Hard Silences, Hard Stories: A Memoirist’s Difficult Journey

Suzanne Strempek Shea interviews Melanie Brooks

Sitting in summer shorts while reading Melanie Brooks’ heart-enveloping memoir A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all, I was reminded that the best memoirists’ long treks through the land of memory often require tactical gear.

A Hard Silence details with documentarians’ precision the story of Brooks’ 53-year-old father’s death from AIDS during Canada’s mid-1980s Tainted Blood Scandal. The author was 13 when he was infected, and 23 when he died, a decade during which her parents required their four children to keep their situation private. Brooks’ father, Orville Messenger, was a respected physician heavily involved in his Evangelical Christian Church, in a time long before drug commercials illustrated the carefree lives of those with HIV. A Hard Silence story pays homage to the isolated soul of every child who’s been made to bear a family secret. It also is among the latest examples of the long, rutted path a memoir writer must tread toward truth, a semblance of peace, and becoming the person able to write the story fittingly.

As we speak over Zoom, Brooks’ Lab Wally snoozing behind her, the 51-year-old native of the Canadian Maritimes nods at lessons learned. “I lived the ten years, then I put myself through it again. I don’t think I knew that’s what I was going to be doing. I think if writers really knew what this was going to be like, they wouldn’t write.”

Melanie Brooks

Brooks did have some inkling, her first book Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon, 2017), featuring 18 in-depth interviews including with Edwidge Danticat and Richard Blanco, began as a project three years into her memoir and during her studies at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program.  

“It became very clear to me that I needed something like the ‘gate’ that (James) Baldwin once said of his work, how he didn’t set out to write about ‘being a Negro,’ as though that were his only topic, but that was the gate he had to unlock to get to anything else. Writing Hard Stories was the gate for me—I had to have those conversations with those writers and really work through what the experience was for me, feeling re-traumatized, and maybe traumatized for the first time, by this writing… ‘You get to the other side of it.’ I needed to hear that to keep going.”

Most writers keep going while also shape-shifting through life. Over the decade of writing A Hard Silence, Brooks was wife, mother, runner, MFA student, undergrad and MFA writing instructor, Narrative Medicine Certificate student, prolific op-ed submitter, new author, and therapy patient with a manuscript in progress. She and her voice, perspective, and skill grew as the story did, despite writing that brought avalanching reminders of the deep love shared with her late father, and the struggles with a childhood faith that once was as much a given as the fact that her father one day would walk grandchildren along the shore. Brooks credits cognitive behavioral therapy, which she began during a confidence crisis around A Hard Silence’s start, for developing necessary emotional muscles and understanding.

“The writing fed therapy and the therapy fed the writing. It needed to be done like that for me. And, certainly, when I started I did not anticipate that I’d be in therapy for over a decade.” The sessions, which she’s continued, also became a story line underscoring the hard and long duty of revisiting the past.

Brooks recalls friend and colleague Richard Hoffman saying he needed 19 years to write his searing on-point memoir of childhood abuse, Half the House, another book in which silence is a main character. “I always say that that time includes all the striving to become the writer who could write that particular book,” Hoffman explained. “I think that’s pretty much true of all my books. None of them are written by the guy who first envisioned them. They are all the result of a process of becoming the author of each book. “

It was the same with A Hard Silence. “There’ve been a lot of times for me when I’ve thought, why haven’t I gotten this done? Why isn’t it published yet?” Brooks says. “But I also realized if this had gotten published right away after Writing Hard Stories, it wouldn’t be the book it is.”

Because the author would not be who she is right now, a woman turning more fully ahead, feeling able to telling the world her story. Is she someone who believes things happen when they’re supposed to? A Hard Silence, Brooks says, “speaks to some of the lessons of Covid that need to be continuously learned” and points to the re-emergence of HIV-AIDS in public conversation—and to a generation unaware of that pandemic’s story. “I do feel like it’s relevant to the current conversation,” she says.

A Hard Story easily will slip into worldwide discourse, but Brooks’ goals are more personal.

“I’m not counting on this being on the bestseller list,” Brooks says. “I’m putting it out there because it might give me the opportunity to have one conversation with somebody who says to me, ‘You know, before I read your book, I felt really alone. I don’t feel so alone anymore’.

“As much as I don’t want to say good has come from my dad’s tragedy, I am able to say I am the person I am, capable of sitting with people in their grief and leaning into hard stories, because of my own experience of a hard story.”
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Suzanne Strempek Shea’s six novels and five works of nonfiction include Songs from a Lead-Lined Room: Notes—High and Low—from My Journey through Breast Cancer and Radiation, Shelf Life and This Is Paradise. Her journalism and fiction has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Irish Times, Yankee, Golf World, Down East, The Bark, and ESPN the Magazine. She is former writer-in-residence and director of the creative writing program at Bay Path University, founded its MFA program and co-founded its Narrative Medicine Certificate program.