time were researched so Freedman could have some sort of idea of the culture his mother lived in and was apart of. As Freedman summed it up, the story of his mother is one of the Jewish experience, female experience, and the immigrant experience.
Freedman’s talk with the class became quite raw with emotion when asked about the issue of guilt. Freedman explained that the writing of the book was in itself an act of penance. He needed to feel that he had reconciled himself with his mother; he needed to write this book so he could “feel like her son again.” On another controversial issue of censoring or withholding certain facts from the published story, Freedman said that only the things he deemed irrelevant to the story were left out. When the issue of classifying his story into a genre came up, Freedman was quick to explain his feelings on the memoirs. He is much more interested in ordinary lives, not the lifestyles of the famous or extraordinary. He tells his mother’s story in a form that blurs the lines of a traditional memoir.
During Samuel Freedman’s visit to Baruch, the audience members got the opportunity to get inside the mind of a tactful writer. He was more than just a writer at the time, he became a human, just like the rest of us with flaws and guilt. He was a penitent child trying to tell his mother’s story and subsequently become her son again at the end of the process.
Photograph by: Sara Barrett