I’m delighted to welcome author Tony Hynes. His first book, a memoir of growing up in a remarkable family is now a set text at his former college. 
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I am a new author. I started writing this book (The Son With Two Moms) in earnest in 2011, and have been writing creatively ever since. I love to write about social issues, and always have. When I was in college I majored in Sociology then ended up getting my Masters in it as well. I want to do things, to make things—that inspire people to look at the world outside of themselves, outside of their own cultural groups. Along with writing, I currently teach children with Autism and other special needs at James E. Duckworth Elementary.
I know it’s hard to do, but if you had to describe what The Son with Two Moms is about, in a few short sentences, what would that be?
You’re right this is hard (laughs). I would say it’s about my family. It’s about describing how this foster child, born in Washington DC, can fall in love with two women from New York and New Jersey whom he met completely by chance. It’s about the challenges they face as a Gay Headed, Transracial Household, and how they overcome those challenges by fighting for one another.
Mary Kane, in The Art of Memoir writes that ‘most memoirists are driven to their projects for their own deeply felt psychological reasons.’ With reference to your own work, are you able to share what the motivation for writing your own book was?
That’s a good question. For me, writing my memoir held a deep psychological meaning as well. I would have written this book even if I knew no one was going to read it. There were actually points in the writing process where I debated releasing the material. It was so…raw. I didn’t know if I was ready to share it with anyone else, and I didn’t know if anyone would even care about it. But I continued to write anyway because it was very therapeutic for me. I had a lot of unresolved issues that I didn’t realize until I started to write. Throughout the custody case, and my mother Mary’s death, I had tried to be strong. I rarely emoted about her death, or examined how the custody case had left its mark on me. Writing gave me an opportunity to let the keys talk for me, to express what I was unwilling or afraid to do. As I saw my words and my stories take shape, I gained inspiration to finish the narrative. Also though—writing this book was fun, as weird as that might sound. It was definitely trying in several parts, but the rush I got when my words tumbled together perfectly, and the euphoria I felt when I transitioned nicely from chapter to chapter, was akin to making a great play in soccer for me. Getting to reminisce about good times, and even not so good times, inspired me to continue as well. It was kind of like looking at an old photo album except in this one, you get to add new pictures to the album every day.
Can you describe the writing process – when you started writing and how long it took?
I started writing some of the material that would eventually end up in the book in 2010. I don’t know if I thought it would become a book or not at that point in time. In those early sessions, I just wrote about whatever came to mind regarding my life. Most of the material didn’t make it into the actual memoir, but it became a starting point for what was to come. Chapter 3 “The Family” was changed very little from those early sessions. The first sentence in that chapter, “If I am close to someone, I want them to know every aspect that has shaped me as a man, which is why I only tell a select group of people about myself,” is the first thing I wrote when I sat down to write for the first time in 2010.
After this initial starting point—life happened. I was in my senior year of undergrad and began studying for the LSAT as well, so writing took a back seat. The next fall I started graduate school, so writing took a back seat again. However, it was during this time that I began having weekly meetings with my professor (Kimberly Moffitt) about the book. (Dr. Moffitt first suggested I write the book). We would meet every Friday, and I would share whatever I had been able to come up with in the past week. Some weeks I was able to give her 3 pages worth of material, sometimes 4. Other weeks I was only able to give her 1.
She would look over what I had written, and give critiques. I remember writing things and thinking they were great, only to have her give these varied critiques that forced me to really look at the message I was trying to send with the book. It was during this time that the arc of the story began to form. I started to learn how to write chapters during this time. I knew how to write research papers, but this was a much different type of writing, one that required a different type of nuance. Still, during this time I didn’t try to write any chapters. I just wrote whatever stories about my life came to mind and put them on paper. Time rolled by, as it always does, and before I knew it it was 2012 and I was diving head first into my last year of graduate school. There were papers to be done, tests to be taken, and thesis papers to be written. I also had a part time job during this time, so writing became hard. Still, I think it was at this point that I realized I wanted to write the book. I would steal as much time as I could to write a paragraph here or there. Before I knew it I had about 60 pages of material, much of which I ended up making into “part 1” of the story. I spent the summer of 2013 writing, but I didn’t really find a groove until January of 2014. I wasn’t happy with my writing output at the time, so I bought a calendar and marked off an “X” for every day I wrote. It was a way to hold myself accountable. I wrote almost every day in January, and then managed to write every day in February. I ended up writing every day until I finished the book, which was in August of 2014.
