Melissa Hart’s memoir Gringa: A Contradictory Childhood is the story of growing up between the polarity of her parents’ worldviews and the harsh judgment of a dominant culture and surviving. As reader, I was engaged in this tale from the beginning when Hart’s mother leaves her marriage to live in a lesbian relationship and full custody of her three children goes to the children’s father. For Hart, sexual orientation is not the only difference she must negotiate. Her mother’s small home is in a Southern California Latino community and her father’s spacious house is in a white middle class suburb. In the years between childhood and college, Hart falls in love with Latino culture, questions her sexuality, suffers jokes about her cultural identity and then strikes out on her own during college by living with a boyfriend who is unable to meet the goals they set for themselves. A tour with her mother in Europe yields self-understanding and a bond that can’t be broken, a very satisfying ending.

Sheila
For how long before you wrote Gringa, did you know you wanted to write it?

 Melissa
I knew I wanted to explore the theme of my first memoir, The Assault of Laughter, in a more sophisticated story expanded to incorporate both my search for identity in my mother’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transvestite (LGBT) culture and in the Latino culture that surrounded me in Southern California. Assault was my master’s thesis at Goddard in the mid-1990s when I studied for an MFA, and I freely admit that it’s not as skillfully written as I would’ve preferred. The story of lesbian moms losing custody of their kids in the 1970s and early 1980s strikes me as so important and so under-reported. I wanted to tell the story of my mother coming out and losing custody of her children in a more eloquent and expansive story, and so I wrote Gringa.

Studying for my M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing gave me the confidence to approach this story. So many lesbian moms and their adult children shy away from telling their story, if there was a custody dispute, but I worked in graduate school with lesbian Young Adult author Jacqueline Woodson, as well as with lesbian mom and author Mariana Romo-Carmona. They gave me the courage to tell this story, and also — with poet Jane Wohl — helped me to move The Assault of Laughter away from its rough drafts informed by a victim-mentality and into a more objective story that would appeal to readers.

Sheila
What got you started writing it? Did you publish any of it as you were still working on the book?

Melissa
I began Gringa as a series of related long memoiristic essays. I pitched them as a book to my agent, but she didn’t feel that they worked as such. She suggested that I focus on writing a coming-of-age memoir exploring the theme of culture, which informed so many of the essays. Gringa was born of my meditations on a Spanish/English flashcard I recalled from my mother’s and my first Spanish class when I was nine. The essays themselves have appeared in The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Northwest Review, Citizen Culture, and various other publications. My agent was very wise in pulling out a theme and asking me to rewrite the manuscript as memoir. The word “essay” can be off-putting to some readers, although I do love the genre.

Sheila
What were the challenges in rewriting after you had written the material as essays? What did you add or subtract as you reworked the material to keep to the theme?

Melissa
I had to cut out a lot of sophisticated, rather academic reflection to maintain a narrative feel. This was difficult because I wanted to share a lot of information about Down syndrome in the context of my brother’s story, and a history of lesbian parenting in the context of my mother’s story, but these parts were pulling readers out of the story in an unsatisfactory way. I rewrote each chapter with an eye for anecdotes and narrative arc, and with much deeper characterization. At the advice of my editor, I cut the last five chapters of the manuscript, which explored my early 30s, to give the story a more coming-of-age theme.

Sheila
At what point did you know you’d include recipes?

Melissa
I added the recipes at the end of each chapter later in the writing process, realizing in my revisions that food was so important as both a source of comfort and cultural identity.

Sheila
Did you go about writing the story using any of the conventional plotting formulas fiction and screenwriters discuss?

Melissa
I tend to write big, unwieldy rough drafts, filling a notebook with long-handed scrawl. I don’t dive into a rough draft with too much thought about plot and formula. I think about narrative arc and characterization and motivation and other literary devices when I’m revising. I’m a slow writer; Gringa took me two and a half years to write because I revised the manuscript about eight times before submitting it for publication. I’ve been working on a new memoir for a year, and I think it’s going to be another year before it’s ready to give to editors.

