Dear Joshua
Mary and Eleanor answer Joshua's question
What are your rules for invention in memoir?
I'm curious how both of you navigate questions
about acceptable levels of fiction
in memoir writing. How much "emotional truth"
is too much? How does one write dialogue in memoir
without fabricating the past and destroying one's reliability
in the process?
Today’s question comes from Joshua Doležal
Memoir, clearly, is held to fact—unlike fiction—and raises the test of fact. But here’s the thing: Questions of memory plague the honest writer and inform our decisions about what we will write and how.
If the lines between fiction and memoir were clean and firm, we might simply assert this: The fiction writer may explore his character’s thoughts; the memoirist may explore only his own. But the line is not clear.
The problem of the test of fact is especially true in the case of stories about trauma. “…[M]emory is crucial because it, like experience, is both what one possesses by virtue of living and what can be constituted as evidence only by submitting it to various tests and protocols of presentation.”1 In short, someone else may have seen it differently or at worse, raise the issues of false memory or forgetting. In other words, “Where there is getting it right, there is also getting it wrong … .”2
In my memoir (Re)Making Love, posted here, I tried hard not to manufacture dialogue and to quote written emails and notes to me, but the navigation question still remains.
Here’s a controversial example of how difficult and perhaps tenuous the route can be: After David Foster Wallace committed suicide, his supposed friend Jonathan Franzen “outed” him in an a public interview with editor of The New Yorker David Remick and argued that Wallace had made up dialogue in a non-fiction essay “Shipping Out” for Harpers—Wallace’s essay about a cruise ship experience. Franzen argued that Wallace had made up or massaged dialogue to suit his piece and other essays he wrote. I found Franzen’s argument to have been a betrayal of their friendship, especially since Wallace had died and couldn’t respond.
But the question remains: Did Wallace take too many risks in the non-fiction piece “Shipping Out”?
I was teaching creative writing at George Washington University when all this happened and invited David Shields, author of Reality Hunger to come to my class via computer to talk to us about what he thought. Shields was quite clear that Franzen was out of line and that the small liberties that Wallace took were in the bounds of fact. I also argued in Wallace’s defense that “Shipping Out” is a memoir-like first-person character study about his experiences on a cruise ship.
What Wallace did doesn’t seem to me to be in a category even close to what James Frey did with A Million Little Pieces. He took a fictional story that he couldn’t sell and marketed and sold it as memoir. That’s lying. The book still sold well even after Frey was forced to go on OPRAH with his well-known editor and apologize.
In any case, the difference to me is clear: One must not lie in memoir. We are held to that test of fact, but we also know that memory is flawed: You and I could be at the same family dinner and see things differently than I did when an argument at the table broke out.
Joshua has written a memoir Down From the Mountain Top: He adds a note to readers: “altered minor details,” “changed or omitted names” and adds this wise advice: “To remember is to reconstruct and interpret and this is as truthful a story as my memory can tell.”
I argue that whichever moniker we choose, story must be chosen over chronology. Once we attempt to relate the events of the past, by necessity a narrative and a form evolve from that attempt. And some element of fact perhaps suffers. By “fact,” I don't mean an event such as a birth or death that can be recorded, but instead the reflective meaning or even sequence of events, not so easily recorded. That narrative—whether in straight forward prose, the lyric essay or poetry—is not easy to define because each of us sees the past and its events through our own lens.
The one thing I can say about my memoir is that I wrote it, literally, while it was happening—and that held me to the test of fact. Do I think we have to be careful about dialogue? Absolutely. It was also clear to me that I needed to build trust in me so that the reader didn’t find me unreliable. My key was the risky tightrope of revenge that I hope I straddled as I kept faith with hope.
But here’s, to me, Joshua’s more important question: How much “emotional truth” is too much?” My answer to that is: We must risk ourselves on the page to ensure not only worth, but reliability.
I add this question: Is emotional truth more real in fiction or in memoir? Many—and please do comment—I expect will argue in favor of memoir. I argue in favor of heart-on-the-page risky fiction.
