Wednesday 24 August 2011

Truth and Untruth in Memoir.

Thorny one, this. When you read a memoir, do you assume that every word is 'true?' - and, if you do, do you assume that your truth and the writer's truth are the same thing?

Deep water, this. But, bearing in mind that everyone sees things differently, surely every memoir can only be the writer's recollections. Parents, siblings, friends, may have completely different memories. For instance, I loathed school; I am sure some of my contemporaries quite enjoyed themselves. Both views are equally valid.

But we now know that not all memoir-writers stick to the concept of personal validity, even make things up. For instance, Steinbeck did not spend every night in his green van when he drove round America with Charley; Chatwin may never have made it as far as Patagonia. Does this invalidate their books - both as works of literature, and in relation to their wobbly attention to truth?

And yes, it is relevant to my book. I trotted round the world, and have written about it. And - you'll just have to believe me here - I haven't made anything up. But I have been selective in what I wrote about. For instance, I have not described my rapture at sitting in the Sydney Opera House listening to Rigoletto; rather I concentrated on getting very lost on a beach near Manly. Why? Not because one incident is more or less important than the other, but because it is easy to find images - and youtube snippets - from the Sydney Opera House, and not many of a middle aged woman stuck on a beach with the tide coming in and common sense disappearing over the horizon with its backside on fire.

Every writer makes choices - for the sake of story. And yes, these choices may shape memoir in such a way that the humdrum is drowned and every day is presented as drama. Truth it may be, but can never be the whole truth.  Or can it - do you know of any other memoir writers wrestled with this?

25 comments:

  1. Sometimes the truth is a little dull (not always). Sometimes you have a nugget of an anecdote or a story that just needs a little bit of work to make it interesting to the reader. Surely if you stay true to the core and intent of the piece of writing, there's no problem with a little artistic license. Afterall you're not writing a historical record, you're writing something that you hope will be interesting and stimulating to a wide range of people.
    Though I'm open to being challenged on this one!
    Annie

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  2. No Annie, I'm not going to challenge you. I think we all embellish stories to make them funnier, or more scary.

    What I do question is making things up in memoir, like Chatwin did, or bending the truth so much that it bears little relation to reality - as Steinbeck did. But they both wrote great books - does that make it forgivable? Not sure I know the answer - it's a dialogue between veracity and telling a good story.

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  3. This has reminded me of the epistomology tutorials on my MBA programme! (How sad is that!) I remember being taken by surprise when a few fellow students were truly shocked and un-nerved to learn that 'management books' were written from a particular perspective, in a specific context of place and time etc etc. - i.e. that there was no absolute truth or perfect advice. I think those of us who have spent a lot of time with human beings, individually or in families and other groups, know this only too well!

    My guess is that most of us hear or read the stories of others in the full knowledge that there will be a combination of ....different perspectives on the same event or conversation; probably some exaggeration or embellishment to make it a better story - and sometimes just different interpretations of the same words. So as a writer of non-fiction you seek your own balance - the one you can live with - between literal 'truth' and a good story, and then as a reader I will take from it what I want to.

    Does this make any sense??

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  4. Of course it makes sense, Carolyn!

    I think there are two separate issues. If a writer actually fibs on a memoir (such as Chatwin's interviews with Welsh families in Patagonia, which probably never happened) then that is cheating.

    But selecting one part of the story over another, with embellishments to make it funnier - then surely that's fine. Provided, of course, that no-one is libelled in the process. But - from a writing perspective - it has been fun to take things that really happened and weave them into a story that is, hopefully, entertaining.

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  5. The material of my life as a nurse was too sensitive for a memoir. If I wrote about experiences with certain children at certain hospitals I could be liable for a breech in patient confidentially, so I wrote a novel instead. I had total freedom to disguise the real stories by changing the sex, hospital name, and city where the child or I lived and retain the heart of the story. In the end, the story took on a predinatural twist that made the story zing. The twist wasn't a lie. What happened in the novel really happened to me but in a less tangible way.
    As for Carolyn's comment, my readers interpret the ending in different ways and take from it what they need or what they believe.

    Shelia Bolt Rudesill

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  6. I think it depends what you are setting out to do. I looked up Chatwin (not being over familiar with the whole situation) and it seems that he was an innate story teller who was completely happy to make stuff up and felt no guilt whatsoever about what he did, so for him it was ok. You are a much more honest, ethical person that he was - and therefore for you all your work seems to need to be much closer to the truth.

    From the point of view of a reader, I believe that pretty much nothing I read is the gospel truth anyway. People exaggerate for effect, show blatant (or not so blatant) bias, and sometimes just make stuff up. And that's ok - if I feel a need to know the truth about something (like a news story) I'll check a variety of sources - and preferably try to find a variety of media. Otherwise, I'm not that bothered - as long as I get what I want - which is normally a good story, it matters less to me.

    I do recognise that I am coming at this as a historian - for whom all sources show an inherent bias anyway and the object of the exercise is to figure out what that bias is. Feel free to take your social science backgrounds and jump all over this if you so choose.

    Incidently, I discovered that Chatwin went to Marlborough College - I always thought talking crap what a curriculum subject - now we know!

    Anna

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  7. Shelia - that's such an interesting perspective. I spent thirty years working in Child Protection, and occasionally write short stories about fostering or adoption - but they are always stories. I know the context very well, but am always very clear that these stories are fiction.

