Bonnie Rough’s memoir, Carrier, which won the 2011 Minnesota Book Award, includes extensive research via family stories, interviews, pictures, legal records, letters, and more, but it is her compassionate portrayal of her grandfather, Earl, who passed away soon after her birth, that keeps readers turning pages. He lived with hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia (HED), a genetic disease that affects a person’s ability to sweat and can cause other health-related issues. Bonnie wondered if these health issues lead his early demise.  Her website includes a link to her blog, The Blue Suitcase, where she writes about the life and adventures of her family.

In a 2010 interview with Literary Mama, Rough explained that “[Earl] was only 49 when he died poor, estranged from his family, and addicted to drugs.” As a carrier of the HED gene, Bonnie hoped that reconstructing Earl’s life would help her decide whether she should have children and use genetic testing. Despite Earl’s complicated life, as she researches his past and looks for her own answers, Bonnie never falters from kindness and empathy in trying to understand her grandfather.

In our interview she explained how she approached writing about Earl’s life from a place of understanding, including her decision to write chapters directly from the perspectives of Earl and her mother, Paula. She also shares her research journey and information about the authors that inspired her as she wrote Carrier.

Andrea
Carrier is an interesting book both because of your extensive research and because of the way you use point of view, which I want to talk about more in just a little bit. So, how did the project that eventually led to the publication of Carrier get started?

Bonnie
Carrier began in 2004 as my thesis project in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. I researched for almost a year and wrote my thesis in fall 2004 and spring 2005. Not much of the thesis remains in the book itself, but it was the integral beginning of the journey that led to my first published book.

Andrea
As I read Carrier, I saw that a major part of the book was your quest to figure out the story of your grandfather, Earl, by using research. Like many people’s family members (including my own!) Earl is a complex character and you do such a good job of including the multiple layers of his life and personality in Carrier. For those who have not read your book yet, could you give us a short description of Earl?

Bonnie
My grandfather was very intelligent and sensitive, trusting as well as duplicitous, insecure, and intent upon proving himself. He worked himself to ruin with an astonishingly buoyant belief in himself and the American Dream. He died young—only 49—penniless, drug-addled, in great pain, and certain his would still be the bright scientific mind to save the nation (at the time, he was focused on capturing sustainable domestic energy sources such as methane gas).

But I’m not certain he was any more complex than a typical person. It’s just that people from the past—except those historical figures who are very well documented—tend to flatten over time. By that I mean that our memories of real people, once they’re gone, can simplify into caricatures with perhaps only one or two dimensions. Then as generations pass, they become even more reduced, until they are just shorthand: names with dates. But somehow, I always had a sense of my grandfather’s fullness as a person, perhaps from witnessing my mother’s internal conflict about her father: She was angry and felt cheated of a good childhood, yet even as an adult and long after he died, she still felt starved for the love of a man she admired and adored.

Andrea
I think that idea of “flatness” and “fullness” in relation to how we remember others is an interesting one. Your sense of your grandfather’s “fullness as a person” is very evident throughout the book. I think one reason this shines through is your compassion toward Earl.

In a blurb on the cover of your book Jane Hamilton said, “There are many things to praise in Bonnie Rough’s deeply felt memoir…but most striking are her compassion and wisdom.” As I came to know Earl through your thorough research, Jane’s comment came back to me again and again.  I felt that a touchstone of your project was really starting from a place of understanding and inquiry. How did you ground yourself in this place of understanding?

Bonnie
I was overjoyed to receive that blurb—I admire Jane Hamilton and her literary service so much. She’s a wonderful speaker, if you ever have the chance to hear her.

Maybe it was possible to start exploring and writing about my grandfather “from a place of understanding and inquiry” because I had a generation—my mother—as a buffer, or even a semi-permeable membrane, between us. My grandfather’s flaws and mistakes never felt like a personal affront to me, even though I could see that the memories of many of his actions still caused pain for both my mother and my grandmother. I think my grandfather knew and despised the suffering he caused others, and carried a burden of guilt along with the rest of his life burden—something I could relate to, as I risked joining a line of mothers feeling guilty for the genes they passed to their children.

Another reason: I had evidence, and definitely do believe, that my grandfather loved me. I have a photo of my grandfather, ill with kidney disease, sitting in a chair holding newborn me on his lap. He curled his body tenderly over me as if to create a tiny sheltered space for just the two of us. His affection emanates from that photo, and it matches the way my mother describes her father’s gentle love for vulnerable beings, and the only grandchild he ever knew. I never felt anything close to anger for this man, in life or for his character.

Andrea
Sometimes even when we have good memories of a family member, like the touching photograph and feelings of love that you describe, we might only see one side of a person, or “flatten” them, to use your earlier term. You really resist doing this with Earl and it seems like part of that is having that sense of the “fullness of a person” that you talk about. Are there strategies that you can share with us to help us see the different sides of family members?

