The Problem With Writing Dialogue In Memoir

In “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion reflects on a lunch with her father when she may or may not have ordered cracked crab, even though she now remembers the day that way. Didion claims that an invented detail is necessary for conjuring the deeper truth of the day: “a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt.”

So much depends on that cracked crab.

I’ve given this advice to writers for years, encouraging them to research their settings instead of falling back on vague details like “tree” or disenchanting disclaimers like “I don’t remember.” If physical details serve a larger truth, such as mood, they are justifiable (in moderation).

But dialogue in memoir poses an ethical problem that I’ve never seen satisfactorily resolved. We know if we are reading a literary memoir that some invention is allowed, and we are mostly willing to give a writer the benefit of the doubt that they aren’t grossly misrepresenting facts or real people. But nothing strains that trust between writer and reader quite like dialogue does. We all remember phrases and snatches of conversation, but none of us can reconstruct those exchanges verbatim.

How can we do it at all without simply putting words in other people’s mouths?

Last week I reflected on some scenes in Tobias Wolff’s In Pharaoh’s Army that felt a little too choreographed for my taste — where the stage effects or craft elements carried me to a point of disbelief. Wolff’s training as a fiction writer allows him to create fantastic dialogue, but at a certain point I realize that I’m essentially reading a Raymond Carver story and that few conversations in my life have ever been quite as pithy and succinct as all of Wolff’s reconstructions seem to be.

Take, for instance, this long exchange from “Thanksgiving Special,” when Wolff and Sergeant Benet are caught smuggling a stolen television and the Chicom rifle they’d originally intended to trade for a different one back to their base.

On the way to the gate, Sergeant Benet said, “What if Captain Cox is still moping around? What you going to do then?”

“He won’t be.”

“You better hope not, sir.”

“Come on. You think he’d miss out on Raquel Welch?”

Captain Cox stepped outside the guard shack and waved us down.

“My God,” I said.

“What you going to tell him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then you best let me do the talking.”

I didn’t argue.

Captain Cox came up to the window and asked where we were headed now.

“Home, sir,” Sergeant Benet said.

“Where’s that?”

“Outside My Tho.”

“Ah, yes, you’re with our noble allies.”

“Yes sir.”

“So what’ve you got in here?”

“Begging your pardon, sir, you already looked.”

“Well, why don’t I just take another look. Just for the heck of it.”

“It’s getting pretty late, sir. We don’t want to be on the road come dark.” Sergeant Benet nudged the accelerator.

“Turn off that engine,” Captain Cox said. “Now you just damn well sit there until I say otherwise.” He went around to the back of the truck, then came up to Sergeant Benet’s window. “My,” he said. “My, my, my, my, my.”

“Listen,” I said. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Sergeant Benet opened the door and got down from the cab. “If I could have a word with you, sir.”

Now this reads wonderfully. Not a word wasted, even in that long string of “my”s. But we realize, don’t we, that Wolff’s invention here runs far beyond Didion’s cracked crab? Perhaps you can hear the subtleties in Benet’s speech, a hint of vernacular contrasted with Wolff’s “proper” voice. It makes for an entertaining read, but I wonder what the real Benet or Cox might think of how they come off here.

Most memoirists never ask others for permission or feedback after changing names and identifying details, and I’m not suggesting they must. But the problem of representing others fairly and accurately in dialogue remains. It must be done if a memoir is to come alive on the page, and yet it seems to violate what we expect from nonfiction more than any other form of invention does.

Wolff reconstructs another lengthy conversation in “Old China,” where a Foreign Service officer named Pete Landon — Harvard educated, fluent in at least five languages, including Vietnamese — explains how he’s arranged for Wolff to be transferred out of his cushy post into a more dangerous zone where he’ll get a chance to make more enduring memories. Wolff doesn’t want it, but Pete insists until he realizes that Wolff’s tour is almost up. The conversation goes on for nearly three pages.

Pete Landon leaves in a hurry at the end of the chapter and asks Wolff to ship him a rare china bowl, a gift from a retired Vietnamese officer. Wolff has felt so humiliated by Landon that he crushes the bowl underfoot before sending it off. Like every essay in In Pharaoh’s Army, “Old China” is exquisitely crafted. But the dialogue is too pitch-perfect; I stop believing in it as memoir. Large portions of In Pharaoh’s Army are what we’d now call autofiction, where the reader understands that the events are based on real life, but the story itself — largely carried by the words characters say — is a fiction (a lie, if you like) that tells a more symbolic truth.

There are different schools of thought about how to write good dialogue, even in fiction. Faulkner, Hemingway, and many other modernists amplify the difficulty of communication through repetition and misunderstanding — characters talking perpetually past each other. Wolff’s dialogue is distilled so perfectly that it always makes sense, but sometimes the way that people really speak is more fragmentary and irrational. George Saunders, who studied with Wolff at Syracuse, recalls contrasting advice from another teacher, Douglas Unger. The dialogue in Saunders’s stories often doesn’t make sense. Instead, it’s filled with interruptions and non-sequiturs that I recognize from trying to have dinner conversations with three kids.

I’ll have more to say on this subject when I review Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma. Foo employs a hybrid approach to dialogue, relying on videos of her therapy sessions to reconstruct some dialogue sequences, but falling back purely on memory to recall painful scenes with her parents, who both abandoned her in her teens.

I trust Foo’s reconstructions more than Wolff’s because she takes pains to raise questions about her own reliability, explaining how cognitive responses to trauma, like dissociation, might have distorted some of her memories. That framing allows me to read Foo’s dialogue as the approximation it is: the truth of what her bones know rather than a literal rendering of what took place. Even so, the knowledge that she has cut off communication with her parents (both living) and thus feels no particular burden of kindness toward them raises questions about the lines she gives them as characters and the ultimate purpose those choices serve.

Some say that hewing close to the original intent of a scene is the only rule you need for writing dialogue in memoir. And Anne Lamott says that if people wanted our warmth in print, they should have treated us better in real life. But don’t we owe it to our readers to show all our cards, to do more than simply relay how it felt to me? This seems particularly urgent for memories of trauma or the bitter hostilities known to most divorcees. We want to be more than Danny McGrath in Billy Madison, crossing people off our grudge lists, don’t we?

Below I’ll list some questions that I’ll be asking myself as I draft my new book. These are limited to full members, so if you’d like to review them, please consider upgrading your subscription.