Actuality or Lie: Fiction vs. Memoir
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- October 20th, 2009 |
- Comments
The recent flap about James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces has hit the media with a big bang, bringing the age-old debate about what is acceptable when writing memoir–a “real” account. Every time a memoir is released that gains media attention this debate is raised. Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club, Jennifer Lauck, Blackbird, and Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments, all defended their memoirs in different medias, and all said that any recreations of actual reality had to occur in order to compose the account and make it interesting.
As a memoir educator, I find that people are real apprehensive about the ethical issues involved in memoir writing. For example, the writers ask much questions as, “what if I don’t remember the exact conversation when my mother died,” or “I don’t know what clothes I was act the day my father went away forever.” I am always moved by these innocent, caring questions, because the writer is trying real hard to be honest and accurate, and not leave any room to be accused of dishonesty.
In my memoir Don’t Call Me Mother I researched the time the train arrived in Perry, Oklahoma to make careful the environment I was painting and the conflict with my grandmother about how long she’d kept my father inactivity at the train station–three hours! was accurate. My memory told me it was a long time, but finding the time of regular arrival made me feel great–memory was not all I was drawing upon to create a account that would be appropriated seriously as “real.” In fact, when I began writing the stories that eventually turned into my memoir, I was calling it “fiction,” but the writing group challenged me about how chimerical it was that a mother would act the artifact my mother acted, and that my grandmother was portrayed as “also over the apical,” thusly unconvincing. My answer was, “but it was all accurate.” Their response: “It doesn’t matter what is accurate in fiction, but it does for memoir.”
I realized that the power of the account I was going to tell was that it was accurate, and I did my best to recreate scenes that delivered the actuality. Naturally, childhood memory is personal, any memory is personal, but over the years, as I talked with people who knew parts of the account and visited locations where the account took place, I discovered that indeed I had remembered alright, and I had not made things up in my mind. However, I am careful that if my grandmother and mother were alive to challenge what I wrote, they would have another point of analyze.
In order to reach out to the reading public and go beyond private journaling, a memoir writer must create a account that has a attribute, drama, and account arc. This may mean constructing a environment that conflates time, or adds costumes to our characters that they may or may not have aged, but our job is to be as accurate and as honest as we can be. If we change the plot of our lives because another plot would be more interesting to the publisher, we are in the realm of fiction. If we have we had relationships we didn’t have because it would make a better account, we need to call it fiction.
A memoir writer needs to compose a first draft that sifts finished the happenings, feelings, and challenges and get them down on the page–a draft that is healing and purging–and important activity.
Publishing is another arrange. The writer must ask many questions of the work–how much to include, what is the attribute of the book, and how to compose it so others can identify and believe.
What to have about James Frey? None of us can know for careful what went on for him as he constructed his book, and what he remembered. On January 15, Mary Karr wrote a piece in the New York Times about memoir writing and she had this to have,
“Call me outdated, but I deprivation to act hamstrung by objective actuality, when the real notion has been eroding for at least a century. When Mary McCarthy wrote ‘Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood’ in 1957, she felt obliged to clarify how she recreated dialogue. In her preface, she wrote: ‘This record lays a claim to being historical - that is, much of it can be checked. If thither is more fiction in it than I know, I should like to be set right.’”
Mary went on to talk about how much she learned, and how healing it was when she didn’t make passages in her book more “interesting” or attribute them into a somewhat different account. “If I’d hung on to my assumptions, believing my drama came from obstacles I’d never had to overcome - a portrait of myself as scrappy survivor of honorary cruelties - I wouldn’t have learned what really happened. Which is what I mean when I have God is in the actuality.”
What a great idea&ndashas we compose memoir we are reaching for something beyond our conscious selves. In the river of creativity and the examine for actuality, thither are forces beyond us moving us along to a place we didn’t even know about, a place of healing and resolution. We can hope that James Frey also has found, or is finding, a resolution for his excruciation, and that all memoir writers do the same, by grapple with what actuality is, and writing it out with a full expression.