Sheila
Three memoirs and I know you can’t be old! Many people believe they have only one in them. Can you tell us how you view life and writing in a way that yields several book length creative nonfiction life writings?

Melissa
I turned 40 in March, and I’m often asked how on earth I’ve garnered enough material to have published two memoirs already. I think writers need to consider the idea of a book length memoir as less an account of every single year of their life, from birth to death, and more as a piece which explores one particular, notable era and/or event. In my case, I wrote The Assault of Laughter to explore the first year in my life after my mother came out and lost custody of us. In Gringa, I wrote about my adolescence as a rather obtuse girl trying on the various personas of lesbian, Latina, actress, and favorite auntie dressed up like a Christmas tree.

Sheila
Do you read memoir now?

Melissa
I’m reading Martha Beck’s fascinating memoir Expecting Adam right now, about what happens when two young Harvard graduate students discover that they’re going to have a baby with Down syndrome. I really admire how she stays focused on this year in their life. She flashes forward and back a bit to give readers context for her story, but mostly, she engages us fully in the process of coming to terms with her discovery and how it changes her life. In workshops, I tell writers to note the single most exciting or problematic time in their life and consider turning that era into a book length memoir.

Sheila
Expecting Adam has long been a favorite of mine. I agree with your words on the focus. It’s a story that stays with you and shows us how much pressure there is on all sides to conform and what it takes to follow your own course and what the rewards are.

You achieve a great focus with the recipes you include in Gringa as they are all “tuned” to the emotions you were experiencing at the time described in the particular chapter. Some are funny in that they describe how to make something quickly from canned/packaged items and some require a little more cooking. Did you think of including them as a kind of enhancement to the material? Were you worried about how they would be received? About how they would compare with recipes in books like Heartburn by Nora Ephron?

Melissa
As a graduate student, I fell in love with Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate. Each chapter included a recipe that illustrated a key theme or conflict. Later, I read Diana Abu Jaber’s The Language of Baklava, which employs a similar device, as does Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone. Food was so important to me as a source of comfort as I was growing up, and I had a few favorite, strange little recipes such as Frito Boats and Tortilla Flats, which I wanted to share with readers. Initially, I simply followed each chapter with a basic recipe–ingredients, directions, how many the recipe serves. My husband suggested that I have more fun with them, putting them into narrative. I wasn’t worried about how they’d be received, because they’re simply fun recipes that readers can actually make. It’s interesting to note that most reviewers have really liked them, while a few question their presence in the book. The latter have obviously not yet made “Conciliatory Carrot Cake” from the chapter titled “The Trials and Tribulations of Trailer Trash.” Really, the cake is out of this world.

Sheila
I’ll be trying them all, but a good carrot cake recipe is a treasure. Of course, I am a chip-aholic and will try anything with corn chips.

What elements of prose writing do you think took the most attention in drafting and revising the book?

Melissa
I’m devout about using sensory details. I respect my readers and I want them to feel that they’re deeply involved in the story. To ensure a balance of sensory details, I made a chart after each chapter of Gringa and said, “Okay, what details appeal to the reader’s sense of smell, taste, etc.?” If I found the chapter to be lacking in appeals to the reader’s tactile sense, for example, I’d revise with an eye for further details about what different objects felt like in that part of the story.

I also appreciate rhythm and flow in each sentence. I read every draft out loud until each sentence sounds good to me. I focused on poetry as an undergraduate at U.C. Santa Barbara, and so I approach my prose with an eye for alliteration and meter and details like that. I do stop short, however, of writing in iambic pentameter.

Sheila
I think we should address an area of concern those thinking of writing memoir have: how do you write about family and publish what you write when you think you might be saying things about family members that they won’t like? Can you tell us what concerned you in this area as you wrote and then published the book?

