You Know Literary Fraud When You See It

Thoughts on ethical invention in memoir

Photo by twentyonekoalas on Unsplash

“Memory is a complicated thing. A relative to truth, but not its twin.”

Barbara Kingsolver

Two weeks ago I inadvertently sparked a debate about truth telling while commenting on David Roberts’s essay “When A Billionaire Maligned My Wife And Me.” David opens his piece at a party in the Hamptons, where a billionaire accuses him and his wife of mooching off of their hosts. While David recalls that exchange vividly, there is a lot that he can’t remember well. He writes, “I don’t recall the time of day or how brisk the ocean breeze was or the strength and slant of the sun. Or whether the four of us were reading or talking or just sitting with our own thoughts and listening to the gulls.” 

I’ve never been to the Hamptons, so I wondered aloud whether David might choose the time of day or the weather or the particular quality of the light in keeping with what he knows of that setting. Why not paint a physical backdrop to avoid distracting from the real story, which is the billionaire’s insult? Is calling attention to what you can’t remember an essential part of that story, or might some invention bring the emotional truth of the scene into starker relief? 

In hindsight, I realize how rude this might have been, like walking into someone’s home and wondering aloud why they thought to hang a painting there and if it might not look better on a different wall. It’s the kind of question that probably belongs at the workshop table, where someone has voluntarily offered a draft for review.

It is a testament to David’s hold on his readers that many of them rallied to his defense, and I made as graceful an exit from the comment thread as I could, feeling ruefully like the billionaire who left after stinking up the party. But because so many readers took the question personally on David’s behalf, ostensibly as a suggestion that he should soften his principles, I can’t help feeling that it was misunderstood. 

Today I want to examine the question of how much invention is permissible in memoir. It may seem counterintuitive, but embracing invention within certain ethical constraints requires more humility than claiming to never embroider a tale at all. I’ll illustrate with a scene from Danielle Ofri’s “Living Will” that seems almost too good to be true, but that still passes my ethical test.

Memory is unreliable (yes, even yours)

Every nonfiction writer will contend, sooner or later, with the question of how much invention their reconstruction of memory requires. No matter how vividly we might remember some experiences, our factual past is not preserved within us like digital files just waiting to spring back into high-definition when we press “play.” 

This is true even of recent events. Elizabeth Loftus has proven that people are so vulnerable to the power of suggestion that they are far more likely to recall seeing broken glass in a video that they watched minutes before if you ask them to describe how fast two cars were going when they “smashed” together, rather than describing the cars “hitting” one another. Loftus discusses many other examples of false memories, even intentionally implanted memories, in this interview with Shankar Vidantam. 

If you want to test your own memory of a daily experience, close your eyes and place your hands at 10 and 2 on an imaginary steering wheel. Imagine that you are in the left lane and that you want to merge into the right lane. 

Keep your eyes shut and replicate the motions required to accomplish this task with your pretend steering wheel. As David Eagelman explains, nearly everyone who tries this exercise cranks the wheel to the right then brings it back to center. In real life, this would send you careening into the ditch at a diagonal. The correct motion is to turn to the right, then overcorrect back to the left, and only then straighten out the wheel. 

If you can’t replicate a simple motion like that, which you do every day, how are you supposed to trust your memory of what happened a year, five years, a decade ago? 

What’s even more disturbing is that our brain sometimes lies to our face. Try this blind spot test by covering your left eye, training your right eye on the + sign, and leaning closer to your screen (or bringing it closer to your face if you’re using a phone). Not only will the yellow dot disappear in your blind spot, it will be replaced by a red dot! The brain simply fills the empty space with the information available to it to compensate for the blind spot. And if this is true of what’s literally in front of your face, how much more of experiences from your distant past?

From Lasik of Nevada

To remember is to reconstruct and interpret, to select and omit — or, as Oscar Wilde said, to strike a pose. We are always filtering who we were through who we are now, through what we believe our experience has revealed. If I had become a professional baseball player, as I once believed I would, my memories of Little League would look differently to me than they do now as a former professor. And even if we never tell these stories to others, we are constantly narrating selfhood to ourselves. Forget about representing others — even when it comes to faithful representations of ourselves, memoirists are doomed to fall short of Henry James’s admonition in “The Art of Fiction” to be “one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”

But does that mean anything goes in memoir? Should we accept David Shields’s claim that “anything processed by memory is fiction” and therefore throw caution to the wind? Or might there be some principles that allow for ethical invention: that don’t require us to footnote every murky memory, but that don’t condone brazen lies about our past, either? 

Let’s return to Ofri’s essay, since some of the answers can be found there.

How to invent responsibly in memoir

“Living Will” is set in Florida during the early spring, when the orange groves bloom, but Dr. Ofri spends more of her time indoors meeting patients. One of them is Wilbur Reston, a former cop with a series of chronic conditions and a history of depression who confesses to Ofri that he nearly killed himself once. His most recent setback has him trending in that direction again. 

