On Writing Memoir with Author Yvonne Caputo

The Empowered Author Podcast transcript

On Writing Memoir With Yvonne Caputo

Boni (00:02):

Hello, hello! I'm Boni Wagner-Stafford, co-founder of Ingenium Books. We work with nonfiction authors to do whatever they need done related to the nonfiction book that they want today. I am joined by Yvonne Caputo, who is author of "Flying With Dad". And today we're going to talk about writing memoir. So a memoir is one of the genres of nonfiction and - you know, on a future live broadcast, we'll talk about all the various different kinds of genres - but we thought it would be interesting to dig into what's involved with writing memoir, at least from the perspective of Yvonne. Yvonne took actually 12 years on her memoir-writing journey. And we don't want to make everybody scared because you don't have to take 12 years, but why don't we start there, Yvonne? And first of all, congratulations on publishing your book, "Flying With Dad", and being so active everywhere.

Yvonne (01:15):

Well, thank you. To think about the 12 year journey: the first two years were just gathering notes from my father and then shortly before he passed away and I was able to show him the third - the first draft, I thought, "I think I have something here. I think I have something really important." And I started to do some research to find out just how important it might be. And what I discovered was there was nothing that talked about an ordinary GI in the Second World War. There were lots of things about guns and battles and death marches and freeing the camps and all those kinds of things, but nothing about this ordinary guy. Now, Dad served overseas from February to June of 1945. So he wasn't there for a long time. So that in itself was interesting, but his whole story from getting to get out of a presidential deferment and into the war from the perspective of an ordinary guy, I thought that was interesting. I thought that was a story that really needed to be told.

Boni (02:41):

So I realized that we didn't talk about, or we didn't let people know what "Flying With Dad" is about. You've got a copy of the book there. Maybe you can hold it up and just show what the framework looks like. But "Flying With Dad", it's a story about Yvonne's father's experience in the war, but it's much more than that. It also is the story of the evolving relationship between a daughter and a father when the daughter wanted a different kind of relationship with her father than the one she had. And it was actually partly through the book that the dynamic of that relationship changed. So the World War II bit is a really key part of the story and it forms the central kind of theme of the story for Section Two, but it's really about much more than that. But back to the 12-year journey, Yvonne. So maybe tell us where you first got the idea: and you mentioned calls with your father and that you thought that it would be a story for a book, but did you - like, are you one of those people that all your life had a burning desire to become an author and write a book?

Yvonne (03:52):

When I just held up that book, it was like, "Who is this person?" I had no idea. No idea. It was just that once I had this first draft and I had his story down, that's when it began to churn in me, this is something that perhaps I can do something with. And the other piece of that was that I was working full time. So the amount of time that I had to dedicate to getting it from that first draft to the book that was published in Thanksgiving of 19 - 2019 - kind of got delayed because of my full-time job.

Boni (04:41):

Right.

Yvonne (04:41):

And there were delays along the way because when I started pitching it to professionals, they kept saying to me, "Well, where are you in the book?" And I said, "Well, I'm not there because it's not about me. It's about my dad." And every time I pitched it to a professional, wanting to get an idea about how do I get it out into the public, I kept getting that question. And then finally it dawned on me that I needed to be in the book because the book was so much more than just Dad's World War II story. It really was the story of how, in the end of all of it, he got a daughter that he didn't know he had, and I got the dad that I wanted from this whole process. So then I really started to write and rewrite and write and rewrite until I had a product that I felt, "Okay, now it's ready to be published." And that took 12 years.

Boni (05:49):

So can you see for other, you know, aspiring authors, you know, wanting to write a memoir and their personal story, what would you say to them about, you know, the length of time? You know, if you had set out giving yourself a deadline - let's say, "I want to publish in a year," or, "I want to publish in two years" - would the book be the same?

Yvonne (06:15):

No, not at all. Not at all. The book is what it is because I took my time. And I never - when I was thinking about this, I didn't have the goal in mind that there was a date. The goal I had in mind was to follow my mother and father's advice. And they would say to me, "Is it the best it could be?"

Boni (06:41):

Yeah.

Yvonne (06:41):

And there were so many times that I came through with saying, "Well, no, it's not." Having - never having written a book before, I wanted professional eyes on it. I wanted people who knew the business to tell me what I needed to do to make it better. So that was also a part of this making it a 12-year journey.

