Open thread: The limits of perhapsing

Photo by Louis Maniquet on Unsplash

This week on

Inner Life

Sam Kahn of

Castalia

has a thoughtful take on Francis Fukuyama’s controversial essay “The End of History.”

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Last fall, I reflected on the ethics of writing about others in Tara Westover’s memoir Educated. And my Tuesday essay highlights the particular difficulty of writing about ancestors we did not know well. A popular technique, when faced with these uncertainties, is “perhapsing,” which typically signals that we the narrative is leaving the realm of the factual and entering more hypothetical terrain. Lee Martin did not witness the farming accident which claimed both of his father’s hands, but for his memoir From Our House he pieced together a picture of what might have happened from family stories. All he has to say is, “I’m free to imagine the day anyway I like,” and we give him the license to invent the weather, the cornfield, the terror his father felt when the corn picker caught one of his hands, and the split second decision to reach in after it with his free hand. 

There are limits to perhapsing in memoir. Martin can’t imagine a Martian spaceship landing in the field where his father lay, hoping someone would find him. But he can take some of the known facts and create images from them, so long as he gives the reader enough cues to distinguish what really happened from his dramatized hypotheticals.

I used to tell my students that once they framed a scene with a phrase such as “I imagine it as…” or “The sun might have been shining that day…” pretty much anything was permissible, so long as it did not seem very unlikely to have happened. The point of perhapsing is to free the writer from the duller strictures of autobiography or textbook history. Aren’t daydreams just as much a part of our reality as the thump of a package on the front step? And isn’t the way we feel about past events, even those we did not witness directly, just as much a part of our life story as the events themselves? 

One of my students wove perhapsing beautifully into an essay about her family farm in Iowa. In one scene, she walked through knee-high alfalfa thinking about her immigrant ancestors who fled the potato famine in Ireland. She bent to run her hands through the alfalfa, and when she stood, she had sea foam in her hands and she imagined herself as one of her great grandmothers on the voyage across the Atlantic. Then she bent again to the sea and her hands came back up with alfalfa in them. 

But it is no longer socially acceptable to put ourselves in others’ shoes. These days we say things like, “I can’t imagine how…” I have an unpublished essay about a former roommate who suffered from schizophrenia, which I learned at his wedding, when his mother prayed over the newlyweds, thanking God for healing her son of the disease. The purpose of the essay is to examine myself: to consider the ways that I have reinforced the stigma of mental illness by telling that story over the years and to reflect on how epiphany can sometimes reveal aspects of myself that I’d prefer to ignore. But near the end I attempt a little perhapsing, protecting my roommate’s anonymity with a pseudonym: “I never knew Lonnie well enough to tell his story. I suspect that he woke to fear many mornings, that making it to work on time was a triumph of will. Yet if Lonnie ever felt alone, walking a high wire buffeted by unseen winds, he never complained of it to me.” Can we imagine what it is like to be someone with mental illness, even for two sentences, if we have never suffered from the condition ourselves? Or does this carry the perhapsing technique too far? What is the difference between empathic imagination and using someone else as a story prop?

Anything goes in art, but that does not mean our readers will look kindly upon every artistic choice — or that every artistic choice gets us closer to the truth. These are some of the questions that memoirists must weigh these days, with an ear toward how readers might respond.

• What might the limits of perhapsing be for men imagining the lives of women? Might a son imagine his mother’s life as a child, a young woman, or an adult? If I were to picture my grandmother as a girl on a North Dakota ranch, what boundaries might I consider to avoid losing the sympathy of female readers?

• I think we agree these days that perhapsing about a person of another race would be offensive in memoir. It’s a serious debate within fiction, as well — whether authors can ethically create characters with racial identities different from their own. I tend to agree with Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer, that writers should be judged on the quality of the writing rather than on purity tests about their own racial identities. But this is tricky territory. How might you navigate it if you were writing a memoir? 

• In my memoir, I reconstruct a bit of my parents’ conversion stories in an attempt to understand their devotion to Pentecostal Christianity. But despite many years of trying my best in church, I have never had what I would consider a religious experience. And so I don’t fundamentally understand what true believers get from a worship service — where they go within themselves or outside of themselves to feel that they have a personal relationship with Christ, for instance. For this reason, I don’t think I could ever attempt a perhapsed scene about my grandfather’s conversion at the country church where he met my grandmother. But, strangely, I would never prevent myself from doing so if I were writing a novel with a character based on my grandfather. Is this a false and arbitrary line between memoir and fiction? 

• How much of our experiences that involve other people are our own stories to tell in memoir, especially if those people are still living and especially if the light we cast them in is not terribly flattering?