Janna Malamud Smith, the daughter of the famous Jewish writer Bernard Malamud, said she only wrote a memoir of her father after wrestling with his privacy concerns.Even though her father, who died 20 years ago, always kept his personal life private, she decided to write a memoir of his life only after her mother and brother significantly changed the text. Smith described the struggle at a talk in Lown Auditorium last Tuesday.

Bernard Malamud is widely known for his short stories and novels, including The Natural and The Assistant, which primarily deal with how Jewish immigrants lived in a poor section of New York City.

The conflict with her family while writing the memoir, My Father is a Book, taught her that personal truth has the capacity to hurt others, Smith said.

When writing a memoir, "the question becomes how fully or bluntly to spell out your point of view," she said.

Speaking more broadly, Smith said privacy has always been necessary for some people to find voices that wouldn't otherwise emerge. In contrast with community-based or, more recently, electronic surveillance, she said, "a certain amount of privacy shields us from the eyes around us and allows us to focus on our own eyes."

But Smith said privacy, if taken too far, can also bring about anonymity or loneliness. Smith said memoir writing, then, fills a need in the face of anonymity, and reflects the increased value of individual experiences.

Memoirs thrive, she said, because people are hungry for intimate details about other peoples' lives in order to feel less lonely.

Smith, a psychotherapist and writer, presented her talk to audience of mostly professors and graduate students in the English department.