Boni (07:04):

Right. So I wanted to talk to you about the emotional side of this as well. So writing a book, especially a memoir - and depending on what the subject matter is, it can be very emotionally draining - and for two reasons: one, because of the content you're thinking about and writing and the other, because it is such a labor of love. And all of a sudden you've got to ask for and accept feedback on your writing about this subject matter that is so near and dear to your heart. And then the third element of that is: in your case, especially, and in many memoirs, we're writing about people we love and there's the temptation to idolize them and protect their legacy, memory, whatever. So I want to talk about each of those three areas. So the first is what was the emotional journey like for you, having people give you feedback as you continued on your quest to get the best book possible? How did you deal with that emotional response to the feedback on your writing?

Yvonne (08:27):

Well, I think it's important to say upfront that I'm a psychotherapist, you know, and so when I would be feeling these heavy-duty emotions, I was able to say, "Well, this is normal. Given the circumstances, this is normal." So if I was crying and in a puddle, when I was writing something very specific about Dad - you know, a really kind of strong memory - I knew that I was just being vulnerable and experiencing what was going on. And I also knew that my ability to be in that place was going to make my writing better. So I just kind of felt what I felt. Now you're absolutely right: when I first got my - I think it was my third draft back with red lines through it, I was devastated. I was absolutely devastated. And - but I got a lot of help. I got help showing that every writer has a good editor who's going to red-line their, you know, red-line the writing, because that's what editors do: editors try and make something be better. So actually what I did was I said to you - 'cause you're my editor - "Listen, just go ahead and do it and send it back to me without the red lines. If I like it, we'll keep it. If I have questions about it, we can go through it. If I don't feel like it has the sense of meaning that I want, I'll ask for changes." And when I started doing that, I became a better writer.

Boni (10:18):

Because you could see the result without, you know, that barrier with all of the red lines. Well, I think that's important for another reason too, Yvonne, which is that you found the way that worked for you to keep your eye on the goal that you wanted to accomplish and recognized where you might otherwise stumble. Had you tried to force yourself to look at all those red-line markups and, you know, that emotional response, it's - I suppose it's possible that that actually prevents some writers from proceeding.

Yvonne (10:54):

I can imagine that it would, but since this was a book about Dad but I also have to talk about Mom, they were really good about telling us to do our best.

Boni (11:08):

Yeah.

Yvonne (11:09):

They didn't ask for perfection. They just wanted us to do our best. So I've grown up - and I was a teacher too. And if I'm going to tell my classroom, "There's no stupid question," then I need to take that persona on myself. So I was comfortable through the process of saying to myself, "Be okay with that you don't know. Be okay that you really don't know and that you're going to rely on somebody else." Now, if I started having chest pains, I would see a cardiac physician, right? Well, if I want my book to be good, I'm going to turn it over to an editor. So I think a part of all of that was, again, being comfortable in my own self to know that there are times when I just didn't know and I needed a professional to guide me through the process.

Boni (12:02):

Yeah. So the other part of the emotional journey is the - you know, this started out to be a book about your dad and it ended up being a book about you and your dad and your, you know, your parents. But - and I was involved in this process, so I know a little bit about the backstory and I know how you and I talked through presenting your parents as real human beings with flaws. And I know that was difficult for you. But can you talk about that a little bit? About what that experience was like and how you reconciled with revealing their flaws and being vulnerable that way.

Yvonne (12:49):

Actually, right about the time that you and I were having that discussion, I read the book "Unforgettable" by Scott Simon, right? And Scott, all through the book, did not make his mother out to be a saint, okay? And that was also true - because it was suggested that I read "Tuesdays with Morrie". And that was also true, that the characters in those books were real people that had flaws. And it was a part of understanding what those flaws were that made the characters come alive. That made them seem real. And so once I kind of got over the, "Oh my goodness," and started to portray the people in the book as real people, then again, the book for me took on a liveliness, a realness that had to be there.

Boni (13:57):

Yeah. And you know, I'm a little biased because I've worked so closely with you on the book but I think it does that. The next part of the emotional journey is, you know, your father passed away in the process of you writing the book. And so you were telling his story, you had two years of regular phone calls with him digging into his past, then he passed away and you continued to have the relationship with your father as you worked on the book, and then the book was published. What was that like? Did you feel a new sense of grief at letting this go? Or is it something different than you expected?

Yvonne (14:43):

If there's any grief, it's the grief of not having a book to write.

Boni (14:50):

We can fix that!

Yvonne (14:51):

Yeah, I know. I have some ideas. What has come through for me - I'm really very lucky. What's come through for me is that in spending all this time writing, and even now as I try to market it, as I tell this story to different audiences, I get my dad all over again.

