Comments on: What’s in a Name? Go Ask Margaret

By: marionroach

marionroach — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:54:20 +0000

Hi, JR, and welcome to TSP. We love your work, and I love this perspective. Yes, point of view, however pointed, is so delightfully the place at which the narrative takes a specific turn on what are mere facts. Emboldening those facts, pumping them full of blood, we inhabit them, wrestle them away to make them ours, identifying ourselves along the way.

Ha, ha, ha to the swimming pool. I adore that. I think we need to collect first lines by older sisters on the subjects of having a sister. I’ll get on it. Please come back for more.

By: margaret

margaret — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:51:05 +0000

Welcome, JR Atkins. I wanted a swimming pool, too (or even just more alone time with the parents). Your stories are wonderful. Even my baby sister (who really cannot understand what *we* went through as first-borns, tee hee) will get it when she hears you tell the tale. See you soon.

By: JR Atkins

JR Atkins — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:41:47 +0000

Oh, I love this story, and the analysis of why it’s such a great one. I love the family mythology and the way certain people love to tell certain stories about certain others. Every single time I see my grandmother, she tells the story of the time my cousin and I fired my sister from our family newspaper and then used her stories in the final publication. To some, it seems to reveal the mean-spiritedness of a big sister taking advantage of the little one. To others—ahem—it leaves out the cause for the firing and ignores the fact that it is general practice for an employer to own any work product created by employees. I like the idea that telling your sister’s grand story means you’re also grand, and I too am envious that she has such a grand name story.

My story of my own sister’s birth: When she was born, I was 2. My dad called me from the hospital and told me I had a baby sister. My response, supposedly, was “I wanted a swimming pool!”

By: marionroach

marionroach — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:33:03 +0000

What I love about the truth is that when it comes to family stories, the truth is only one person’s version of the tale. There is Margaret’s truth that she doesn’t use the name, and mine, which includes no small amount of envy that she has such a grand story to her name. Which is why I love to tell it – not because I envy it, but because it is grand – which, I suspect, we need no shrink to unravel to reveal that every time she is grand, I am, as well. Ah, family.

Welcome back, Rona. Lovely to hear from you. Oh, what a terrific nugget, that if we want to know someone we ask about their birth. Such a great question. And so true. I will now go get The Thirteenth Tale. Please come back soon. We love to hear from you.

Hello, Deb. Yes, her name does reflect our community and that, in turn, tells a tale. I frequently think of storytelling as laying out a deck of cars, or so I tell my memoir students. Laying down this card reveals so much, doesn’t it? Thank you. And please come back soon.

By: Deb Wilson

Deb Wilson — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:02:35 +0000

There is Truth the concept, (as in verifiable) and there is the truth of a story (as in “the truth be told”).

It seems to me High Gun as middle name is The Truth of your Sistory, in that her naming was important in many of the same ways any thoroughbred filly’s naming would be.

“High Gun” reflects the community into which Margaret was born and what needs to be any more true than that?

By: Rona Maynard

Rona Maynard — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:01:11 +0000

Fascinating. Does it matter whether this story is verifiably true? In the epigraph to The Thirteenth Tale, which I’m now reading (and loving), fictitious novelist Vida Winter writes, “All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.” (Afterthought: The Thirteenth Tale is about sisters–specifically, lost twins. Check it out.)

By: margaretroach

margaretroach — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:41:31 +0000

I feel compelled to say that although we were always told this story as fact, and that it ran in various newspapers at the time and afterward, that the original birth certificates and Social Security cards and so on for the family (which I possess in a musty old brown accordian file tied with a piece of gray string) do not include any document with my H.G. middle name.

Family stories are so powerful, and they become our truth…but when I go to renew my license at the DMV later this morning, I think I’ll just sign all the forms Margaret Roach. Probably for the best. :)

Now of course I think the story of *your* birth is entirely accurate.