Reston challenges Ofri to give him a reason to live: “Why should I live this life? I can’t walk, my wife don’t speak to me, I can’t do nothing. What’s the point?...You tell me.”

Ofri has no immediate answer, and Reston’s question nags her for days like an aching tooth. Medical ethics require her to act if she thinks her patient intends to harm himself, but is a psychiatric ward really in his best interest? What if she does nothing, releases him to his collection of firearms, and allows him to see himself to a merciful end? Maybe suicide is a completely rational choice for someone trapped in the “miserable muck” of infirmity, “stranded too far from the shores of either health or death.” 

Ofri even imagines herself as Mr. Reston lifting a pistol to his mouth, surprised by how comforting the cool metal feels against his tongue. She confesses that if she found herself in his predicament, she might well pull the trigger.

These are high stakes, and they pull us deeper into the essay. We want Dr. Ofri to find a satisfying answer to Mr. Reston’s question, to do more than simply weasel out with medical protocol. And she does finally crack the mystery during a traffic jam on her commute. 

Traffic was stopped as a cumbersome tractor-trailer backed out of a dirt construction site, attempting to turn itself around. A grove of orange trees had just been plowed, probably to make way for a new strip mall. The trailer was open on top, and I could see the stacks of shimmering steel girders. The driver backed up a few feet, and then the trailer swung in the opposite direction, blocking his turn. The workers on the road waved their hands, shouting contradictory instructions: ‘Pull back a bit.’ ‘Swing to the right.’ ‘Turn your wheels on a sharp left.’ The driver edged forward and back, craning his neck out the window then up toward his rearview mirror as he tried to extricate himself from the tight spot. The steel girders flashed in the sunlight each time he changed angles. The smell of fresh damp earth blended with the intoxicating sweetness of the orange blossoms, something I’d never smelled in New York City.

The lull allows Ofri to relax. She closes her eyes, rests her head on the steering wheel, and suddenly the answer comes to her. Mr. Reston has a living will, but he allowed himself to be intubated. Thus, he must have a will to live. 

Almost immediately after this epiphany, the external action of the scene resumes: “The traffic snarl cleared and I jammed on the accelerator, flying down the road with the breath of orange blossoms sweeping against my face.”

I could use “Living Will” to illustrate at least half a dozen other craft ideas: the objective correlative, Chekhov’s Rule, extended metaphor, characterization, plot, and dialogue. But I want to linger in Ofri’s epiphany because it seems like a perfect confluence of narrative threads. Her mental block just so happens to coincide with a traffic jam, and her breakthrough is mirrored by her freedom to step on the gas.

What if both events, the traffic jam and the epiphany, were true but asynchronous? What if she had the epiphany about Reston’s will to live in the shower, but then hit the roadblock later on the way to work? And what if she noticed “the breath of orange blossoms sweeping against [her] face” at a different time during her assignment in Florida, but not at that particular moment on that particular day?

Danielle Ofri is a friend of mine, but I’ve never asked her these questions because I don’t care. I’d find the essay satisfying either way. It would not seem more marvelous to me if all of these events magically converged in exactly the way she describes them. In fact, that scenario, if belabored too much, might raise other distracting questions about whether the hand of Fate or God brought her to that sudden realization at that time and place. Similarly, I would not admire the essay less if it were written as I imagine it was, with asynchronous details mashed together to dramatize the essential question: how to give a suffering man a reason to live. I would not even be the slightest bit bothered if Ofri recalled these events later, from her New York apartment, and thought What was that smell on my commute? and then googled Southwest Florida and realized it must have been the citrus bloom.

What matters is that the essay holds me in its spell from start to finish — and that none of these potential narrative choices would amount to what I’d consider a lie. 

Would I feel differently if I discovered that Danielle Ofri had never worked in Southwest Florida, or that her assignment took place in the fall, not in early spring when the orange trees bloom? If Mr. Reston were not a real person, but a composite of several other patients? If there never was a construction site on her route to work, and the tractor-trailer and the workers shouting directions were purely fictional? Without a doubt, invention on that scale would destroy my trust in Ofri as a nonfiction writer. 

Are these just personal judgment calls, or might we agree on more objective standards for distinguishing truth from lies in personal essays?

You know literary fraud when you see it

Some of you might remember the fabulism scandals of the late 90s and early 00s. After Oprah and others fawned over James Frey for his addiction memoir, it turned out that he’d invented significant portions of it — not a few setting details, but major facts, such as the details of his arrest and alleged jail time. Oprah herself admitted to feeling “duped” when investigative reporters dug up the truth. Not long after Frey’s fall from grace, Margaret “Jones” Seltzer was outed for having completely fabricated her story of being a foster child in urban L.A. And a few years after that, John D’Agata’s feud with his editor over egregious fallacies in About a Mountain actually ended up benefiting them both. Their correspondence was published as The Lifespan of a Fact and later adapted as a Broadway play. It’s hard to see that D’Agata paid any price at all for those shenanigans, but I agree with Dinty W. Moore – D’Agata conned his readers.¹ 

The ethics of invention have even roiled the poetry world. In 1998, Ted Kooser denounced poems that manipulate readers’ sympathy by framing fictional details as personal truths. “A childless man writes with great skill and tenderness about a schoolyard experience with his small son, engendering sympathy in the audience,” Kooser writes. “Another poet writes with touching sadness about the suicide of a brother, and we pity her until we chance to learn from some other source that she has no brother. Hundreds of readers may be moved by these fabrications, moved to pity the poet, moved to praise his or her courage and candor.”

