A conversation between Robb Forman Dew, author of The Truth of the Matter, and Katharine Weber, author of The Memory of All That.

RFD: The Memory of All That is about a fascinating group of people, many of whom played a large role in shaping our popular culture. And yet the complications and eccentricities detailed are mind-boggling. In relation to this book can you tell me what you first think when you hear a family described as dysfunctional?  Would you apply that label to your own family?

KW: But, Robb, who would want to read a book about utterly functional people? Do perfectly content, sane, serene people accomplish anything of note? Are they interesting? Are there any worthwhile novels or plays or movies about people who are not in some sense “dysfunctional”? As a novelist, I find weird and outrageous behavior intriguing, which is not at all to say I am especially tolerant of bad behavior. Admittedly, my family’s dysfunctions over several generations were certainly more colorful and extreme than most. But in the book I avoided using this word. It’s a clinical caption, easy to assign to anyone, which in a way can foreclose further reflection or analysis.

RFD: Do you believe that there are members of your family who were intentionally destructive of the communal goal of serenity that most families strive for? Did your family give much thought, in fact, to serenity? How did your family perceive itself? I'm thinking particularly of your mother, who remains rather mysterious throughout the book. 

KW: When I think of “my family” there is such an extraordinary range of characters who come from very different worlds that it is hard to characterize them as a single group. The Swifts were cultured people who encouraged creativity, but there is nothing in my grandmother’s background that would make her destructive affair with George Gershwin seem like an obvious or inevitable choice. The Warburg family were extraordinarily accomplished people who certainly had a unique sort of arrogance and entitlement, but it was the flip side of their fantastic sense of noblesse oblige, and as a family they certainly were effective in their devotion to making the world a better place. The Kaufmans and Gottesfelds were certainly not very serene people; they were cynical refugees who scrabbled their way to a comfortable existence in what they regarded as an essentially unfair world. In my family of origin, the fractures and divisions about self-perception, which is what you are asking about, were the very things I struggled with growing up. Were we poor Kaufman immigrants who had made ourselves from scratch? Were we privileged Warburgs whose philanthropy and influence was everywhere? Or were we Swifts and Faulkners--witty, intellectual people who didn’t know whether to be amused or embarrassed that Benedict Arnold had married into the family? My mother’s hugely complex ambivalence about her identity and background were incredibly confusing to me as a child. I doubt very much that anybody ever mentioned the concept or goal of “serenity” to me when I was growing up. 

RFD: I haven’t run across anyone as fascinating as your father since reading Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception which describes his own father. But, unlike Wolff’s book, The Memory of All That is both hair-raising, in regard to your father, as well as being astonishingly, unexpectedly, even, perhaps, unreasonably funny. Is that a gift you decided to give to the reader? Was the humor intentional? In fact, as you worked on this book was it always humor?

KW: I am sure my unusual childhood conditioned me to being able to laugh readily at shocking and disturbing incidents and situations that other people are more likely to be dismayed about, at least on first reading. I don’t in the least think I have a lack of compassion for people, however, including my own childhood self as I endured those situations. While I didn’t make a conscious choice about using humor, per se--I wouldn’t have known any other way to tell these stories--entertaining the reader was certainly my intention. Writing the book was not an unremitting stream of laughs, however. I was writing about things that were enormously painful for me, and revisiting them was an intensely emotional experience. Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” If I can make you laugh even as you are moved or saddened or enraged by what you are reading, then your experience of my book is that much more complex.

RFD: How do you suppose you survived being your own--and your only--parent, essentially, beginning about age four? And you not only survived, but you’ve thrived vigorously!

KW: I think I filled in a lot of blanks imaginatively, starting at a very young age. And I felt very loved by my maternal grandmother, Kay Swift--she made all the difference for me. I think that comes across in the book. But I was a very unhappy and depressed child, and a nearly crazy teenager. Although I chose not to mention this in the book, I owe a great deal to a long, traditional psychoanalysis, as well as to some other forms of committed serious introspection, over the years. Also, I think I have been very lucky. I married young, had two children in my twenties, and have had a very rich and complex marriage and family life of my own for the past thirty-five years.

RFD: Your grandmother, Kay Swift, is a pivotal figure in this memoir, as is her husband, the economist and friend of FDR James Warburg, as well as Swift’s long-time lover, George Gershwin. You write with striking authority about those complicated and often heart-breaking relationships, and I’m curious about your thoughts on the custody of memory. Do you feel that at any point you overstepped? That you describe events and emotions that are bound to be purely conjecture?

