Thanks for exploring this important question of memory and the memoirist and providing so many resources and examples to consider.
As you write, even the details of a memory we remember clearly may veer from absolute accuracy, but, still, they are intact in our minds.
I disagree that your comment about my essay was rude. Along with many others, I thought it sparked a vigorous discussion and now we have your essay as a result!
In my particular case, I wanted to distinguish which memories of mine were intact from what was not. I hoped that writing what i didn't remember precisely would give credibility to the accuracy of everything that came next. But there likely was a third way available to me. I could have substituted "maybe" for "I don't recall" and chosen the characteristics of a nice day in the Hamptons. The point was the four of us were at peace until the incident with the billionaire occurred.
In any case, your analysis here will certainly help as I continue to write from memory.
Thank you, David! I'm glad that you weren't put off by the question. And I like your third way. There's a lot of leeway with "maybe" or even "I imagine" that can work even for events we did not witness ourselves. But the perhapsing technique is a separate essay!
I came back to your essay today to reread it. Thanks. Started Down from the Mountaintop and am fascinated by your writing with such a strong sense of place.
Wonderful piece. I am one of three sisters. We each have different memories of our upbringing and even certain situations. If I were to write a memoir I’m sure my sisters would have a say about it. I appreciate the allowance given by the term— auto fiction— which used to be creative non fiction. I need those loose parameters. Meanwhile, I write Substack essays with dialogue. While I can recall a situation I am most certainly inventing the dialogue to aid in the story telling. Unless there is a one liner that affected me so deeply I could add it in.
That term "autofiction" seems like a slippery one. I don't think it's interchangeable with creative nonfiction? At least, I think of memoir and creative nonfiction as interchangeable, but autofiction is really just autobiographical fiction, isn't it? A lot of Pam Houston's stories seem like that, but we understand that even if there is a backbone of personal experience behind the story, the narrative expectations are that it's all invented. To me, the difference is that in fiction we know that someone is lying to tell the truth, and the spell of the story is paramount. In memoir, I think there's a little more latitude to break narration for some meta-reflections.
What you're describing with dialogue, to me, fits squarely within the parameters of literary memoir. Tobias Wolff has an extended scene in "This Boy's Life" about a drunken evening with his high school buddies. There are some breaks in time where he presumably lost consciousness, as well as dialogue with his friends. He's a pretty thoroughly unreliable narrator for all kinds of reasons, not the least his intoxication, but I guess I don't expect that a clinical summary of the experience would necessarily be more authentic. I know it's an approximation, a dramatization, and yet I still trust him to be trying to tell the truth about it. Does a scenario like that have to be autofiction? Maybe I'm getting old, but I would rather read a memoir where someone is wrestling with these ambiguities and embroidering in good faith or a novel where I understand that the writer has chosen every detail. Maybe I misunderstand autofiction, but I don't find myself interested in a hybrid text where personal narrative is mashed up with made-up material?
Great points. Theres also the fact that each one of us have our own truths borne of very real emotions that may completely contradict someone else’s memory of a situation.
Agree! As a recent divorcée, I'd say that that is one life experience with radically different interpretations -- each with some validity and some blindness.
My sisters played a big role in my memoir. I included moments where they remembered events differerently than I did. Some of those differences were about about narrative details but there were a few major events that I demonstrably got wrong and there were major events that I didn't remember at all.
I had too many references already, but I should have included Mark Twain's quip about having reached the age where the things he remembered best never happened at all!
Yes I do know the other term and I associate it with the literary phrase, in this context, of that being 'true to life', as you put it, a 'could have been' without doing any injustice to the wider reality. The standard of what 'could have been' or even of plausibility certainly adds to the chiaroscuro of what mortal memory is capable. I have used this aspect of our shared human condition as a plot device more than once - in a short story entitled 'This Never Happened' (2018), for one, and in one of my as-yet unpublished novels, where the lead recalls Nietzsche's epigram 'Memory says I have done this. Pride says I have not done this. At last, memory yields'.
Funny you should happen to mention kudzu, as my only memoir - of my time as a professor in Mississippi - is entitled 'A Canadian Yankee in King Kudzu's Court'. It too is searching for a press.
This is a biggy and the Frey incident is unforgettable--though his book is, as I understand it--still a best seller. I think David Shields is risky and brave. Have you read _Reality Hunger_?
Thanks, Mary! I have read "Reality Hunger," and I'll confess that I love all the quotes from other people and find myself disliking Shields's own additions (hope we can still be friends!). He seems much more of the D'Agata school to me. But I've not read any of his other books, so perhaps I ought to take another look.