It seemed old-fashioned in the 90s to question such sophistry. Universities were factories of deconstruction theory and postmodern relativism. Wasn’t reality a construction of language anyway? Didn’t words always move us perpetually further from our original intent in what Sausseure called an “infinite regress” of signification? Who cares whether the poet really had the experiences she captures in verse?

But Kooser cuts through this slippery rhetoric with a simple test. If a writer gets “extraliterary credit or sympathy” from a lie, then invention is done in bad faith and violates a reader’s trust.. Ofri’s essay might illuminate the flip side of Kooser’s rule: invention that illuminates truth about a memory, place, or character is done in good faith and strengthens a reader’s trust.

Kooser again: “It is despicable to exploit the trust a reader has in the truth of lyric poetry in order to gather undeserved sympathy to one's self. Why do we permit this kind of behavior in poetry when we would shrink from it in any other social situation?”

We might also test these principles against Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” where she explains at some length why even as a journalist some of her notes hew more to emotional truth than to hidebound fact.

The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the day's pattern to lend verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not now remember the cracked crab. The day's events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt. Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

The invention of a concrete detail, the cracked crab, that grounds us in a particular place and that evokes a more figurative truth about Didion’s relationship with her father feels squarely in line with Kooser’s imperative that a writer ought to honor the reader’s trust above all. 

The passage above is Didion’s explanation of her notebook, not the story of that day in 1945. But consider how the lunch scene might land if Didion were to interrupt it by calling attention to whether or not she remembered the cracked crab. Or the weather. Or any other background detail that isn’t the focus of a story about family love and guilt.

The effect would be for Didion to step in front of the narrative camera, interrupting the cinematic scene and forcing us out of it. My father tells his hunting stories in this way, often backtracking to wonder whether it had really rained that day, or whether he or his companion had flushed the herd of elk out of the draw where they’d been bedded down. This makes his stories true, but also dull. The only way to segue back to the story proper after such a digression is with “Anyways,” which is itself an admission that the footnote was unessential to the tale at hand. 

We do not want Danielle Ofri to step in front of her dialogue with Wilbur Reston to remind us that she doesn’t remember every word verbatim because she didn’t carry a tape recorder into the examining room. We trust her. We know that even if Mr. Reston might not have said exactly those words, he assuredly said something very close to them and that neither he nor any of his friends would feel, upon reading the scene, that he could never have spoken the words attributed to him. 

If Ofri engages in sophistry here, it is for our sake as readers, because she knows that we will feel the urgency of Reston’s depression and her own fear of failing him if we can “hear” him speak on the page. By doing so, she illuminates the truth of that experience more faithfully than she might if she were to annotate every jot and tittle. And we are grateful to her for allowing us to dream the scene in as close an approximation to her own memory as she can manage.

In some of my own scenes, I have chosen weather that fits the mood, because the weather on a particular day is not the story I’m trying to tell. That is how it felt to me, and it might as well have rained, could have rained, did rain. Memoirists do not need to behave as their own tedious detectives, searching the meteorological archives to determine if the sun was shining on a day they felt happy, or if it really stormed on that magical day — unless the essential story is one about memory itself. 

Hollywood enjoys dramatizing recovered memories, as in this example from New Amsterdam. But in truth we don’t have to be trauma survivors to distort the meaning of past events. We all do it unconsciously all the time. 

The ethical memoirist inquires into these ambiguities, accepting that the deepest truths spring from a synthesis of fact and fancy, not from an inerrancy that none of us can claim. But as Kooser makes plain, a writer’s motivation is the best test of whether they deserve a reader’s trust. Are they doing it to get away with something, to glean sympathy or credit, to go viral? Or are they inventing a few details to take themselves out of the way, to stop holding a reader at arm’s length from a memory and let them draw so close that their own imagination feels like the floor of its happening?

Consider the final lines of “Living Will,” where Ofri wonders how Mr. Reston is doing long after she has left Florida. Every detail here is invented, but we trust Ofri completely. Why?

I imagined that he was sitting alone in his house, his wife at yet another volunteer function, his bones still aching, his weak heart preventing him from even getting the mail. But maybe there was now a puppy yapping at his feet, freely dispensing and demanding love. When the headaches and joint pains became overwhelming, maybe Mr. Reston would again consider ending his life. But then he might stop and think: Who would feed the puppy?

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1. I was perplexed by the new genre “autofiction,” which seemed to be a hybrid of memoir and fiction, until I found this clear-headed explanation of it by Brooke Warner. Autofiction is just autobiographical fiction, she contends — just another form of fiction, where there are no expected constraints on invention.