What was the biggest obstacle you faced during the writing and editing of this book and how did you overcome it?
The manuscript was finished in 2014, but the editing process, along with getting everything else decided as far the cover and publishing went, meant that the book wasn’t truly done until the summer of 2015. That was frustrating, but the biggest obstacle I faced was making each chapter fit together perfectly to tell the message I wanted to tell. At first I wanted to surprise the reader with a big reveal that I had two moms, so I had a different chapter to begin the book. Then I decided I didn’t want to do that, so I had to go back to the drawing board. Finding what I wanted to say in the beginning of the book was very difficult. I felt the reader had to be immediately drawn in, but that they also had to grasp the arc of the story in that first page or two, so I messed around with that a bit until I found the right fit. Editing wise, the hardest part was finding the right place for all of the chapters. There was a certain point—maybe in at the end of 2013, when I sat down and did an outline for the rest of the book after I had already written the first 70 pages or so. Before I settled on what would become the first 70 pages I had to cut a lot of material though, and deciding which material to cut was difficult. I ultimately went with what I thought made the story flow the best.
Young Tony comes across as a wise little boy, far older for his age than his peers. Do you think that’s a fair assessment and why?
You know, I think that is a fair assessment. Young Tony, as he appears in the book, had to be written in a very specific way. I didn’t want to try to remember the exact things I thought when certain incidents happened. I knew that going down that path could lead to me misremembering things. So what I wanted to do—what I wanted to capture, was how I felt when those incidents happened, which was a much easier place to write from because all of the times I described in the book are vivid memories for me. I say that to emphasize that my words in dialogue were what I remember saying. However, because I am now 26, I decided to articulate how I felt using my current sentence structures and grammatical abilities, which gives young Tony an older feel at times. Still, when I read the stories again, I am struck by how grounded young Tony seems as well. I think that has a lot to do with what I had experienced at a young age. Before I hit the 5th grade I had already experienced questions about my mom’s sexuality and race, had been asked to choose between my biological family and my adoptive family, and had been told that Mary was diagnosed with cancer. All of those events opened my eyes to things I probably wouldn’t have thought about if they weren’t thrust into my lap. The concept of race held actual meaning for me at a young age in a way that I think most kids probably didn’t think about at that time. Mary and Janet always made sure that I was learning about the world around me at a young age as well. I remember seeing Emmit Till’s (murdered during civil Rights Movement in the United States) mangled face when I was in the first grade. The Quaker school I went to taught me to respect my peers, and I had a wise group of friends around me who helped me be the best person I could be. I made mistakes when I was younger, I complained and whined when I should have been quiet. I didn’t appreciate all the great things not just my moms—but many adults in my life did for me when I was younger. However, my world view hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. I think as children we sometimes think that everybody is good—and not just inherently so. We see the bad people on the news—the criminals as “monsters.” It’s only as we grow older that we realize those criminals and those monsters were kids once to, and that they might not have been as evil as we thought. The world becomes grey. For me, the world was grey at a young age. I didn’t see the people who “hated” our family as monsters. I saw them as reproductions of hate from past generations. I remember watching the United States Civil Rights Series “Eyes On The Prize” when I was very young. In it there was a picture of a baby with a Ku Klux Klan hood on. I remember being angry, angry that this baby was not even given a chance, was branded to hate from birth. I surmised (like so many others) that if this baby could be taught hate, he could also be taught love. I thought of the people who disliked our family in the same vein, and tried to put myself in their shoes, tried to empathize with why they felt the way that they felt. Thinking this way helped me when I explained how our family was and how it came to be to other people, but it also helped me understand the daily problems my friends faced. In short, trying to put myself in others shoes helped me better understand people, which came across in the book when discussing young Tony.
The Son With Two Moms is now a set text for an American Studies paper at your former college. Can you tell us a little about how that came about?
Sure (smiles). After I posted a message to my friends on Facebook about the book, my professor (Kimberly Moffitt) got in contact with me and said that she was proud of me, and was going to teach my book in her course the following semester in exchange for me coming to lecture the students in the Spring. It was a full circle moment for me because it was in her class that she first suggested I write the book. I am honoured to be included in the curriculum for American Studies 200: A Study Of Multicultural America
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