Life History Interview: Session One

I was a little surprised to find out after arriving at GH this morning that the women we were there to interview hadn’t yet been told about us, or that they would be asked to talk about their lives at all. I imagined their anxiety, which then made me anxious. For some reason I had assumed that, while I would present a formal space for my interviewee to talk, I would also communicate to her that she was the expert on her life, and furthermore, that she was helping me learn about interviewing while she told a story that was familiar to her. In other words, I was overly self-conscious about seeming in some way powerful or authoritarian, and had envisioned how she and I would divide this abstract idea of power as though it was a pie that we would cut right down the middle. When we were told that the women were concerned about the interview and were afraid of exposing themselves to strangers, I immediately felt like I had to take charge of the situation; to display the pie intact before handing over any slices.

When I walked into the cafeteria to meet the women who we would be paired with, a woman who was sitting and finishing her breakfast immediately pointed at me and said “I want her. Can I have her?” And then she asked me “Will you take me?” And I said “Of course!!” and mentioned that we should check first with M, who the residents call Miss M. When M came in the room, the woman jumped up to ask her if she could go with me and Melanie looked to me for confirmation that that was alright and I, again, agreed enthusiastically. B was the name of the woman who chose me.

I didn’t ask why she responded to me the way she did. Maybe I looked the most or least frightened? Like I was the smallest? Wearing the brightest color? I guess her reason could be no reason or any reason at all. I suppose that, faced with an uncertain situation, she chose to make it certain by taking charge of her fate in this small way. But the details of the situation were that we filed in and stood awkwardly in front of a small group of women, and felt uncomfortable and not unlike objects, and B saved me from that and led me into the chapel where we did the interview and got me a chair and made sure we had an outlet nearby and took charge of me before I could even do one thing to present myself as in charge of her or myself.

So I wasn’t so uneasy and she didn’t seem so uneasy either, though at heart she seemed a little antsy. I asked her if she’d ever done an oral history interview before and she said no, and I told her that I was a student and interviewing was new to me too, but that I wanted her to know that the interview was for her to share her life experiences, and that it was also to help me learn as well, and thanked her for her willingness to participate with such short notice. She asked about what I studied and what my major was and we talked about breakfast (Laura Starecheski’s recommendation) while I tested the mic levels.

At first I thought that I wanted to start off our interaction slowly and to talk with her for a few minutes before starting the interview, which I hoped would convey that I wasn’t using her for information and would clarify that the priority wasn’t so much my project but her comfort with sharing her experiences. But again, while she was entirely polite and communicative, she seemed hurried, and when I mentioned that I hoped we might talk for about an hour, she opened her eyes wide and conveyed a certain level of fear or astonishment. I guess an hour sounds longer by name than it does in the actual passing of time! Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it. But I reminded her that we could stop when she wanted.

I began with a question about her childhood, her family, and who she lived with when she was growing up—she grimaced a little, but told me about how she had had many guardians, but no real family. It was a little unfortunate that what I hoped would be a slow and simple start was actually precisely what was, for her, so extremely sad and complicated. But she answered readily, and traced her path from her mother, who emigrated from India when B was three, to two foster families, and an adoptive family who abused her and her sisters, to a group home, to a juvenile detention center, back to foster care until she turned 21 in February 2008. I can’t imagine how much strength it takes for someone to grow up without having a clear connection to her own background, or a background that shifted and repositioned itself so frequently.

From this beginning, I tried first to bring out topics that would be brighter, like her relationship with her sisters and her thoughts about school, which she loved, and which functioned as an escape when she was living with her foster family. I did this first because I wanted her to talk about issues that were, at least on some level, comfortable, and showed her abilities both to form relationships and to excel in a formal environment like school. It was also important to me to develop a life history that was not obsessed with adversity, and was filled with many regular details in order to round out who she was. On one hand this was, I think, effective in developing rapport, not only because it was a space to talk about something that she enjoyed, but because it also gave her an abstract way to talk about how she got along with women (like me) and loved school (like me, there as a student). I wonder now, though, how these topics set the stage for the rest of our discussion—if maybe they gave the impression that the more difficult parts of her experience could be excluded from the sort of history I was trying to collect for her.

The idea of history was an important theme for her, which made it even more poignant that she struggled with some parts of her own. She shared a story about her foster family, including the details of the abuse, and described how acceptance of this history was important to her, whereas to one of her sisters, J, it was dismissible; J chose not to remember the abuse. Part of B’s own history, however—the time that she spent in a juvenile center for attempted murder—was not something she felt comfortable talking about. When I brought it up, she immediately stated that she didn’t want to talk about it and she asked then if we could end the interview. I agreed, even though we had only been talking for about 30 minutes.

In a brief allusion earlier in the interview, B said that being in the juvenile detention center—the experience of having her freedom taken away and being treated like a child—made her shut down and turn into a child again, who suffered inside herself and dwelled in a profoundly isolated world. She explained that she rebelled against the abuse when she was old enough to run away and escape from her adoptive parents. In a way, perhaps her rebellious behavior was in direct response to what had been her submissive behavior when she was younger—yet, rebellious behavior got her into trouble too, oppressed her too, and ultimately left her feeling again like a powerless and submissive child who had no voice and no say in her life. This backwards trajectory was something that seemed to bother her; she talked about how she should be “farther along” than she was. Her second childhood seemed no better for her than her first.

Although I was happy to let B determine the length of the interview, it was disappointing for me that I wasn’t able to go back through her narrative and ask her more questions. It halted what I vaguely conceived of as my longer strategy for having her narrate the different phases of her experience. It’s hard to tell whether the interview ended when it did because of B’s own ability to acknowledge all of her history, because of an unarticulated trauma experience that B couldn’t speak about, because I had set an inappropriate tone in some way, or because I had been too lax in my questions.