KW: “The custody of memory” is such an intriguing concept, Robb! My grandmother did not like dwelling on the past. I am sure that she would not have enjoyed reading my speculations about the likelihood that she had an abortion in July 1934, and because she was sleeping with three different men at that time--her husband, Jimmy Warburg; her lover, George Gershwin; and her unscrupulous psychoanalyst, Gregory Zilboorg--she probably wouldn’t have known whose baby it was, which would have made it that much more of a crisis. I am sure she never dreamed that her best friend Mary Lasker would save every intimate letter she wrote her over many years, and that those letters would now be archived in a university library for anyone to read. But I also think my grandmother would have accepted that The Memory of All That is my story, and this is my book. In many ways, in the chapters devoted to her, my grandfather, and George Gershwin, I have written a corrective counter-story to the many books that have been published over the years by all sorts of people with all sorts of agendas. I do think she would recognize my loyalty and devotion to her legacy. And when it comes to other people in the cast of characters, I don’t believe I have overstepped in anything I have written. I certainly don’t agree with the adage about not speaking ill of the dead. Who better to speak ill of?

RFD: Katharine, I think one of the most succinct descriptions of a relationship I've ever seen is yours of your own parents’ marriage: “My father dreamed of being somebody and my mother dreamed of being nobody." Which of those opposing desires did you come down on?

KW: Even as I feel much more identification with my mother’s family than my father’s, and even though my loyalties in the 35-year conflict that was their marriage were almost all on her side, my ambitions and accomplishments make me more of a match to my father than to my mother. Were I purely my mother’s daughter, I wouldn’t have published five novels and this memoir, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation!

RFD: At one point you speak of visiting your glamorous grandmother, Kay Swift, in her New York apartment, and of how you missed George Gershwin even though you had never met him. Only in retrospect does that strike me as an odd claim. Can you explain exactly what you meant?

KW: Some children grow up in a religious family and feel the love of Jesus, whom they have never met, though His presence is everywhere. In my family, my mother and grandmother talked about George Gershwin with what felt to me like a near-religious devotion. As a child, I felt his presence in his absence. From a very young age, I recognized how much they loved him and how much he loved both of them, too, and I felt excluded by this. I would study his photograph on the wall in my grandmother’s apartment, willing him to be alive and present in the room, wanting him to come back for them, but also, I wanted to be in his presence.

RFD: There have been a spate of memoirs lately that have been both fascinating and also occasionally horrifying--and even peculiarly embarrassing to the reader--in what they reveal. Did you ever worry about disclosing personal information about your family?

KW: You know, Robb, I certainly didn’t set out to write one of those cringey books displaying what my mother used to call “dirty laundry.” As I reader, I find hugely distasteful those memoirs that are as loaded with intimate disclosures as they are devoid of insight and awareness. No matter how careful and aware I think I have been, I am sure there will be readers who will disapprove of what I have chosen to write about, but I accepted a long time ago that I don’t write books that will please every reader. Meanwhile, members of my family have been gossiped and speculated about very publicly for decades, by people far less informed and thoughtful than I think I have been.

RFD: When I become as absorbed in a book as I did while reading The Memory of All That, I'm reluctant to let it go. I browse the copyright page, find out who designed the jacket, go over the photographs once more, and so forth. But upon careful investigation your book provided me with a real mystery! I was taken aback by the dedication: For Nick, O.L.I.H.T.S. I hesitate to mention the various combinations of phrases I teased out trying to come up with the meaning. I have been gullible and naive all my life, and I couldn't imagine how these letters could be arranged into a sentence that must remain unsaid—my conjecture became more and more bawdy and even downright bizarre. And then it hit me like a bolt of lightning—I am thinking of a song by George Gershwin (though I don't want to be a spoiler). Am I right? And, if I am, then may it always be so for both of you!

KW: Robb, you are exactly right. “Our Love Is Here to Stay” is what my husband and I have inscribed inside our wedding rings, and it is actually the same dedication I used for my first book. When Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear was published, many people asked me about the mysterious dedication, and I would always agree to tell them what those letters stood for if they would first propose to me a solution of their own. I kept a notebook and collected many wonderful examples. One that comes to mind is, “Oh, Look, Iris Has Tumbled, Stan.” Although I never say this in The Memory of All That, the song “Love Is Here to Stay,” one of the very last songs Gershwin wrote for the score of the film The Goldwyn Follies (which was released after his death), has a lyric by brother Ira that can be read as George’s wistful revisiting of his romance with Kay Swift. They would never, ever meet again, but he would never forget the way she changed his life, and the way he changed hers--in other words, the memory of all that. 

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