    Memoir, however, is different - as it claims to find its foundations in lived experience. Where the issue of truth comes in, as I see it, is when the writer bends that experience for the sake of story. Which seems fine, most of the time - and only wobbles when the original event is made up. Then it is fiction.

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  8. Anna - thanks for coming at this from the perspective of historian, and a reader looking for a good story. As a reader, you want to be entertained, maybe surprised, but don't necessarily want to engage with the deep and meaningful.

    But as a historian you look at text differently, and work with bias - trying to unpick it rather than challenge it. Not sure it's a social science v history thing - but it's certainly a really interesting way of looking at it. Thanks.

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  9. You touch on some interesting points here.

    Do I expect memoir to be truth? I want it to be true, at least from the author's perspective. I know there are different 'versions' of the truth and that's fine, just give me the version you believe in. I understand facts are embellished or exaggerated for effect. The big jolly woman at the beach may have been a skinny little man, but I want you to actually have been to the beach. Sadly, I'm more inclined to be suspicious of memoir these days.

    As for leaving out parts. That's fine by me, you're writing memoir not autobiography. I don't want to read that you went to the shops every day unless it's relevant to what you're telling me. I assume that even writers of the most exciting memoirs have 'boring' bits that they leave out, in the same way that I assume they eat, sleep and breathe even though they don't mention it.

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  10. Sarah -

    This is exactly where I'm coming from. I've had to recognise that not all memoir-writers take this approach, but - for the sake of my own integrity if you like - I've felt a need to tell it like it was with funny bits thrown in to make a good story.

    (And I can even think of a very big woman on a beach in Goa - so huge that I could see her from the sea, and she was my signpost to where I left my towel! I gave her a not-very-flattering name in my head. Far too rude for this blog!)

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  12. Do I expect memoirs to be lived experience? I think memoirs are just that - memories. Memories which are notoriously unreliable, muddied, confused and sometimes just plain false. If i were reading journals or diaries I would expect them to be factual accounts of lived experience but memoirs are something else. Maybe Chatwin is the rogue Anna suggests and blatantly made up stories or maybe he just recounted false or mixed memories. Not sure it really matters to me.
    Mark

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  13. Thank you, Mark. It's been a great discussion.

    Maybe you are suggesting that now I need to work on making sure my book is the best it can be - based on lived experience, and with embellished bits to make the story stand out? Stop worrying about truth and get back to thinking about story.

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  14. It has been a good and thought provoking discussion thank you Jo. Yes I think you have my feelings about right. Tell a good story. I remember a really good film about a teller of tall stories and after his death his son discovers the stories were truer than he ever believed. Great film, can't remember what it was called - about a giant carp.
    Mark

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  15. Big Fish by Tim Burton. Very good film.
    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319061/

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  16. Thanks Mark - will look up the film, and sounds interesting.

    And then get back to telling stories.

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  17. It does all depend on pov, of course. We all see and experience things differently. It follows that our telling of a story or experience will vary. Nice blog, Jo, :)

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  18. Thanks, Sheryl.

    POV is, of course, central - but then the memoir-writer makes choices about what he/she includes, and may embellish that in the process of making a good story. Consensus here seems to be that doesn't matter!

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  19. Mark's point about the degradation of memory is very true - we can never guarentee the full accuracy of anything we remember and recount unless we carry a dictaphone around and record every single detail of everything! Even then it is subject to the individual's perceptions of events.
    Thank goodness the consensus was not to worry too much as long as there is no deliberate or malicious intention to mislead the reader - life feels to serious anyway without something else to worry about!
    Annie

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  20. Annie - thanks for coming back. And I don't think I was actually worried, rather curious - whether, when people read memoir, they got caught on issues of validity or just wanted a good story.

    I've got my answer - and hasn't the discussion been fun!!

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  21. Just read a review in the Guardian of Candia McWilliams' memoir on her recent blindness that looked v interesting (I love her short stories)

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  22. I agonised over this when writing my memoir. At first I got so hung up about trying to write only the truth that I could hardly write at all. For example, I wanted to include some minor details to bring scenes alive. But was someone's dress blue or green? Was it okay to make up a colour for it if I wasn't sure, as long as it in no way detracted from the main points? I finally decided, yes, okay to flesh out half-remembered scenes with invented minor details, but I did not, to the best of my knowledge, distort the substance of the true story.

    I explained this in my Authors Note at the front, but one reviewer misunderstood and said that I had said myself I'd embellished and that therefore we don't know what is fact and what isn't in my book. I found this really hurtful as I knew I had been as truthful and factually accurate as it is possible to be in a memoir.

    Memory is inevitably fallible and anyone's version of reality is a perceived truth, but I worked hard to recreate my experiences with scrupulous honesty, telling truths as I perceived them.

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  23. Jean - I think it's impossible to please the memory purists, and the task of the memoirist is to tell a great story that is based on the truth as you see it. (This is not autobiography - that needs a much closer attention to fact.) So making up the colour of a dress, making up dialogue, even embellishing an aspect of the story to make it more exciting - all that is fine. And, from the comments here, it's clear that readers of memoir expect us to do just that.

    Elinor - am off, now, to look at that review. Thanks for flagging it up.

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  24. I believe it all comes down to memory and perception. David Carr in his memoir, The Night of the Gun addresses this very topic.
    Nice to meet you as part of the campaign/memoir group.

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  25. Welcome, Susan. I'll make a point of tracking down that book.

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