Y.A. Kafka: Finding Agency in Childhood Trauma Narratives

In 2007, I attended a writers retreat with the specific goal of writing about my childhood trauma, but the creative process was too painful for me. I couldn’t write at all. I was unable to sleep or eat. With my own body growling at me like a cornered dog, I stopped working on the family memoir I wanted to write. I gave up.

Meanwhile, over the years, my students kept at it. Since Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) such as abuse and neglect impact up to 60% of American children, it didn’t surprise me that many of my college Creative Nonfiction students wanted to workshop memoir chapters about childhood trauma. What has surprised me is how much I have learned, and how much we can all learn, from these beginner efforts.

During one perplexing workshop, my class reviewed two students’ chapters, both of which contained scenes of parents physically abusing young children. My class and I tried to determine why one chapter engaged us as readers while the other left everyone stumped. In one student’s chapter, a father choked the narrator’s ten-year-old brother. In the other, a drunk father woke his grade-school children in the middle of the night and beat them. So, given the similar content, why did one piece find an interested audience while the other was impossible to read?

Consider this scene: the nine-year-old girl who watched her father choke her brother waits until she is alone in the house and phones Child Protective Services. As readers, my students and I suspected the system would fail this small-child narrator. We knew, in the best case scenario, the upheaval of foster care results in a negligible improvement of a child’s circumstances. We knew that interacting with the government is traumatic and often makes matters worse. We knew that foster parents themselves can be abusive. This phone-call scene broke our hearts.

The girl on the phone with CPS assumes that there is a rational order to this life that adults pretend to control. She is doing what the adults have told her to do and thinks that the adults will help her. We readers know what she doesn’t: she’s in for a long, hard road ahead. All of this complexity made the story engaging. We wanted to find out what happens next.

Yet the appeal of this scene is rooted in a more basic sensation. We, as readers, were simply relieved that the protagonist takes action. Any action at all.

The protagonist in the other student’s essay, the girl with the drunk father waking her in the middle of the night, doesn’t take action. Or, rather, the writer of the essay never allowed her protagonist to take action.

The writer didn’t locate her younger self’s agency in the memory and never wrote it into the story. I would argue that this protagonist’s action must be there somewhere in the memory. It might be a subtle action. A small action. It might occur after the violent scene. But I bet it’s there. I would argue that all victims take some kind of action, no matter how small.

The scenes of this drunk father waking his children in the middle of the night had sufficient sensory detail. There was plenty of show-don’t-tell. But it’s difficult for a reader to ingest eight pages of helpless suffering. The abuser took all the agency of the scene. The story followed a victim instead of a protagonist. It’s too painful to read a scene in which a child only endures violence. Or rather, let’s get to the active voice here: a parent inflicts violence on a child.

Many beginning writers addressing abuse get stuck in this glue trap of victim mode. The initial instinct makes sense. First, we record the experience because often we’ve been gaslit out of it. Someone has tried to convince us it hasn’t happened, and so we record the horrible details to confirm we are not crazy. For a moment, the only story we have is a set of horrible details.

The next step, finding agency, is a difficult one to take.

An active protagonist strategy for writing about abuse seems, at first, like advice we’ve heard before about traditional narrative structure. The protagonist must want something. The protagonist must take action. The reader wants to follow a story that asks the question, Will this narrator get what they want?

Now, try applying this strategy to your own childhood trauma. That’s when things get tricky.

As we all know, kids don’t have much power. Their lives are controlled by adult rules, and they are dependent upon adults for their survival. They don’t have as many choices as adults do. This disempowerment is one reason why we are warned against writing about childhood trauma.

No one wants to hear stories whose entire action is children being victimized. I’d say the only less popular topic is animals being hurt.

So, there is this cultural taboo against telling these all-too-common stories of childhood abuse and neglect, and then there are the many would-be writers hanging onto their horrible details, intimidated by both the taboo and the pain of the details themselves.

When I was writing my one-woman show in 2015, reviewing my horrible details was so painful for me that I almost chickened out. I felt like I was back at that writer’s retreat again. And then I remembered the phone call scene from my own student’s story. So, I mined my memories for agency.

