First things first: I’m not looking for condolences, “I’m sorrys,” or advice about forgiveness. I’ve done all that. If you can’t resist, if unsolicited advice is your currency, know this: I keep boundaries like talismans. Cross them and the door closes.
Boundaries are what led to the estrangement. It didn’t happen all at once, but person by person. And while I thoroughly grieved each loss, I’ve made peace with them all.
My dad: We’ve been estranged since my youngest son was two. He’s now 35. When I tried to talk about my childhood, my dad shut me down: “You can write to me about what your kids are doing or about the house [my then husband and I were building a custom house], fine. But if it’s about any of this other stuff, don’t bother me.” He also told me he had “a new family now.” I took him at his word and wrote one last letter saying the door would always be open if he ever wanted an honest conversation. Thirty-three years later, it’s still open.
My mom: Our falling out was slower, with repeated “come back” attempts, always on her terms, always at my expense. Her well-disguised narcissism unraveled when I could no longer pretend. The final break came in 2017.
My younger brother: Our estrangement fell between the two. Ask him why, and he’ll tell you it’s because I’m crazy. That’s all.
So, why am I sharing this?
First, because I’m often asked when I do public readings: “Is this autobiographical?” (A bad question, in my opinion. I’ll say more about this in a future post.)
If I wanted to write my autobiography or memoir, that’s what I’d be doing. Writing fiction is a choice I’ve made for particular reasons. In short: fiction is a superior form of writing, in my opinion. (More on that, too, in a future post).
Another reason I’m airing my dysfunctional family estrangement is because:
- being abandoned by them taught me resilience. It shaped me into a tenacious, self-contained, resourceful human who isn’t afraid of doing life alone. That has been pure gold.
- it’s taught me that “Love conquers all” is only an adage. In my experience, shame and fear often outweigh love. (That doesn’t make me jaded. It makes me a realist.)
- maybe most importantly, this is the soil where my fiction grows.
These experiences—loss, resilience, the complicated messiness of dysfunctional family dynamics—are the threads I weave into my fiction. Writing is where I transform the raw emotional material of my life into story, where pain becomes meaning, and where characters walk paths I recognize.
So, when people ask me, “Is this autobiographical?” about my work, the answer is always “no.” I don’t write about myself. I don’t need to anymore. Because I have the perspective… The distance needed to make meaning of human dramas and the human condition on a wider scale, to make my stories universal.
I let my characters have their own struggles, I walk beside them the way a parent does a child, and I serve as a guide on their path to meaning making about the human dramas readers identify with, which leads to recognition, validation, and connection.
And in the end, it leads to healing.
Hi, I’m Johnnie Mazzocco—Word Witch, Story Alchemist, Sage. I’m here to heal the world through stories, whether the ones I write and tell or the ones I help others write and tell.
Have you worked with a real word witch before? It’s time.
More to come about my family and how it has informed my fiction…