Re)Making Love, my memoir, like Who by Fire, my novel, is a love story but oddly the memoir is a story that fiction would probably not find credible. I learned through these two books that the fictional account may very well have greater emotional truth and intellectual significance than the factual one.
You can judge as I am now posting, serially, the novel.
The novel Who by Fire I put aside when my husband left me.
The memoir, posted here, is the result of my husband’s decision.
Later, I narrated the novel in an NPR studio for Audible. I discovered in the process of reading it aloud that although the memoir is full of self-revelation—key in my view to any good story—the totally fictional story, like my short stories, go even deeper on the emotional truth level than the memoir does—and boy, did I take risks in the memoir to tell all.
Writers, willing to write close to the bone, often choose fiction because of the greater privilege to get at emotional truth.
I argue this more fully in one of my chapters on writing that discusses “Autobiography and Fiction.”3
What do you think?
Here’s the link to Eleanor’s answer.
Next up: Point of View: We’ll touch on questions from David Roberts, Elizabeth Bobrick, Holly Starley and Julie Gabrieli
Eleanor and I ask you to remember that these are separate posts (we share the video that I record) but we both hope for comments on EACH of our posts—as they are separate. That’s the gift to us both as we work hard to study and consider each q.
P.S.: I have a full course that I introduce here—the link is for you to take a gander—it’s free…. https://marytabor.substack.com/p/write-it-how-to-get-started
If you missed our launch post, take a look at Write it! and This Writing Life.
Ask us a question in Comments or Notes (be sure to tag us both). Or direct message me. I’ll get your q. to Eleanor!
Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of AutobiographyTuama and Testimony, Cornell University, 2001
Ibid.
Mary Tabor, “Autobiography and Fiction”
I'd forgotten that stunt by Franzen (one of many unsavory gaffes of his that might not have been gaffes at all). I think there is a different standard for journalism, and there is some ambiguity about where journalism leaves off and memoir begins in travel writing. So I'd hope that Wallace would have some notes or basis for those conversations. But speculating about that without asking him directly is not terribly helpful!
Thanks for mentioning my author's note. The contrast between your memoir and your novel is also instructive. As I wrote to Eleanor, I have decided not to write my fatherhood essay in real time, partly because I didn't know when I began it that I would get divorced (or that the story that someone else was telling about me as a father would be part of that rupture). Eleanor's point about feeling ready to write the memoir -- and how that implies a kind of safety that is its own evidence of truth-telling -- is very helpful. I'm not ready to tell that story, which is to say that I don't trust that the way I'd tell it would hold up over time, the way I feel my first memoir has.
Having written a novel, I quite agree with you about emotional truth in fiction. We can sometimes delve deeper and speak more truthfully behind the veil. I'm presently contemplating an essay on how constructing a narrative persona in memoir is an inevitable fiction, but one we must come to believe. And in that way, I think we three agree: striking a disingenuous pose is not memoir. But memoir does require us to select and frame, to make choices about tone and emphasis, and none of these choices have higher stakes than those that define who we are as the first-person witness to our own life.
Thank you for sharing your wisdom with me and for extending our conversation in such a thoughtful way.
Yes to everything in your paragraph on narrative. Joan Didion famously wrote “There is no narrative line to events.” By that I think she meant that events alone don’t make the narrative, and perhaps also that we don’t experience the narrative as it happens, only the events. We create the narrative in our heads afterwards.
This involves a certain amount of fictionalizing: in selecting what to include and discarding what doesn’t fit, and possibly some invention to fill in gaps and supply suspense, surprise, irony. The result is a coherent narrative that explains what happened, and perhaps helps readers keep track of the event sequence, but it only came into existence after the fact. It’s not really what actually happened; that would be a dull recounting, like a police report.
And yes to the emotional truth of fiction. I think that’s part of what makes Taylor Swift’s lyrics so effective, that they’re mostly fiction, told by a series of personas. That they’re marketed, maybe, as a kind of real-time memoir, and that many fans receive them that way, is perhaps unfortunate. But I think she knows what she’s doing and that’s inventing, like what poets and novelists do. I mean, they’re in rhyme. Who talks like that?