Recently
in a writing class, I was working on my next memoir. But I just
couldn’t get the right angle on my material, and I therefore could not
hold the group’s interest. One suggestion after my third rewrite was,
“Embellish it.” Someone else said, “Just make things up. You can do
that in a memoir.” Several heads nodded in agreement.
I was
startled at the ease with which these writers were willing to
fictionalize a memoir. For one thing, James Frey was still being hotly
discussed – and condemned – for calling something that was largely
fiction true. For another, their view was so antithetical to my own. I
have always believed that if you possess the insight and skill to
really capture an event, the truth of it will provide all the drama
necessary to rivet the reader. This is not to say that every
event about which a memoirist writes requires every last detail to be
exact. The memoirist relies upon her memories, which contain lacunae
and distortions. I remember the event one way; the other person in the
recalled scene remembers it differently. Maybe I don’t recall a
particular conversation or essential incident at all.However,
if you are absolutely certain your memory is correct, then that is the
way to write the story. You simply do your best. As Tobias Wolff says,
“It all has to do with the intention.” That intention, as Colleen
Mondor writes, is to tell “an honest story.” But what about
the times when you’re not certain your memory is correct? One approach
to the material is to tell your readers, “This is the way I remember
it.” Your uncertainty can in fact become part of the story, part of the
ambiguity of a life of which you are trying to make sense in your
memoir. Keep in mind, thought, that another requirement of the
memoir is that you must keep the story moving forward. Sometimes this
precludes signaling the reader that the next scene may be inaccurate.In MY MOTHER’S HOUSE, A Memoir, my first book, about ninety-five percent
of the dialogue between my mother and myself is exact. We were very
close –sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad – and all the episodes
and periods of our relationship about which I write were very
emotional, fraught with an intensity that made the details, especially
our verbal exchanges, indelible in my mind. Moreover, my mother had a
flair for language that added to my awareness of her use of it.But
what words did my mother use when she explained her treatments of the
cancer she eventually conquered? I just couldn’t hear her in my mind.
Should I tell the reader, “Well, here my memory is a little hazy about
exactly what we said, but it went something like this.” However,
throughout the rest of the book, I’ve got our sundry conflicts,
diatribes and conversations nailed. Ultimately, I decided that pulling
the reader into my memory process by explaining it would also take them
out of their experience of the story. I recalled enough bits and pieces
of what Mother and I said to inventively fill in the rest as best I
could. So, for the sake of the narrative, that’s what I did.Similarly,
you may indeed recall an event exactly, but that very exactitude might
derail the momentum of the story or distract the reader from the
meaning of the scene. In my book an incident occurs in which I
deliberately altered a detail for both reasons. In reality the scene
took place while my mother was sitting on the toilet. I switched it to
the kitchen table. Then there are those moments you are
recounting in which you cannot possibly know what the other person
felt. They never told you, and you were not there when the incident
occurred. If you make up the scene and don’t inform the
reader, you will be deceiving her. But another way to resolve this
quandary is to say, “I can imagine the terror/pain/joy she must have
felt when – ” and then, knowing the person, go on to imagine those
emotions for the reader. Similarly, you can “just imagine” the way this
person thought or what she must have done when she got that job or
caught that plane.Some memoirists employ very large swaths of
fiction among their memories. But where the intention is an honest
story, the writer will indicate to the reader in some way that these
are fabricated deviations from what actually happened. The problem
comes when no such signal is sent. While Frey is the ultimate
liar, another memoirist, for the sake of story convenience, might give
us composite characters – while leading the reader to believe they are
actual people. To me, that choice exceeds legitimate alterations.In
the end, the key thing is for the writer to maintain integrity and the
trust of readers. The public already must contend with a staggeringly
obscured reality. Most politicians lie; some lie like crazy. They all
spin reality. The corporate media quotes the lies and spin without
discrimination or investigation, while coming up with its own myths.
Digital cameras can transform any visual reality into any other visual
reality. What is true? What really happened? We can’t even depend upon
the food we eat to be real.Currently, one company is
considering placing mouse genes in pigs and not labeling the meat as
such. Once they get that down, they will clone the pigs. Then we’ll be
eating the genetically exact same animal over and over, with its
genetically identical mouse genes, and not even know it. Indeed, I once
read that a species is defined as "a closed gene pool." If this is
true, then what about experiments in which human genes are spliced into
salmon (or some other animal)? What is human? What is salmon?We
ought at least to be able to rely upon someone who is sharing with us
some aspect of their own life story, from which they learned this or
that, and from which we might learn the same, to tell it truthfully.
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