"Memories Like Splintered Glass" is Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's first piece of memoir. She is quick to explain why this is: "That fear you have that you will be hurting somebody else by writing about their life--that you have no right to it."

Schaeffer is strongly protective of her children and the rest of her family from public exposure. This is less of a problem at her current stage in life since her children are grown, but she felt this strongly when they were young, The issue of public exposure is a highly personal one for Schaeffer and she admits that she doesn’t have quite enough psychic protection herself.

She spoke poignantly about the feeling of exposure during public readings when the subject is highly charged for her. "'Wordsworth said that emotion has to be recollected in tranquility when you write.' I think that state of emotional detachment is simply something protective and this has happened repeatedly. When I have to read aloud in front of an audience, I suddenly discover that I don't have that emotional protection anymore and then I become very frightened that I'm going to start to cry when I read a particular passage. Every time it takes me by surprise. And I have this phobia about crying in public. When I was young my parents would punish me by making me cry and I wouldn't give them the satisfaction so the idea of making a display of myself in public is too much for me. It always made me more reluctant to read than other people that I knew. And I didn't realize that what was behind it was this fear of crying."

In spite of her sense of vulnerability, Schaeffer almost always writes about things that touch her deeply. She has written about Vietnam, about the Holocaust, difficult love affairs and now, what she considers, moments of pain in an unprotected childhood. "When I wrote "Splinters...," it was as I have described. I end up in a state of emotional detachment from the material. The parts that were about the disturbing things were written as though I was behind that pane of glass before it splinters. But, it's quite fixed while

I'm writing it. When it's finished and I come across it accidentally or am looking at it from another context, it is then that I have the emotional reaction that must have been always been there while I was writing."

She notices that so much of what we select to write about are events that were unpleasant or in some way harmful or damaging. This can cause a "psychic storm" during the writing process, resulting in the cessation of writing because "you can't go on." She has developed a single rule from this awareness, one that she shared with students before her recent retirement from Brooklyn College: "I always finish everything I start." Her daughter has created a screensaver on her computer that reads, "Don't look down!"

Recently, Schaeffer finished a novel entitled "Rules of Attachment" which presented her with an opportunity to use her adage. "About three months ago I would have said that I was never going to finish it because I had never had so much trouble with anything before. The form was peculiar. There are four parts; three were very good and the fourth was terrible. It was like having a four-story building and the second one was made out of balsa wood. It was awful. I would look at it and get very upset because, while I liked it, I knew something was terribly wrong with it."

She stayed with it. She had a sort of faith that she would find her way. Finally she figured out that the subject whom she had made the protagonist was, in fact, not the character she was really interested in. The one she really wanted to write about was a person from the past for whom the protagonist was a screen. "Once I realized that I was writing about the tyranny of memory and the price of having intense early memories, it became much easier to write." She was then able to layer the piece in a way that reflected what the book was really about.

She struggled with parts of "Splinters..." as well. "The parts I struggled with and will have to write about again will always have to do with the grandmother and grandfather who separated and caused each other and us so much trouble. My life revolved around these two." She described the difficulty as having to face that there is this kind of injustice without reparation--a fact she had to face at such a young age. Writing, for her, is her way of demonstrating that, in spite of this, "we can't just sit in our chairs until our heart stops. You have to also write in the face of danger."

Schaeffer has been writing since she was 8 and has been recognized for excellence in poetry (she was nominated for the National Book Award in 1974) as well as her novel writing. And in spite of the fact that she regularly gets stuck and thinks she won't finish, she has a good deal of courage as well as that screensaver to help her finish.

Karen Rosica