From the intro to a longer story in
The Baltimore Sun:
Steve Luxenberg is a journalist and a son, and he is scrupulous about fulfilling his differing responsibilities down to the smallest detail. But sometimes, the two roles he's played haven't always jibed.
On at least one notable occasion, the son prevailed. At other times, the reporter won out.
Luxenberg's book, Annie's Ghosts, which was published this month, is part journalism, part social history and part family memoir. It also can be read as the author's struggle to reconcile the competing parts of himself, to pay his familial duty to his mother while remaining true to the values of his profession.
"I think I did succeed in being both a journalist and a son," says Luxenberg, an associate editor for The Washington Post, and a former reporter and editor for The Baltimore Sun.
"At least, I hope I did. I didn't hold back on the readers. I didn't leave out facts of any importance, but I also remained empathetic to my mother. One bookseller told me, 'There's a lot of love in your book.' "
That author's internal conflict began in 1995, when he learned that his mother was not the only child that she claimed to be for nearly all of her life. In reality, Beth Luxenberg had a disabled younger sister named Annie, who, decades earlier, had been sent away to an institution in Michigan. Beth had hidden Annie's existence from everyone: her neighbors, her closest friends, her three sons and two stepdaughters, and - possibly - her husband.
After Beth died in 1999, her journalist son set out to find out as much as he could about the aunt he never knew. He also wanted to figure out why his mother, who taught her children to always tell the truth, had lied about a matter of such importance.
In the month since it was published, Annie's Ghosts has received some national attention. There have been reviews in The Washington Post and The Detroit Free Press, and a lengthy interview with the author was broadcast recently on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.
Critics have commented on the hybrid nature of Annie's Ghosts, which mixes objective and subjective methods of storytelling. It's a rare memoir in that it contains 22 pages of footnotes.
The author's obvious passion for the truth is one of the most touching aspects of the manuscript. Luxenberg bends over backward to avoid inadvertently coaching his sources and tainting their recollections. He is painstaking about distinguishing between what he knows for a fact and when he is unavoidably drawn into making suppositions.
Even his Web site ( www.steveluxenberg.com) has been professionally edited for accuracy.
That compact with his readers is why Luxenberg eschewed the narrative storytelling style now in vogue, which uses fictional techniques to tell real-life stories. His prose style is plain and unadorned, without fanciful images or hyperbole.
"One of the things this book is about is the distortions that memory imposes on truth," he says.
"In some instances, I'm interviewing people about events that happened 50 years ago. I couldn't bring myself to pull a fast one on the reader by telling them that this is the way things really happened.
"I also saw it as an opportunity to teach readers about the methodology that journalists use. My experience is that people enjoy being shown how the sausage is made."
Yet, for all Luxenberg's diligence, there was one time when he deliberately allowed an error to make it into print. When Beth Luxenberg died, Steve prepared information for the obituary that ran Sept. 3, 1999, in The Free Press. The article describes her as "an only child of immigrant parents" - a statement the author knew to be false.
"That is the most mystifying thing to me," Steve Luxenberg says.
"I had known about my aunt for several years. So how could I, as a journalist, write that my mother was an only child? Maybe I was being respectful of the way she'd want to be remembered. Or maybe I didn't fully believe that she really had a sister."
Annie's existence came to light in 1995 in a roundabout manner, in a phone call made by a social worker to Luxenberg's half sister, Marsha Rosenberg. She told Steve about Annie, and they later told their siblings.
From the intro to a longer story in The Baltimore Sun: