Two Daughters Tell the Truth
By Chelsea Boes
In a carpeted room of the West Asheville library, two memoirists sit behind a table. They’re about to tell the truth about AIDS, family secrets, and the power of narrative nonfiction.
The front parking lot is full, but the chairs are still filling. The first memoirist, Melanie Brooks, softly asks library branch manager Sherry Roane to “Give it five minutes.”
This proves to be a good idea: Among others, a woman with long brown hair streams in, holding up a copy of Brooks’s book, A Hard Silence. “See where I am?” she asks Brooks, showing a bookmark in the middle.
Soon Brooks stands, sandy hair falling past her lapel, to give the backstory behind the chapter she’ll read from her book:
Her father, Dr. Orville Messenger, needed quadruple bypass surgery when Brooks was 13. During the surgery, he was given blood tainted with the HIV virus. Expecting his death within six months and aware of the stigma his diagnosis would carry, his family kept his condition a secret. Instead, he lived for 10 more years, the entirety of Melanie’s adolescence—marking it forever with a heavy burden of secrecy.
Brooks carries an important part of her father with her: his name. Messenger is one of her middle names—and also what she grew up to be. “It’s the story of what happened to me when HIV happened to him,” Brooks says, then sets off reading. Though she’s publicly read this particular chapter, The Ryan White Story, and Mine, around 15 times, she still sounds curious about the words.
In the chapter, 15-year-old Brooks comes across The Ryan White Story on TV while babysitting. The movie, released on ABC in 1989, tells the true story of Ryan White, a teenager with hemophilia who contracted AIDS through contaminated blood products.
Teenaged Brooks wants to disconnect from the movie. But she’s glued. The movie ends with the credits rolling and “I’m Still Standing” playing.
Brooks, the grownup one, is still standing too. But she’s also confessing to us that though she knew the movie was over, the story wasn’t. Ryan would die. Her dad would die. In the next scene in the chapter, she’s demanding of her mom in the school drop off line, “Is Dad going to die? Tell me.” The chapter ends with her mother waving goodbye with tears tracking down her face.
The audience, who during the reading held hands over their mouths or leaned in to listen with deep frowns, now applauds.
The second memoirist, Laura Carney, lost her dad to a distracted driver. Her new book, My Father’s List, details her journey through her late father’s bucket list. Carney checked off one of the items (“swim the width of a river”) in Asheville’s French Broad. Her book also reveals a family secret: Her father cross-dressed. Later she told me that telling the secret “took away the secret’s power” over her.
The two have visited dozens of cities to tell their stories. But tonight is Brooks’s night. Carney is here to interview her and watch her shine. “Melanie is my hero as a writer,” she says. When Carney was writing her book, she Googled “How to write about family secrets.” Brooks’s earlier book, Writing Hard Stories, came up in the search. Carney rewarded herself for each chapter she wrote by reading a chapter of Brooks’s guide.
“Grief sticks with you if you don’t pay attention to it,” Brooks says. She wrote the earlier book because she wanted to know how memoirists “get to the point where they have” holding up her book— “this.”
Before closing, Brooks clarifies that she doesn’t refer to her dad as “an innocent victim.” She says there are no ‘guilty victims’ of AIDS. “A disease does not have the power to discriminate. People discriminate.”
Malaprop’s Bookstore sells copies of the two books from a table in the back, donating 10 percent of sales to the Western North Carolina AIDS Project, which serves thousands of people across 18 counties.
Chelsea Boes is editor of WORLDkids Magazine, a book and movie reviewer at WORLD Magazine, and a columnist for the Asheville Citizen Times. She lives in Old Fort, NC.
