I have been preparing a presentation for a conference on the essay A Patient Examines his Doctor by literary critic and writer Anatole Broyard.

While working on my dissertation research on narrative healthcare, Broyard’s writings on illness were on my radar but I hadn’t delved into his work.

I was inspired to re-visit his collection of essays, Intoxicated by my Illness, after listening to a talk by a physician about the lessons she learned from Broyard’s reflections on his relationship with his doctor. Having now read the essays several times, I’m beginning to see Broyard’s work as a literary guide on compassionate care.

In mining his experiences in the “foreign country of illness” – in particular, his feelings of  isolation and alienation — Broyard examines “what sort of doctor he wants to have, and to talk to, and be with.”

With his ideas about clinical relationships in my mind, I happened across a very different but equally compelling story. It is the backstory of Broyard’s own life — a complex legacy of race, identity and family secrets. While well-known as a writer and literary critic during his lifetime, Broyard became a subject of controversy after his death when it became public that he was of Creole ancestry and had concealed his racial identity to everyone except his wife and a few close friends.

His story was explored by Black studies theorist Henry Louis Gates Jr. in an article for The New Yorker in 1996 entitled, The Passing of Anatole Broyard and the controversy reached across the border into Canada through an article by Robert Fulford in the Globe and Mail.

Demonstrating the veracity of Arthur Frank’s contention that stories beget more stories, an inter-generational narrative of race and identify was born when, several years after his death, Broyard’s daughter wrote her own memoir – One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life – A Story of Race and Family Secrets.

In this book, Bliss Broyard struggles to make sense of her father’s decision to keep his background an “open secret” and explores the conflicting emotions and troubled losses he left behind.While she isn’t able to completely reconcile her father’s actions, she comes to appreciate his decision within the cultural narratives of race and ethnicity that shaped her father’s life.

Addressing the issue of what this newfound info on her ancestry means to her personally, she challenges our assumptions about identity stating, “I may never be able to answer the question What am I? Yet the fault lies not in me but with the question itself.” (For more insights see her New York Times interview.)

In resisting the rigidity of identity boxes, personal narrative allows us to explore the intricacies of personal history, family dynamics and identity. Whether it is writing one’s story to map the terrain of serious illness or as a vehicle to explore the troubled legacy of racial trauma and loss, memoirs embrace nuance and complexity.

Because they do not lend themselves to easy endings, memoirs are a critical resource for thinking about identity in more complex ways. Perhaps most importantly, they invite others to continue the story and add their voice to thicken the plot.