How Do You Write the Truth When the Truth Might Break Your Family?

This is the central problem of writing a memoir about your mentally ill parent: How do you tell the truth without becoming another source of damage? How do you honor your own experience while acknowledging that mental illness made your father both the villain and victim of his own story?

The Multiple Truth Problem

Here's a fun family exercise: Ask three siblings to describe the same traumatic event from their childhood. You'll get three completely different stories.

My brother Matt remembers the night Dad was arrested as "the night with all the police cars." He was eight. He remembers the lights, the excitement, counting seven officers. To him, it was almost thrilling—like TV had come to life in our front yard.

My sister Melissa remembers it as "the night Mom cried." She remembers the sound specifically—quiet, controlled sobs that somehow seemed worse than wailing would have been.

I remember it as "the night we became a statistic." I was already the kid who noticed patterns, who collected data. Seven officers. Three kids. One bipolar father. Zero good outcomes.

"We're all right. We're all wrong. Memory isn't a video recorder—it's more like a highlighted manuscript where everyone used different colored markers based on what mattered most to their survival."

So which version do I write? The eight-year-old's adventure? The ten-year-old's heartbreak? The eleven-year-old's grim accounting?

I write all of them, and somehow none of them.

The Naming Problem

My father's name is Jim.

Such a simple sentence, but I rewrote it twelve times before settling on using his real name in my memoir. I considered:

• "My father" (too formal)
• "Dad" (too intimate for the worst moments)
• "Jim" (too distant for the loving moments)
• "F." (too precious)
• A pseudonym (too dishonest)

The name problem is really a relationship problem. What do you call someone who taught you to ride a bike and also taught you that love could arrive with a baseball bat? Someone who spent seventeen hours straight helping you build the perfect pinewood derby car and also spent seventeen hours convinced the mailman was a government spy?

In the end, I use all the names, depending on who he was in that moment. "Dad" for the man who jumped into an icy creek to save me. "My father" for the man who had to be arrested in front of the neighbors. "Jim" for the man whose illness made him a stranger in our own home.

The naming changes are my tell—a careful reader can track my emotional distance by which name I choose.

The Diagnosis Dilemma

"Your father has bipolar disorder."

This sentence appears on page 43 of my memoir. It took me 43 pages to name the beast that lived in our house. Not because I was building suspense, but because for the first nine years of my life, we didn't have a name for it.

We had observations:

• Dad doesn't sleep sometimes
• Dad thinks he's receiving messages through the microwave
• Dad bought a chariot for twenty dollars
• Dad reorganized the garage at 3 AM according to "vibrational compatibility"

But we didn't have "bipolar disorder." We just had Dad.

When I write about those pre-diagnosis years, do I use the language we had then or the language I have now? Do I let the reader experience the confusion we felt, or do I name it immediately so they have context?

I chose confusion. Because that's what it was like—loving someone whose brain was breaking in real-time, without a manual or a vocabulary or a WebMD article to explain what was happening.

The Humor Question

My family survived on dark humor the way other families survived on casseroles and prayer. When Dad spent twenty minutes in a Pizza Hut bathroom drawing crosses on mirrors with his own saliva, we had two choices: cry or laugh.

We laughed. We still laugh. At family dinners, someone will say, "Remember when Dad thought he was Jesus?" and we'll all crack up. When he was alive, even Dad would sometimes laugh along.

But when I write these moments, I have to ask: Am I allowed to find this funny? Does humor diminish the real pain these moments caused? Or does leaving out the humor diminish the truth of how we survived?

A therapist once told me, "Humor is how you metabolized trauma."

"Metabolized," I said. "Like I ate it?"

"Like you transformed it into something you could live with."

"So I write the humor, but I also write why we needed it. I write that we laughed because crying would have meant acknowledging how broken everything was. I write that sometimes the laughter had sharp edges that cut us even as we smiled."

The Villain Problem

Here's what's true: My father's manic episodes terrorized our family.

Here's what's also true: My father was terrorized by his own brain.

How do you write someone as both villain and victim? How do you say "this person hurt me" and "this person was hurt" in the same sentence?

I don't have a clean answer. I write scenes where Dad is clearly the antagonist—throwing chairs through bank windows, locking us in my mother's store during a paranoid episode, having an affair and calling it "educational." But I also write scenes where he's fighting his own brain and losing—crying after an episode, begging Mom to help him remember what he'd done, staring at his medication like it's both salvation and prison.

The real villain isn't Dad. It's bipolar disorder. But bipolar disorder doesn't make for a compelling character. It has no motivation, no arc, no possibility of redemption. It just is, like weather or gravity—a force that shapes everything around it.

The Protection Paradox

My mother reads every chapter I write. She has editorial privileges—not over my truth, but over hers. If I write about her crying, she gets to tell me if I got the kind of crying right. If I write about her strength, she gets to tell me when she wasn't strong at all.

My siblings read their parts too. Matt usually says, "Did that really happen?" (It did.) Melissa usually says, "You left out the worst part." (I did.)

But Dad never read any of it.

This wasn't because I was hiding it from him. He knew I was writing this memoir. He'd given his blessing, in his way: "Tell whatever story you need to tell." But he didn't want to read it. "I lived it," he said. "That was enough."

By the time I finished, he was gone. I'd spent years protecting someone who didn't want protection, telling truths he'd given me permission to tell but didn't want to hear. Every word I wrote was both a gift to my own healing and a potential weapon against his memory. Now, with him gone, those words feel different—less like weapons, more like attempts to hold onto something that kept slipping away.

The Ending Problem

Memoirs need endings, but I didn't expect the one I got. When I started writing, Dad was still alive, still taking his medication (mostly), still capable of both tremendous love and tremendous damage. I thought I was writing a story without an ending, one that would just stop at some arbitrary point while life continued on.

Then Dad died, and suddenly I had an ending I never wanted.

Death doesn't provide the neat conclusion you might expect. There's no moment of clarity, no deathbed reconciliation, no final understanding that makes everything make sense. Instead, there's just absence—the phone that won't ring with crisis anymore, the episodes that won't happen again, the apologies that won't be offered or received.

The story did end, but not the way memoirs are supposed to end. Not with forgiveness or healing or wisdom, but with a different kind of silence than the one I was used to. The exhausting, terrifying, occasionally beautiful chaos of loving someone with bipolar disorder simply... stopped.

And somehow, that silence is harder to write than all the noise that came before.

The Permission I Give Myself

After 47 versions of that baseball bat paragraph, here's what I've learned:

I have permission to write the truth, even if the truth is multiple and contradictory.

I have permission to love my father and be angry at him in the same sentence.

I have permission to find humor in horror, because that's how my family survived.

I have permission to name the illness without letting it excuse the damage.

I have permission to protect myself by telling this story, even if telling it fails to protect others.

I have permission to write a memoir that doesn't end with forgiveness or healing or wisdom, but simply with survival.

"Most importantly, I have permission to write version 48, and 49, and 50, until I find words that are both true and bearable—for me, for my family, and for the memory of a man who was both my father and a stranger, both the hero and villain of this story, both the person who hurt us and the person we couldn't save."

Even though we couldn't. Even though no one could.

Even if the best we can do is tell the story and hope that someone else living this same impossible life reads it and thinks: "Oh. I'm not alone."

Because that's what this is really about. Not healing, not revenge, not even understanding. Just the simple act of saying: This happened. This was real. This was love, even when it looked like something else entirely.

All of it, forever.