Boni (15:18):

Right.

Yvonne (15:18):

He's so with me. I'll be working on the book or working on a pitch or working on something and on my desk, to the right, is a picture of my mother and father that was taken during the war. And they're beautiful people. And I'll look over and there's Mom and Dad smiling at me. So it's like the sense of that they're still with me in this very spiritual kind of way. So I didn't have the grief that I - of turning the book over, but I do have the missing of Dad. That comes back to me, and in moments when I'm working on things, that there's a question I want to ask him or I want that all-consuming hope that my father knew how to do. So that's where the grief comes in for me. And I'll say here too, as a psychotherapist, that's always going to be there. One of the myths that we have about the grief process is that there's an end to it. There is an integration of it but there's never really an end to it.

Boni (16:32):

Yeah. So part of the emotional journey of the book as well - and I'm going to transition now to start talking about the research - but your dad actually had undiagnosed PTSD from his experiences in the war. And you mentioned that the very first driving purpose for you in writing the book was to tell his war story, which was rather ordinary, but extraordinary at the same time, in that, you know, in our generations, we've not really had too much exposure to the kinds of things that anybody who serves in an active war situation goes through. And, you know, lots of it is glorified and lots of it is absolutely horrendous, and horrific but lots of it is fairly ordinary. And that's kind of the thing that you set out to do. You had to do a bunch of research though, in addition to talking to your dad, and I'd like to find out what that research entailed. Anybody who's going to write memoir that isn't solely interior sharing of an interior journey will have some element of research to do. So we're talking about World War II. We're talking about your dad in training, in a number of different U.S. communities and serving from a base over at Rackheath, England. Where did you start with your research?

Yvonne (18:11):

Well, even when Dad and I were talking - and we were doing the phone calls, okay? For example, he tells me a story when he's stationed in Miami Beach for basic training that he contracts maybe dysentery, goes to the slit trench, drops his drawers, was so weak from dehydration that he fell in.

Boni (18:37):

Ugh!

Yvonne (18:37):

I know. All right, so he gets picked up and thrown in the ocean. Then they cart him off to the hospital and Dad said they treated him with arsenic. And I said, "No, no, no." So when Dad would tell me things that didn't sound real, or that I questioned, I hit the research. But then even when I was writing that first draft - I'll give Rackheath as an example: I did a ton of research about this little tiny village that was started in 1422. So I didn't want what I was writing to be sterile. I wanted to have background and information that would draw the reader into what it must've been like for Dad to go to this little tiny village in England, where there was this big, huge 467th Bomb Group base. So the research started then. The more I wrote, the more research I did. At one point, Dad read the first four chapters and he said, "Honey, it's missing something." "So what's it missing?" "It doesn't matter." "Daddy, it matters. What's it missing?" He finally opened up and said, "Combat was terrifying." Well, that took my breath away. But he didn't go into it anymore and at that point we were so new to the game that I wasn't willing to try and pull a little more out of him. So I felt that it was really important for me to find out what he meant. So reading, you know, that people in B-24s, there were no medics on board. They were 22,000 feet above the ground. It was 40 degrees below zero out there.

Boni (20:39):

Yeah.

Yvonne (20:40):

There were just all kinds of things that told me in my research, "Oh, this is what he must have meant." So ...

Boni (20:52):

I was just going to clarify for the folks watching and listening, that your father was a navigator on B-24 bombers. And so bombing raids over the English Channel, over Germany, some areas of France. And then from that base in in Rackheath. Now you actually went and got yourself into more than one B-24, or more than once.

Yvonne (21:21):

Well, I have to drop back and say that I had a lovely professor in college that just made history come alive. So this was fun. This was not - this was not a chore. So any time that we - that my husband and I - found out that the Collings Foundation B-24 "Witchcraft" was going to be anywhere nearby, off we went. And the first time I saw it, I think was in 2012, and this is after Dad had passed away. And we were allowed to get in the plane and to walk through it. And then I met somebody who literally let me get up close to where the pilots were. We were fortunate enough to fly it. To book seats in this. And I sat in the radio operator seat with the seatbelt on the whole time because I wanted the experience to know what it was like to fly in this airplane. And I could stand on the catwalk and put my arms out and feel like it basically touched the sides of the airplane. So what my father considered this huge airplane was not my idea of a big airplane. And then - last year? Last year, the "Witchcraft" is in Seattle and I'd never been up in the nose. And there were two engineers standing under the wing and I told them Dad's story. And one of them let me literally go up through the bomb bay and crawl on my hands and knees to get myself into the nose so that I could sit where my father sat as a navigator. You know, so those kinds of experiences were just so necessary to the writing.