Bonnie
It’s tempting to use research—those photos, letters, records, documents, sources, and artifacts we turn up—to validate or prove our hypotheses. But inevitably, we find clues and hints that just refuse to jive with our preconceptions. My advice is to embrace those misfit details—that’s where you’ll find your character’s richness and dimension and human nature hiding.

Andrea
What were some of those “misfit details” that you found as you researched Earl?

Bonnie
Property transactions showed that he was not only a gullible business partner, but also at times quite shrewd. His personal notes revealed that he was simultaneously frustrated with and compassionate toward his doomed friend and business partner Junior—which didn’t help me solve who pulled the trigger on the night Junior died in the warehouse where he and my grandfather worked alone together. There were times that I wanted, for the sake of the story, for my grandfather or my mother to have been somewhere—a family gathering, for instance—where they actually weren’t. I had to revise my understanding of the story to align with the evidence, even if I’d been certain a different narrative had taken place. But each of those was an opportunity to ask “Why?” and to understand characters more deeply.

Andrea
About one-third of the way through the book you interview Betsy, a friend of your grandparents. After that interview you say, “Outside of the quiet observations I had shared with Dan, Betsy might have been the first person to bluntly propose that a man’s physical condition could lead directly to his personal failures.” The chapter ends with your husband Dan’s observation that, “no matter what story you believe, it’s pretty clear that a kid with [HED] doesn’t get a good start in life.” Looking again at the idea of compassion, I am wondering if understanding Earl’s health problems, and how they influenced his life decisions, affected how you understood him as a character?

Bonnie
This is a great question. Yes, I knew from close at hand the struggles of living with HED because my brother was born with the same genetic disorder that tragically altered my grandfather’s life. Because I had grown up loving my wonderful brother, I had, I think, an automatic love and deep respect for the struggling boy who became a bright, tenderhearted, desperate and failing man.

Andrea
One technique that you play with in Carrier is point of view. In addition to telling the story from your own point of view you wrote chapters from your mother, Paula’s, perspective and from Earl’s perspective. I think this made the writing feel more active than saying something like, “Based on Earl’s notes it is likely that he felt X.” Did you try writing this story from just your point of view first or did you know all along that you would write using other voices? Did this shift in perspective give you a better understanding of Paula and Earl?

Bonnie
I never expected to write my book this way, until the first lines I typed came out of Earl’s mouth. I was as surprised as some readers would be, but actually, it should have made sense to me. These were the voices that I’d been hearing: my mother’s on the phone, and my grandfather’s in my dreams as I re-imagined the narrative of our family based on everything I had learned. The goal of this work was to deeply understand my characters—my predecessors—so I could hear and trust their lessons as they echoed through time. At times, certainly, inhabiting their voices did give me greater understanding of the characters, but I waited to start writing—to really start writing, beyond exercises—until I knew them deeply already.

You should know that it was difficult to find a publisher for Carrier because it was described as true yet written from three characters’ first-person perspectives. This was not a typical memoir. Several editors at the bigger publishing houses expressed interest—but only if I would rewrite the book in the style you hint at above: a single first-person perspective. I was so glad that the book found the right editor at Counterpoint—she saw what I was doing with Carrier, and wanted to help me make it really sing.

Andrea
I’m glad you were able to work with Counterpoint because, as a reader, I felt like the writing from Paula and Earl’s perspectives made me more engaged with the story and more empathetic toward the characters. I’m glad their voices didn’t get lost!

Because your mother, Paula, plays such a large and integral role in the book, did she play a role in the chapters that you wrote from her perspective?

Bonnie
My mother and I spent months and months together on the phone and exchanging detailed narrative emails. Before beginning the project, I asked if she would be willing to do this with me—I knew I would not have the story I dreamed of writing without her painstaking participation. And it was painstaking, for both of us, especially for her. I asked her again and again to dredge up difficult memories—and then to stay with me as we meticulously excavated each of those memories for perception, context and detail. It was hard emotional work, and I couldn’t have sneaked up on her with that kind of research—I needed to ask ahead of time for her rigorous involvement, and I had to be clear that this would become a preoccupation for both of us, for months if not years. She agreed to work with me, and gave me the gift of the stories I needed to make the book whole.

As for the prose itself: There are many instances in Carrier where I preserve my mother’s exact phrasing from an interview or e-mail. My mother is expressive, sentimental, detail-oriented, and carries a memory rich in salient details. My love of language, and my vignette-style memory, come from her.

Andrea
Related to writing from your mother and grandfather’s perspectives, on the copyright page you include an Author’s Note that explains the book is “a memoir about my family, and it includes stories, scenes, and voices from generations before mine…Since detailed research could take me only so far into long-lost incidents and sentiments, I used disciplined imagination…but without embellishment or pure invention. My abiding intention has been to tell a true story, in the way I understand it.”

