And it begins to replace your memories the way that photographs replace real things. But "it's also a betrayal once you write about someone who's died: What remains is what you've written. My father was a little bit more elusive," she says. "I think maybe with the rest of my family, they're much larger than life. Smith says her father was difficult to pin down, and she wanted to make him "more solid."
But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do." I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. I didn't realize I'd be the person who used my writing in that way. "With my father, writing about him was genuinely an act of mourning. "And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific. "I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person," she says. (Read one of the essays, " Dead Man Laughing," below) Smith says she wrote about her father as a way to mourn him. Two of Smith's essays focus on her father, who died in 2006.
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