Thank you so much for this Mary. And Josh! Coincidentally, I was recently emailing back and forth with Iowa food writer Wini Moranville (Wini's Food Stories https://winimoranville.substack.com/) about this exact issue. I was reflecting on it with her because I am very sensitive of the tendency I tend to have as a writer to exaggerate, or change things to make the story better. I do my best to keep myself in check, and I suspected that it would be especially hard with restaurant reviews, in that I would find it very hard to be critical of a restaurant. We both agreed that our readers need to trust us. I was in an interesting situation in that I was traveling across several counties with a young woman friend to a meeting. We had an encounter with a road construction flagman on the highway that was so complex and interesting I wrote about it. When we were coming back from the meeting and I was going to drop my friend off at a coffee shop, she mentioned that she was going to study there for awhile. So, I went in with her, wrote a draft of the story and asked her to read it for accuracy, or if I missed anything in our complex interaction. She made a couple of minor suggestions and it provided great comfort to me that I had presented our interaction accurately. Coincidentally, about a month later in a different county, I had to stop for road construction again. And there was the same flagman! So I pulled the story up on my phone and showed it to him. He read it, was very happy about it and said, "Wow! You captured our conversation perfectly!). If only we had that kind of positive feedback all of the time. Thanks again.
It's such a good conversation to have, and the issue is one I was continually aware of when writing my memoir (Love Is My Favorite Flavor: A Midwestern Dining Critic Tells All).
Filling in small details (e.g., was it tournados Rossini I had 40 years ago, or tournados Clamart?) seems harmless enough. But making up huge swaths of stuff for the sake of a dramatic read (e.g. while I was working at the Country Kitchen, I was addicted to herion and turned tricks in the parking lot) would be utterly wrong. I certainly did not go there.
True, there is no exact line you can point to, but I think every writer knows, in their heart, when they've crossed it.
This is likely the third or fourth time I'll say that your joint responses are the best of this series so far. You cover so many of the crucial issues, I could quote everything. I'll choose this as the heart of the matter:
'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.'
Another commenter, Frank Dent, invoked Joan Didion: "There is no narrative line to events.” Writers impose one, and this is what "The White Album," the essay, is about, when Didion believed she had lost sight of that line, lost the thread. The narrative line is an imposition of meaning, Didion says, on "disparate images" -- a vision of a truth -- and at the end that essay Didion says that unlike Paul Ferguson, the murderer of Roman Navarro, who took up writing after and claimed that it helped him "reflect on experience and see what it means," it has not helped her to see what the events of that late 60s period mean.
Yet Didion has most certainly in that essay collected very disparate images and decidedly imposed a narrative line on them. She sees something. I'm not aware of any arguments over fact in that essay, but it surely has a vision of a complex truth even as Didion denies it (which denial is part of the vision, in that closing opposition).
I'm wondering if we can probe these issues, with this question I'll ask you and Eleanor. You might think it too close to address again, or soon anyway, but I think it might have fruit to bear. @susanbordo writes a good deal today about distortions of fact in historical fiction. My question, then, is how might we distinguish answers on these questions, if distinguish at all, between memoir, as in this question from Joshua, and historical fiction? Are the answers exactly the same, or are there differences?
Jay, you add much here and thank you for what you say about our answers. Though I'm, admittedly, no expert on historical fiction with the exception of having read Mantel and some others, I will share this q. with Eleanor. I do think it's worth discussing, particularly considering what Mantel did with her series. Thank you for this--we'll think about it, but I have a sense that with your Magellan series you might be the expert on this one! ~ Mary
And we'll need those opinions ... anything you can share with me privately beforehand would, in fact, be helpful, Jay. So do, when you have time--as we're doing "point of view" next.
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?
I'm confused about my own writing plans beyond personal essays, which is right now my sole mode of writing.
I'm eager to see the differences between your memoir and your novel in terms of emotional pitch.
I'm convinced that fiction serves better to make social observations. Dickens probably did far more for Victorian efforts to fight poverty than any other writer.
But for personal revelation, I'm in a quandary.
These series of Q and A's are valuable and I appreciate then so much.
This, that Mary raises, truth in fiction, there being more room for it, is so essential and valuable. I've put emotional truths into novels that I could not reveal in memoir.
I don't actually think you're in as much of a quandary as you say--unless social commentary is what you are seeking. Do you think the story that strikes for emotional intensity and truth of feeling need have a social commentary? I wonder about this too, but the books that hold me the most don't do that. Some examples to be discussed. The ones that hold me for all time strike the heart through feeling. I could, of course, be wrong about the power of that view and would love to discuss with you.
David, we could do this by phone if you like today perhaps? or tomorrow--or we could pose it as an additional q --or even better perhaps, both. Also, please check your email--as I have a q. about your point of view question up next.
I agree that fiction gets at the emotional truth in a way that memoir can't--which is why I write fiction rather than memoir! I'm going to pass this post along to my prose group, which had several memoirists.
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.
