Writing Literary Memoir: Are We Obliged to Tell the Real Truth?

142Fourth Genre ent. Personal essayists do not need to have enormous vocabularies or—spare us—a gift for grandiloquence, but they must constantly adjudicate the voices in their heads and choose the right language. These, then, are the essential shaping devices, the tools of the essayist's craft: beginnings and endings, proportion and pace, and language. They do not involve invention, but they are the way to art—and they are rarely easy. Recognizing that art is in the shaping oflanguage, not in inventing or being true to life, can be liberating for students. They do not need to have exciting lives in order to write about themselves, nor do they need to resort to fanciful creativity. Instead they can find that any event, when fashioned in words, can have meaning. But all of us, whether we be students, teachers , writers, or—bless their souls!—readers, reap benefits from carefully shaped compositions. "All that you love you lose," Yeats wrote. Our life slips through greedy fingers even as we live it. Works ofart may not give us our lives back, but they are money in the spiritual bank. With these hard-earned things of beauty we redeem a lifetime of losses. Writing Literary Memoir: Are We Obliged to Tell the Real Truth? Michael Steinberg The aims of the imagination are not the aims of history. Cynthia Ozick Recently at a writer's conference, I gave a public reading ofa memoir about a turbulent relationship I'd had with an old high-school coach. During the q and a, I was asked several questions: "Did it really happen the way you wrote it?" "Did your coach really do those perverse things to you?"And the one that almost always comes up: "Ifyou were only thirteen, how can you remember exactly what was said in the coach's office?" Those questions go right to the heart of some of the more provocative issues that literary memoirists are currently debating. Issues such as: Does the writer have to stick to the literal facts ofthe story?What should writers do when they can't remember the details of an important incident, situation , or conversation? Can/should they embellish? And if so, to what end? My first impulse is to advise aspiring memoirists to write the whole story first, just the way they remember it. Include all ofthe specifics and the names Roundtable: Literal versus Invented Truth in Memoir143 and the situations. I say this because ideally when we write memoir, we're hoping to create an authentic and convincing story. In other words, we want the work to ring true. But what does that phrase, "to ring true," really mean? I was thinking about these matters while I was attending an Associated Writing Programs (AWP) convention a few years back. As part of a panel discussion on truth and invention in nonfiction writing, memoirist Fern Kupfer gave a talk entitled "Everything But the Truth?" In her speech, Kupfer spoke about the differences between literal and artistic truth. At one point, she said something to the effect of the following. "The question of lying comes up all the time in the creative nonfiction classes I teach. 'But that's how it happened' my students sometimes say when I suggest changes that would shore up the narrative and pep up the prose. 'Your memoir shouldn't read as slowly as real life,' I tell them." Kupfer went on to suggest that "We need to give memoir writers permission to lie, but only when the reconstructed version of the story does not deceive the reader in its search for the aesthetic truth." By raising the issue ofaesthetic truth, Kupfer was moving into a controversial area. Some writers and editors contend that memoirists should remain faithful to the facts and events, much like good journalists are expected to do. Others like Kupfer, and Patricia Hampl, believe that imagination cannot help but transpose memory. In which case, the writer has license to invent. For myself, I believe that the type ofmemoir a writer produces is determined at least in part by that writer's sensibility, as well as by how that writer views/defines the genre. Someone who thinks...