Boni (23:21):

Yeah. And helped you bring it to life. And so you were, you went to Rackheath a number of times. You were in a B-24 a number of times. You visited some of the towns where your father spent time training. And of course, local archival research. Now we're just winding down through our last six minutes; we said we would end a quarter to the hour. But you know, this - we didn't really set out to talk about the situation: the current situation with the coronavirus pandemic. However, your father having gone through the war and the Depression and actually having PTSD based on his experiences in the war: we were having a conversation a little while ago, and I don't remember how it came up, but it was like, "I wonder what Dad would say to us now, what advice he might have based on his experience." So let's talk about that for a little bit. What do you think your dad would say?

Yvonne (24:22):

Oh, he would have a lot to say. He would have a lot to say. Number one would be, "Follow the rules." And in his letters - by the way, I've mentioned this as part of research, but I have all of the letters that Dad wrote to Mom during the war. Ah, it's such a wealth of information about how he thought. But in these letters, he would scream and holler about the Army Air Force and their rules and how stupid their rules were. But when it came to it, he followed them.

Boni (24:57):

Right.

Yvonne (24:58):

He also talked a lot about how much they practiced. He would rail against that as well but they were always trained for the what ifs. So practice and plan. He was very much into belonging in the service. You know, there was this sense of identity of wearing the uniform. And I would say now I feel the same thing when I go out and I wear a mask: it's a uniform. It says that I belong, you know, to what's going on. He would say, "Honey, I know you don't like it, but do it anyway." There was - I've heard from the woman who was the daughter of the copilot that Dad flew with. And there was a comradery that happened in that crew where they did things to protect each other. And they may not have liked each other. If they were on the ground, they would not necessarily socialize together. But the minute they walked into that plane, they became a team. So that team play of things. He took his responsibilities as a navigator safely. He knew that to get back to the air base safely, he had to calculate and calculate on the money. And he took that really, really serious. Seriously. He was compassionate. They were compassionate. I mean, there was this thing about them that they listened to their stories. They didn't necessarily talk about it, but there was this compassionate identity of just being together. He kept a sense of humor and he would be keeping his sense of humor now. One of the things that he so loved when he was on that plane was cracking jokes.

Boni (27:06):

Yeah.

Yvonne (27:07):

And I heard that from, you know, Susan, who was the daughter, that Dad could help people when they were on flak-happy nerves. And the other thing that really came through to me is, do the right thing. At the end of the war, when Japan surrendered, Dad was either in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, or in Colorado Springs. And the soldiers went to heck in a hand basket, turning over cars, setting things on fire. And Dad left. And he wrote to my mom. He said, "That's not what we should be doing this time. We need to do the right thing." And the other thing that stands out about my father in that sense is his great depth of faith: where he wanted to be at the end of the war was in church and praying. So these little pieces started to jump through. And of course, besides being - going through the war, he went through the Great Depression. So he knew what it was like to do without. And that was also a piece of what he would tell me, you know: you just need to learn to do without.

Boni (28:31):

Yeah. Well, that's all good advice and from a different perspective and good to think about for us in this strange time that we're in. That is pretty much the time that we set aside for us today. I want to thank you, Yvonne, for taking the time to chat with us about your experience writing memoir. Yours was a 12-year journey but not everyone's has to be. We can certainly see why yours was 12 years. So I have also a link in the comments where anybody can check out your author page, Yvonne. And on that author page is a link to Amazon where you can buy the book. But you can buy "Flying With Dad" anywhere you buy a book; it's not only available on Amazon. You can go into your - of course you can't go into the local store now. But you could, if once we get lifted - the distancing requests lifted - but you could go into a local bookstore and say, "I would like to order 'Flying With Dad'" and you can do that. So anywhere you buy books, you can see "Flying With Dad." And next week at this time, John and I - my other co-founder with ingenium Books - we'll be back. And we'll be talking about why nailing down your "why" for writing a book is really the first thing that you need to do. And, Yvonne, you did probably 12 years ago. So - or probably 20 years ago. Anyway, that's it from us. I'm Boni Wagner-Stafford of Ingenium Books and Yvonne, we'll talk soon.

Yvonne (30:04):

Thank you. Bye.

Boni (30:07):

Bye.