Earlier this summer, my father and I took a fishing trip. It was a three-day trip, and we had two long dinners overlooking a beautiful river, with a moose fording it.
I knew he had some qualms with my book, so I brought it up at our first dinner.
He thought I'd gotten his grandfather completely wrong. That stupid stigma, he said, about the way I'd portrayed him. In the original version of the book, my great-grandfather appeared as an immigrant who sold light bulbs door to door. But to my father, that completely missed the man. His grandfather was an inventor. He created the cube tap, which let you plug multiple cords into a single outlet. He was endlessly creative, a man who built a huge company with his brothers, made fortunes, and lost them multiple times. He was also the grandfather who took my father to the park every week and told him stories about Peter and the boys, stories that were really about magic, about the power my father had inside of him. My father loved him deeply, and my one line, turning him into a poor peddler, absolutely disturbed him.
He also didn't think I'd given my mother enough credit for the care and the love she'd given both me and Scott. He reminded me of the Saturdays he gave up to take my brother and me hiking, or to Train Town in Sonoma, and the soccer he coached. Then he said, "I'm not looking for credit."
But then came the sentence the whole dinner kept circling around. He said, "I think there's a selfishness about it."
He wasn't saying that I was a selfish person. He was saying that the stories I told in my book were selfish. I had told stories about his father, his grandfather, my mom, and him, the only way that I could, from inside my own experience. Which meant the book carries my version of people he loves, and he felt I'd misrepresented them.
When he said that, I could feel this old reflex coming up inside, the one where I wanted to clean it up and make it more acceptable for my dad. But that night I didn't do that. I didn't fight him either.
I told him how even in the book I hadn't made myself a saint. I know that back then I was trying to get everybody's goat, and I even wrote about that too. But I had to be honest about what it was like for me.
At some point, I finally said it out loud. Hold on, I said. So you're saying it was selfish of me to tell my story, but aren't you telling your story right now? What makes your story more right than mine?
After the trip, I sent him a revised version of the chapter about his father and grandfather, where I'd gotten some of the facts wrong. I made some changes, and he offered me a different sentence for something I had lived, but I kept my own sentence.
He still doesn't agree with parts of my book. My father can have his perspective on it and on his own life, but I can also have mine. It doesn't mean I love him any less, or that he loves me any less. It's okay to disagree.
The trap I wrote about is the old belief that to keep connection, one of us would have to contort. One of us would have to give up our account of things. But that night, neither of us did. We each held on to our own perspective, and we honored the fact that the other had experienced the same circumstances differently.
I think that's what deepens connection: the capacity to honor one another's differing perspective. When I clean my account up to match his, he ends up connected to the cleaned-up version of me, not me. If he gave his up to match mine, I'd be connected to a version of him that doesn't exist. But when we each keep our own story and stay at the table anyway, the one being loved is the person who is really there. That night, we both were.