Melissa
After my first memoir was published, my father called and threatened to sue me. Then his first wife read the book, called him up, and said that I’d essentially nailed his character. As we’ve been estranged for the past 20 years, I wasn’t too concerned with his reactions to the book. I tried very hard in both memoirs to present family members honestly, as round characters with both positive and negative traits. I was more concerned with what my stepmother would think about both books, as we’ve seldom talked about any of the family dynamics that I explore. She e-mailed to tell me that The Assault of Laughter helped her to understand the family better. I’m not sure whether she’s read Gringa yet.

I admit that I was nervous about my closer family members’ reactions to the book, and I’ve been both surprised and delighted by their support. My sister, deservedly the comic relief in both books, organized a bookstore reading of Gringa in Orange County where she lives. I was most concerned with my mother’s reaction to Gringa. I wanted to be very honest about her naiveté and idealism, and later, about the fact that even as she missed her children horribly, she fell madly in love with both her partner and the lesbian community. I worried that she’d be angry, but trusted that she’d let me know. We’re very close, and I offered her the opportunity to read the manuscript before it went to print, but she declined. She ended up going on much of the book tour with me, going so far as to answer some pretty personal questions from the public at Books, Inc. in San Francisco’s Castro District. She’s a writer, as well, and she writes about me on occasion. She understands the importance of telling this particular story, and as this all happened decades ago, she’s got a significant amount of emotional distance from the events.

Sheila
Are there any tips you might want to give prospective memoir writers? Resources? Lessons from your experience publishing?

Melissa
I reviewed Sue William Silverman’s latest book Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir for The Writer Magazine last year, and it’s fantastic. I’d advise prospective memoir writers to read it cover to cover. She’s so intelligent in her advice to memoirists, regarding the fear of offending family members and friends. I also want to recommend Natalie Goldberg’s Old Friend from Far Away, which offers readers many useful writing exercises, as well as discussions on why one might choose to write memoir, and how best to shape it.

I’d also advise readers to avoid the temptation to fabricate stories in order to create a more dramatic narrative arc. It’s understood that some dialogue may need to be invented, and some memoirists create composite characters and mess around a bit with the timeline of events, but you simply cannot say that you met your wife in a concentration camp when you met her in Manhattan, and you can’t say that you grew up in poverty and joined a street gang when in actuality, you grew up in affluence . . . without a street gang.

Sheila
Are there sites those interested in reading more about your book and you as an author might visit?

Melissa
I post upcoming events, recipes, and other tidbits on my Facebook fan page. I maintain a blog for emerging writers at www.butt2chair.wordpress.com and update my website, www.melissahart.com, as often as possible with newly published essays and articles, plus guest blog posts and reviews. I’m on Twitter, as well, at MelissaMHart. Readers can Google me, as well, but I’m often pre-empted by the actress Melissa Joan Hart (who played Sabrina, the teenage witch) and the former Republican congresswoman from Pennsylvania. The latter and I, in particular, are quite dissimilar and it’s amusing when people mix us up!

Sheila
What has been the most interesting part of working to publicize your book?

Melissa
The most interesting part of working to publicize Gringa has been coming across kind-hearted and talented bloggers and reviewers. I’ve met wonderful women, in particular, who have gravitated toward my story and written about it. I appreciate the publicity, of course, but even more, I appreciate getting to know these women. I’m thinking of a few in particular who have been particularly delightful — Erica Driefus, who’s a fellow contributing editor at The Writer; Brandon Gazette reviewer Kristy Cade; Clatsop Community College women’s studies teacher Mindy Stokes; and Dana Rudolph who writes the witty Mombian blog for lesbian moms and allies.

Sheila
Thank you so much for this interview. When we write from personal experience we often feel that our essays and vignettes are adding up to something larger and it is a pleasure to read your words about how you shaped what you wanted others to know into an accessible, informative and entertaining memoir. I am so glad you have posted some of the recipes and a book excerpt on your website. I know WIR readers will be heading there now.