Here’s the thing: agency can be a small act. It can be an act of imagination. (Think of the character Precious in Sapphire’s Push, enduring her abuse by imagining herself as a well-dressed celebrity posing for the paparazzi.) Agency can be as simple as getting back up. Or walking away. Agency can be a revenge fantasy. Try to find something!

Go back into the memory and ask, what did I want? What did I do to deal with this?

In one of my memories I was using for my show, my dad made my brothers and I maintain stress positions in our living room in the middle of the night. The director of my one-woman show, Christen Clifford, asked me, “How did you get out of the situation?”

I reviewed the memory repeatedly and realized it was my older brother who saved us. As an athletic ten-year-old, I’d meant to outlast my dad, physically. I’d wanted to keep my arms outstretched as Dad ordered until he was worn out. My older brother, asthmatic and unathletic, eventually dropped his arms … and walked away. Miraculously, this approach worked. My dad gave up on the whole thing and went back to bed.

My brother’s action seems passive at first. Pacifist. And it’s an appropriate one for my brother, who, as a recovering heroin addict and high school dropout, is one of the most well-read people I know. In our twenties, he’d talk about how two of his favorite literary characters were Candide and Bartleby.

My brother “preferred not to” hold a stress position.

Another moment of agency for my show was a revenge fantasy. One time, after my dad’s rage had ruined a family holiday, my brothers and I planned to kill him once he was old and feeble, to push him off a cliff in his wheelchair. When I realized that this children’s murder fantasy was darkly humorous, my one-woman show improved. Whenever my narrator was caught in a horrible situation, and her fantasy life reverted to the murder plot, my audience found some comic relief.

I’m not saying you should find your protagonist’s agency so that you’ll have a traditionally-structured story. I’m saying you should do it because once you find this seed of action in your memory, the memory might be less painful for you to look at. And once you can really look at it, you can write it. And when you write this action into your narrative, your story will be more rewarding for readers.

Once, a listener who heard my story on the "Best of Risk! Podcast" went to great lengths to dig up my personal email online and send me a “thank you” for going public with the taboo subject matter of childhood violence. She told me the details resonated with her own life. Soon afterward, several other strangers found me on social media to express similar sentiments. Agency is what made this connection with my audience possible, because it made the story less painful and more hopeful for those who had their own trauma backstories.

But what about readers who had sunnier childhoods and don’t carry trauma histories? The lucky 40%.

Well, let’s get back to the little girl on the phone to CPS. Her action expands the universality of the story. The reader is no longer witnessing a single figure suffering through an abusive dynamic. This is no longer the story of one little girl in one little family. Protagonist agency allowed this writer to emphasize an unsettling fact: our culture’s childhood trauma stories are not private anomalies but common societal failures that implicate all of us.

If we had merely witnessed scenes of this father abusing his kids, we wouldn’t want to read the story at all. This single phone call grants readers a direct line to our most serious doubts about our culture.

None of our truisms are true anymore.

Parents protect their children, we want to insist. Well, maybe that comforting world view is untrue too much of the time. We have systems in place to help abused kids. Well, maybe that’s not true either, folks.

Here we are, suddenly transported to Y.A. Kafka. Or rather, we find Kafka’s dystopian bureaucracies in a children’s story. Curious George Goes to Foster Care. The Bad News Bears with little Joseph K.’s loading the bases.

So, yes, finding agency in your childhood trauma story is good for the story’s universality. It’s healthy to disturb your reader with a rigorous yet bearable destruction of the status quo. It’s healing to turn a victim into a protagonist.

Agency is also good for you as a writer. And a human being. Finding my brother’s action in my stress-position story was a game changer for me. If I hadn’t found my brother’s agency in this piece, not only would I have been unable to tell a good story, I would have been unable to function well enough to make anything at all. And despite the resistance of those stubbornly upholding the taboo against childhood trauma narratives, we should make this art.

It’s been said that living well is the best revenge. I’d say that writing well is better yet.

*Feature image by Jorm Sangsorn (Adobe)