Laurie Hertzel, the longtime books editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune who retired in 2023, is the author of Ghosts of Fourth Street (University of Minnesota Press, Mar.) a memoir about growing up with nine siblings, one of whom drowned at the age of 18, resulting in the breakdown of an already dysfunctional family.

Why did you decide to write a memoir that culminates in such a painful memory for your family members?

I was nine when my brother died and this story has haunted me for most of my life. I was old enough to be very aware of what was going on, but I was not old enough to have mature feelings, so I internalized everything. My thoughts were, how is this going to affect me? Am I going to get any birthday presents? When will things return to normal? But I also knew that they weren't going to. It was something I thought about a lot while I was growing up, but there was no one to talk to about it. Nobody in my family really talked about it, so I started writing about it when I was in high school. I just kept trying to make sense of it all.

You've written about your family here, and about your colleagues at a newspaper in Duluth, Minn., in your first memoir, News to Me (Univ. of Minn. Press, 2010). How has writing about the people in your life affected your relationships with them?

In News to Me, if I had something negative to say about anyone, I simply didn't name the person. With Ghosts of Fourth Street, it's been very difficult. I have a big family and there is no consensus on what I should or should not write. I've been supported by some, but others have said this is nobody's business; I shouldn't be writing about it. Years ago, I published an essay in a literary journal about my brother's death; I stupidly thought nobody would see it. Someone showed it to my mother, and she was very upset. Some of my siblings were very angry, so I said that if I wrote about my family again, I would change names, and that's what I did. But I really had to think about it: I said I would do it, but I'm a journalist—I don't believe in changing facts. I made a promise, but it was during an extremely emotional time. My mother never spoke to me again, and disinherited me from her will.

There’s a very strong sense of place in this memoir. Was there a strategy in doing this?

All of my life, I have felt really close to that little girl that I was. My memories of my childhood are really vivid and what I wanted to do was to write a book that was like inhabiting the world of that girl: going to Old Main, running through the tunnel, eating chokecherries, and grabbing Mr. Hammer's pear apples, afraid that his dog was going to bite my hand off. That neighborhood was my whole life. We never went anywhere. We never traveled. We didn't even go out to dinner because there were 12 of us. This was my world.

How has your training as a journalist affected you as a memoirist?

It made me very careful to not rely only on my memory and not to load up. There are very few quotes in Ghosts of Fourth Street, because it took place 60 years ago. There are a few things that were said that I do remember verbatim, and they're in there, but I don't make up dialogue. And I fact-checked the details surrounding my brother's death—the things that are checkable, that is. I don't make things up. It's one reason why this book is only 150 pages. Journalism made me a clear and direct writer, a person who is careful of the facts. If you start making things up in a memoir or changing things deliberately, it can very easily tip into fiction because, at some point, it’s no longer true.