Thank you so much for this Mary. And Josh! Coincidentally, I was recently emailing back and forth with Iowa food writer Wini Moranville (Wini's Food Stories https://winimoranville.substack.com/) about this exact issue. I was reflecting on it with her because I am very sensitive of the tendency I tend to have as a writer to exaggerate, or change things to make the story better. I do my best to keep myself in check, and I suspected that it would be especially hard with restaurant reviews, in that I would find it very hard to be critical of a restaurant. We both agreed that our readers need to trust us. I was in an interesting situation in that I was traveling across several counties with a young woman friend to a meeting. We had an encounter with a road construction flagman on the highway that was so complex and interesting I wrote about it. When we were coming back from the meeting and I was going to drop my friend off at a coffee shop, she mentioned that she was going to study there for awhile. So, I went in with her, wrote a draft of the story and asked her to read it for accuracy, or if I missed anything in our complex interaction. She made a couple of minor suggestions and it provided great comfort to me that I had presented our interaction accurately. Coincidentally, about a month later in a different county, I had to stop for road construction again. And there was the same flagman! So I pulled the story up on my phone and showed it to him. He read it, was very happy about it and said, "Wow! You captured our conversation perfectly!). If only we had that kind of positive feedback all of the time. Thanks again.
It's such a good conversation to have, and the issue is one I was continually aware of when writing my memoir (Love Is My Favorite Flavor: A Midwestern Dining Critic Tells All).
Filling in small details (e.g., was it tournados Rossini I had 40 years ago, or tournados Clamart?) seems harmless enough. But making up huge swaths of stuff for the sake of a dramatic read (e.g. while I was working at the Country Kitchen, I was addicted to herion and turned tricks in the parking lot) would be utterly wrong. I certainly did not go there.
True, there is no exact line you can point to, but I think every writer knows, in their heart, when they've crossed it.
What a grand comment. That second paragraph truly got to me, Wini. Thanks so for reading and connecting here.
So glad you read and for your anecdote here, Robert -- and for the restack. let alone your post this a.m.! Do stay in touch. ~ Mary
This is likely the third or fourth time I'll say that your joint responses are the best of this series so far. You cover so many of the crucial issues, I could quote everything. I'll choose this as the heart of the matter:
'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.'
Another commenter, Frank Dent, invoked Joan Didion: "There is no narrative line to events.” Writers impose one, and this is what "The White Album," the essay, is about, when Didion believed she had lost sight of that line, lost the thread. The narrative line is an imposition of meaning, Didion says, on "disparate images" -- a vision of a truth -- and at the end that essay Didion says that unlike Paul Ferguson, the murderer of Roman Navarro, who took up writing after and claimed that it helped him "reflect on experience and see what it means," it has not helped her to see what the events of that late 60s period mean.
Yet Didion has most certainly in that essay collected very disparate images and decidedly imposed a narrative line on them. She sees something. I'm not aware of any arguments over fact in that essay, but it surely has a vision of a complex truth even as Didion denies it (which denial is part of the vision, in that closing opposition).
I'm wondering if we can probe these issues, with this question I'll ask you and Eleanor. You might think it too close to address again, or soon anyway, but I think it might have fruit to bear. @susanbordo writes a good deal today about distortions of fact in historical fiction. My question, then, is how might we distinguish answers on these questions, if distinguish at all, between memoir, as in this question from Joshua, and historical fiction? Are the answers exactly the same, or are there differences?
Jay, you add much here and thank you for what you say about our answers. Though I'm, admittedly, no expert on historical fiction with the exception of having read Mantel and some others, I will share this q. with Eleanor. I do think it's worth discussing, particularly considering what Mantel did with her series. Thank you for this--we'll think about it, but I have a sense that with your Magellan series you might be the expert on this one! ~ Mary
Expert shmexpert. I've got opinions . . . 🤷
And we'll need those opinions ... anything you can share with me privately beforehand would, in fact, be helpful, Jay. So do, when you have time--as we're doing "point of view" next.
yes, agree, it's worth discussing. I'd like to get into it.
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?
Thank you, Frank. Especially the Joan Didion quote ...
Mary,
I'm confused about my own writing plans beyond personal essays, which is right now my sole mode of writing.
I'm eager to see the differences between your memoir and your novel in terms of emotional pitch.
I'm convinced that fiction serves better to make social observations. Dickens probably did far more for Victorian efforts to fight poverty than any other writer.
But for personal revelation, I'm in a quandary.
These series of Q and A's are valuable and I appreciate then so much.
This, that Mary raises, truth in fiction, there being more room for it, is so essential and valuable. I've put emotional truths into novels that I could not reveal in memoir.
I don't actually think you're in as much of a quandary as you say--unless social commentary is what you are seeking. Do you think the story that strikes for emotional intensity and truth of feeling need have a social commentary? I wonder about this too, but the books that hold me the most don't do that. Some examples to be discussed. The ones that hold me for all time strike the heart through feeling. I could, of course, be wrong about the power of that view and would love to discuss with you.
No not at all
I think fiction is more effective at striking deep.
Perhaps my quandary is not knowing the emotional key to write in
And would love to discuss whenever you’re up for a conversation
Or when you return from your European vacation! Enjoy. Let me know.
David, we could do this by phone if you like today perhaps? or tomorrow--or we could pose it as an additional q --or even better perhaps, both. Also, please check your email--as I have a q. about your point of view question up next.
I agree that fiction gets at the emotional truth in a way that memoir can't--which is why I write fiction rather than memoir! I'm going to pass this post along to my prose group, which had several memoirists.
Oh, lovely, Liz! Thank you for the pass-on, as well.
You’re welcome, Mary!
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.
As usual, Joshua, an eloquently stated reply that adds to my essay and Eleanor's and my conversation.