Delia Montrose on Writing About Her Father Without Writing Him Off

The manuscript sat on Ray Montrose's kitchen table for two days before he touched it. It was 248 pages, printed at a copy shop in Alton, Illinois, and held together with two black binder clips. His niece Delia had driven it over herself. She told him to take as long as he needed and to call her when he was done, whatever he thought.

"I was ready for him to say no," Delia Montrose says now. "I had decided that if he said no, I would put it in a drawer. That was the deal I made with myself before I ever printed a page."

He did not say no. He called on the third morning, asked her to change one sentence, and told her that his brother would have hated the whole thing and been secretly proud of it. The sentence was changed. What the River Kept, her memoir of retracing her late father's route down the Mississippi, came out in May.

Most readers know the book through its unlikely rise, which began when a hometown book club took up her first 300 copies and has carried it into a fourth printing. This is a story about the harder part, which came before any of that.

The problem of the other people

Memoir has always had a consent problem. The writer owns her memories. She does not own the people in them. Montrose, who spent twenty years as a claims adjuster before she wrote a word of the book, thinks about it in plain terms.

"Everyone in a memoir is a character who did not agree to be cast," she says. "My father can't answer back. So somebody who loved him had to be able to."

Her father, Frank, worked the river most of his life, first as a deckhand on towboats and later running a small bait shop near the Clark Bridge. In the summer of 1982 he took a borrowed johnboat from Alton to the Gulf, a trip he talked about for the rest of his life and never fully explained. After he died, Montrose found his log from that trip in a coffee can. She made the same run in 2023, stopping where he stopped, and the book braids his entries with her own.

The log is not flattering. Frank drank on the trip. He left a wife and two children at home for five weeks with little warning. He was, by his own written account, running from something. Montrose kept all of that in.

"If you clean him up, you've written a eulogy," she says. "A eulogy is a lovely thing. It isn't a book."

What stayed out

What she removed matters as much as what she kept. The first draft ran nearly 400 pages. Montrose cut a long section about her parents' marriage after her mother, who is still living, asked her to. She cut the name of a woman her father mentions twice in the log, a woman no one in the family has ever identified. She cut a chapter about her own divorce because, she says, it was about her and not about him, and it was the one place where she noticed herself trying to win an argument on the page.

"There's a test I use," she says. "If I'm writing something to settle a score, it comes out. If I'm writing it because the story doesn't make sense without it, it stays. You'd be surprised how often those feel exactly the same while you're typing."

The sentence her uncle asked her to change described a fight between the two brothers in 1979. Ray remembered it differently. Montrose rewrote it so that the page admits it is only her father's account. "He wasn't asking me to lie," she says. "He was telling me there were two versions and I only had one. That's a good reason to leave something alone."

"Everyone in a memoir is a character who did not agree to be cast. My father can't answer back. So somebody who loved him had to be able to."

Advice for the ones still writing

Montrose now gets letters from people drafting their own family books. Many of them, she says, want permission to be cruel, or permission to be kind. She tries to give them neither.

Her advice is practical. Write the whole draft first without showing anyone, so the fear of a reader does not shape the first pass. Then decide, person by person, who deserves to see it before strangers do. Offer those people a real veto and mean it. Keep a separate file of everything you cut, so that you can grieve the good sentences somewhere private.

"And date your drafts," she says. "You'll want to know later which version you were when you wrote it."

She is careful not to turn her own choices into rules for everyone. Some families cannot be asked. Some people in a memoir are the reason it had to be written, and showing them the manuscript would be its own kind of harm. Her situation, she says, was simpler than most. Her father was gone, and the person who knew him best was a phone call away.

Ray Montrose keeps a copy of the book on the same kitchen table. His niece says he has read it three times. He has not told her what he thinks of the ending, and she has not asked.

What the River Kept by Delia Montrose (independently published, 248 pages, $17.99 paperback) is out now.