Hunger of Memory: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Rodriguez recalls how, following the publication of his first autobiographical essay, he received a letter from his mother saying: “Write about something else in the future. Our family life is private.” Specifically, Rodriguez’s mother did not want gringos to know about her family life. Rodriguez reveals that he considered this question while writing Hunger of Memory. He also reflected on the isolation and silence required to live a writer’s life, as well as his fear that his “absorption with events in [his] past amounted to an immature refusal to live in the present.” He concludes that he will never be able to explain his motives for writing to his mother; instead, he will only be able to reveal them “to public readers [he] expect[s] never to meet.”

Rodriguez continues, arguing that his mother’s use of the phrase los gringos indicates that his mother and father “have not followed their children all the way down the path to full Americanization.” His parents “never forget when they are in public.” He provides further details of his mother’s letter, where she pleaded: “Writing is one thing, the family is another. I don’t want tus hermanos hurt by your writings.” Rodriguez writes that his mother never had to give him these kinds of warnings as a child. As a boy, he was very protective of what he considered his family’s secrets. Though he recalls being sometimes embarrassed at how his mother would use “her ‘visitor’s voice’” when one of his school friends came to dinner, he also remembers how he refused to write about personal topics in school. (When a high school teacher suggested he write about “something closer to home,” he wrote a story about an old man who lived down the block from him.) Not until he began typing papers in college did he gain “a new appreciation for how [his] reader” would see his words. He writes that he is now “struck by the opportunity” that writing presents to engage with an unknown reader. He writes that his imaginary reader is “of no particular race or sex,” but that this reader “has had a long education and that his society, like mine is often public (un gringo).”

Rodriguez describes struggling to explain to his parents his impulse to write. Once, when his mother asked him what a psychiatrist did, he realized that his mother could never imagine talking about her personal life with a physiatrist. He writes that his parents “remain aloof from the modern temptation that captivates many in America’s middle class: the temptation to relieve the anonymity of public life by trying to make it intimate.” Rodriguez realizes that his parents “will be as puzzled by [his] act of self-revelation as they are by the movie star’s revelations on the talk show.” However, he says he continues to write because he still believes that “there are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.”

Rodriguez begins to reflect on what is contained in his parents’ silence. He wonders about his parents’ memories of his childhood, about how different his mother’s version of Hunger of Memory might be. He writes that many people have congratulated him on being the first in his family to write a book. “I stand on the edge of a long silence,” he writes. “But I do not give voice to my parents by writing about their lives.” He argues that his parents are not accurately represented in his writing. Even though he “may force their words to stand between quotation marks,” his parents’ words, spoken only to him, were never meant to be revealed to the public. (Rodriguez also explains the essay’s title: his mother has begun calling him Mr. Secrets because he refuses to tell her about his writing.) Rodriguez finally reveals that the reason he writes is because “by finding public words to describe one’s feelings, one can describe oneself to oneself.” He broadens this argument by claiming: “It is not enough to say that my mother and father do not want to write their autobiographies. It needs also to be said that they are unable to write to a public reader. They lack the skill.”

Rodriguez writes that he responded to his mother’s letter, trying to explain to her that he had not meant to hurt her by publishing the autobiographical essay. The first time he saw his mother after sending his reply letter, she did not bring it up. Instead, he writes, she “sensed that afternoon that the person whose essay she saw in a national magazine was a person unfamiliar to her, some Other,” and she gave him the gift—“the freedom so crucial to adulthood”—to be a different person in public than who he was at home. Rodriguez elaborates that the Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory is not the person his siblings know, but that he hopes they will also understand that, sometimes, one must “escape to the company of strangers, to the liberation of the city, in order to form new versions of oneself.”

Rodriguez writes that he sees his brother and sisters a couple of times a year, but that the whole family only gathers on holidays, at the behest of his mother. He reflects that, at these holiday dinners, she often seems lonely and unable to participate in conversation, speaking only in her “visitor’s voice.” Rodriguez recounts a Christmastime conversation with his older sister, whose questions about his writing he evades. His sister says excitedly says of her son, “Tommy reads and reads, just like you used to.” Rodriguez wrestles with the question of whether he could see himself in this child, whose father is a fourth-generation American of German descent who has spoken English all his life. He continues to narrate the rest of the evening, describing his father—whose hearing and English are both bad—sitting in silence, “a witness to the evening.” When his mother stands in the doorway to see her children off, Rodriguez writes that she looks, to him, small and worried. “I am tempted to ask her quietly,” he writes, “if there is anything wrong.” His father asks if Rodriguez is going home too, and Rodriguez realizes this is the only thing his father has said to him all evening.