I really liked this move because I felt like it made it less confusing when I encountered the chapters that you wrote from Paula and Earl’s perspectives. Can you tell us a little bit about your decision to include this author’s note?

Bonnie
Carrier came out after the James Frey A Million Little Pieces flap, so by this time, an author’s note—aka disclaimer—was a standard requirement for memoirs. My publisher and editor expected it, and I think they were the ones who asked me to write it, which was fine with me. It was a nice opportunity to use the term “disciplined imagination,” which I learned from a scientific illustrator—a dinosaur artist who paints prehistoric murals for major museums—when I asked him how he hews close to the truth of a past he didn’t experience.

Andrea
I like that term, “disciplined imagination,” and the scenes you create really are based on very detailed research. You do an amazing job of collecting as much information as possible about Earl through interviewing family members, taking road trips to important locations in Earl’s life, and sifting through letters, photographs, legal records, and Earl’s papers. In fact your research process and journey for information seems as important as the data that you collected. Why was this journey so important and why did you decide to include your research process as a part of Carrier?

Bonnie
In my MFA thesis and early book drafts, I didn’t include my learning journey—only the first-person stories of my grandfather, grandmother, and mother. Eventually I folded my grandmother’s first-person narrative into the other voices, but my writing partners and mentors still were telling me that the story lacked a narrative spine: my part in all of it. Why did I need to be the one to tell this story, and why now? My husband and I were trying to figure out what kind of life we might pass down to our children, and whether the risks might simply be too great. Even though I hadn’t yet written it this way, our quest for answers was really the book’s raison d’être. It had to be there.

Andrea
What were some obstacles you encountered while doing your family research and how did you deal with those?

Bonnie
Some questions just couldn’t be answered definitively. Junior’s shooting may have been murder or suicide. I thought I could solve the crime. The closest I could get, though, was knowing what I believe happened, based on everything I had learned.

Andrea
What was one of the most fulfilling aspects of the research process?

Bonnie
As for fulfilling research, I’m not sure I would have said this then—because I did keep discovering the most juicy and thrilling tidbits, and meeting people I never thought I’d find—but now I’d say the most fulfilling part of my research process was  making the journey together with my husband. It was one of the most significant things we did together in the early years of our marriage, and it was deeply bonding.

Andrea
When I am writing about family members who are still living I know that I sometimes struggle with how they might react to events that I am writing about in an essay.  At one point you say, “I felt my family members…watching and waiting, each clutching their own prayer, as I pulled all the fragments together and held them up to the light.” Did your family members’ expectations about your project, or about the way they understood Earl, influence your writing process?

Bonnnie
I knew that some family members had hopes or expectations for the revelations my project could bring, and that was both unnerving and fascinating, but not overly influential when it came to the outcome of the project itself. It was critical that I waited until my manuscript was very near publication before I shared it with my parents and siblings. I know my mother in particular hoped I would learn more—and desired a specific proof—about Junior’s death and her father’s part in it. In the end, the best I could do was to write about her, and where those intense hopes came from.

Andrea
Did Carrier’s publication influence your relationship with your mother and other family members?

Bonnie
Our family does seem more open around the topics of genetics, health, family history, and emotional experience now. You can probably guess that the process was particularly important for my mother and me in the evolution of our relationship. I can surmise that my family members also saw a different side of me revealed in Carrier. Then again, I don’t want to put too much emphasis on changing relationships or imply some great big familial catharsis. Long relationships find their way back to their set points in some ways, don’t they? I value that, too.

Andrea
In addition to your own considerable research, including your mother’s extensive contributions, were there authors that you looked to in order to help you with this project?

Bonnie
Michael Ondaatje inspired me to break form with The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. William Least Heat-Moon focused me on a sense of a journey evoking people and their places. As I say this, I’m struck by the fact that books by men are the ones that came to mind first here. To prepare myself for writing my second memoir, I’ve been reading literary, feminist, and historical works mostly by women for several years.

Andrea
I am excited to hear that you are writing a second memoir! Can you tell us about it as well as other events you have coming up?

Bonnie
I just received a wonderful grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation to continue working on my new memoir about how I went looking for answers on how to raise strong, uninhibited daughters in the 21st century, and found I had to first deal with my own insecurities about sex, marriage, parenthood, and what it means to be a woman. I’m about a third of the way through the writing.

This summer, I’ll be teaching in Ashland, Ohio for the summer residency portion of the low-residency MFA program in which I teach nonfiction. Next April (2015), I’ll be back to visit my onetime home and the marvelously literary city of Minneapolis for the AWP Conference.

Andrea
As a Midwest native, I hope you enjoy your time in Ohio and Minnesota, and I look forward to reading your second memoir when it comes out.

Thank you for taking the time to share your writing process with us. I know that it has given me different ways to think about the way I write about family and how I might use research in my own writing.