The Treachery of Narrators in Memoir
Today’s essay continues my conversation with and in their collaborative series “This Writing Life,” where they answer readers’ craft questions.
My question was: “What are your rules for invention in memoir? I'm curious how both of you navigate acceptable levels of fiction in memoir writing. How much ‘emotional truth’ is too much? How does one write dialogue in memoir without fabricating the past and destroying one's reliability in the process?””
You can read Eleanor’s response here and Mary’s here. I learned a lot from each of them and discovered that I had more to say about narrative personae, in particular.
The Treachery of Narrators in Memoir
Tobias Wolff begins This Boy’s Life with an epigraph from Oscar Wilde: "The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has discovered." Few understand Wilde’s aphorism more keenly than memoirists, and I want to think a little about the inventions that constructing a narrative persona in nonfiction requires.
We’ve forgotten the necessary invention of a narrator in our age of reality television, influencers, and personal branding. Or at least we’re not honest about it. Authenticity is all the rage. But there is no such thing, not on public platforms, not when a profit motive is involved. The essential question for memoirists is not whether to strike a pose, but whether there might be a way of doing so that remains honest, sincere, and trustworthy.1
We all know that our public selves are distinct from our private selves. A first date is stressful because it requires performance: a choice of outfit, a shave, a little makeup. The person who shows up on that date is us, but also not us, not really, not completely. Even if we end up marrying that person, the challenge of translating who we really are into how we are seen goes on for a lifetime in what we say, what we keep to ourselves, the battles we choose or avoid.
Just being ourselves is never simple.
The same is true of our writing. A memoir invites a reader to a café table where a strange monologue ensues. In real life, the scenario would be bizarre — a narcissist prattling on about themselves. We know it’s not that one-sided on the page, that the reader is having a silent conversation with us, but the burden is on our narrative persona to keep the conversation going. At any moment, the reader might cry “Check, please!” or simply walk away.
We crave that connection. So we try to tell as absorbing a tale as we can. This requires a thousand judgment calls about tone, word choice, and details — what to include, what to omit. Every choice determines the pose that we strike. We don’t have to be perfect, but we do have to act as our own Puck, sprinkling fairy dust, casting a spell. If we do it well, the reader invites us into their home, and we stay there, on the nightstand or the shelf.
If we’re lucky, we nest forever within a reader’s memory, the way Wolff does within mine. But it’s a combination of disclosure and reticence, of performance without outright sophistry, that gets us there.
The self is not a single self
Nonfiction requires us to play at least two parts: the character immersed in the moment and the analyst making sense of it. And this says nothing of the struggle to find language for what we feel in a way that makes our inner lives comprehensible to others.
Michel de Montaigne says it well in “The Inconsistency of Our Actions”:
We are all patchwork, so shapeless and diverse in composition that each piece, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.
It’s possible to carry this reasoning too far, making liars of everyone and reducing every attempt at conveying truth to absurdity. Every memoir could carry a disclaimer, “This is not a life,” the way René Magritte captions his painting “The Treachery of Images” with the phrase “This is not a pipe.”
Scott McCloud takes this a step further in Understanding Comics. It’s not a pipe, it’s a painting of a pipe — but wait! — it’s actually a drawing of a painting of a pipe. Wrong again! It’s a "printed copy of a drawing of a painting of a pipe.”
That’s the kind of trippy reasoning that dazzles first-year college students, but it’s misleading in its own way.
Sure, a painting or drawing is a representation of life, not life itself, the same way that memoir requires us to reconstruct and interpret events, not simply recall them. But this does not mean all truth-seeking in memoir is essentially fiction. Or that memoir is simply a con game that tricks the reader into mistaking the pose for the author herself.
There is a responsible, even ethical, middle ground between the influencer who peddles the pose as the truth and the postmodernist who pulls the rug out from under truth-seeking itself.
In the next two sections, I offer examples of how a memoirist I admire presents his multiple selves in a straightforward, but no less enchanting, way. And why the challenge of finding the right voice for my fatherhood memoir has currently stalled that project.