Lara Tupper: Swift Ink Stories

The Benefits of Oversharing

My paternal grandmother, Grammy Liz, grew up on a farm in Maine, then spent the bulk of her adult life in her linoleum-lined kitchen, where she ironed sheets, towels, and my grandfather’s wardrobe, down to his underwear. She prepped meals for six children. Like Marilla Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables, Grammy didn’t see the need for idle affection, be it physical or verbal. She communicated when information needed to be relayed.

By contrast, my maternal grandmother, Nana, greeted me with a barrage of questions and opinions. She grew up in apartment buildings in the Bronx, where privacy and silence were luxuries. In my last phone conversation with Nana, then 95, she said, “Tell me everything.”

When I sit down to work on my memoir, which has been “in progress” for many years, I think of these two matriarchs—the stoic and the bean spiller—and I’m torn between their opposing examples. My first book, A Thousand and One Nights, is an autobiographical novel, a fictio…