Well done! This is a topic adjacent to my heart as both a philosopher and a fiction author, who has written but a single memoir. The post-war archetype of the 'hybrid' text which was neither/nor was Castaneda's 'Don Juan' and sequels. Even at the time, I was told Berkeley Anthropology doubted its authenticity as a dissertation, but let it pass due to its compelling quality, and the possibility that one might have to issue the same reservations about the entire history of ethnography, given the legendary 'Two Crows denies this' problem, which Geertz speaks of later that same decade. One can thus distinguish between 'veracity' - is it convincing? - as opposed to 'veridicity' - does it have anything to do with reality or even truth? The other side of it, historically speaking, is that memoir was originally very much a kind of politics - did Augustine really do all those things in his supposedly misspent youth? - and the problem of origins in general, which is cannily addressed perhaps best by the human science dictum 'if people believe something to be real, it is real in its consequences' (W.I. Thomas, 1923). Thus more tellingly than memoir, because the reader can take it or leave it after all, is indeed the political scene, where one can begin some kind of rumor - Biden is the Anti-Christ - and for many, somehow this becomes a new reality.
This is excellent discourse! The term "veridicity" is new to me, and I might need a little help understanding it. A related term is "verisimilitude," which is often what I mean when I encourage memoir writers to allow themselves more latitude. If a memory takes place in northwest Montana, kudzu wouldn't have been taking over the backyard. But there might well have been an aspen grove, a stand of Douglas Fir, or an old Ponderosa along the edge of that yard. Simply choosing a tree species for verisimilitude -- which I think means the same thing as veracity, in your formulation -- might not be literally true, but would be true to the place, true to what likely could have been.
Your example of alternative facts and the distorted realities they engender is another can of worms.
Such an interesting question and one that keeps writers (many of us) awake nights as we compose memoirs. After years of teaching composition and literature at the university level, I left, feeling constrained by the process of generating knowledge that was too heavily invested in (and dependent on) linear thought. My opinion is that memory is not solely the product of linear thinking--in fact someone, I don't recall who, described the storyteller (or writer) as someone standing at the edge of memory and invention. I think this complicates memoir writing because we (memoirists) are composing a story, based on memory--which may or may not be concrete. Our challenge is how to define truth and relate it to readers?
One way is to follow the example of writer, Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried), who insists his book is a work of fiction even though he's clearly experienced the events contained in the story. O'Brien points out that writers (or story tellers) respond to something he describes as "story truth," a kind of truth that creates coherence in the story, even as it moves between reality and fantasy.
Then, there's the work of Dr. Galit Atlas, the psychiatrist who recounts stories her clients have brought into therapeutic sessions which they are not able to articulate. Many are based on embodied memories, and she discovers them by exploring the reasons behind certain behaviors, reaching the conclusion that we may all be living stories we may have never heard or been told. What does this say about truth in storytelling?
IMHO, it begs the question of where does memory live? Is memory a product of the mind? What is its relationship to knowledge? To truth?
I address this in my own memoir (coming out later this month) and must admit, it was quite uncomfortable to navigate the truth waters as I wrote. After a lot of soul searching, I made the decision to write about memories I could never prove but felt and carried across my lifetime. I also discuss the way memories may be constructed by the rational mind in ways that are difficult to see as we experience an event--such as the doctor you mention. The nature of narrative writing, as you know, is to allow the writer (and, eventually, the reader) to re-experience an event in ways that add layers of meaning.
Thank you for opening and continuing this dialogue.
Thank you, Jane! I love your phrase "navigate the truth waters." Atlas takes things to a level that I'm not sure most memoirists are equipped to address, but I appreciate your mention of O'Brien's "story truth." The kind of coherence that emerges in fiction is, in my opinion, very different from the one that drives good memoir. That is, while writing my unpublished novel, I felt no constraints whatsoever on invention. The story could seek its truth in any direction. As a memoirist, I have a more limited set of parameters for story truth. I might hedge with "maybe" or "I imagine" or "It might have been," and I might make creative choices with structure or chronology -- I might even invent setting details for verisimilitude or reconstruct dialogue as it might have been said. But I can't veer completely into figurative meaning for a nonfiction story, as D'Agata did, or completely invent portions of my past, as Frey and Seltzer did.
I know that truth is never singular and that the same event can hold different meanings for different people. But I can't accept postmodern relativism, either. Did you settle on some rules for yourself that are similar to those that I describe here, or do you find my (and Kooser's) strictures too didactic?
Look forward to hearing more about your memoir, too :)
Yes, I use "maybe," frequently. My memoir is really a book (short) about writing a memoir and the frustrations I encounter while searching for truth or, at the very least, some "verisimilitude." But the driver (or purpose) of my memoir is the way women, in general, have been silenced and, in particular, how that condition shaped my career as a journalist and writing prof.
I change family names, explain that I can only offer an interpretation of some events and provide a whole chapter as a disclaimer in the introduction, where I discuss why the book was so difficult to write.
In the beginning, I tell a story from the pov of my two-year old self, based on an interpretation of a visual memory and, in the end, admit that I'm trying to tell a truthful story whose fidelity to truth seems to evade me in the process. It's a big piece of exploratory work. I suppose I could use the defense, "The story made me do it." :-)
Yes, it's a tricky balance of when to show your hand and when to *not* call attention to the process of truth seeking in memory. I suppose much of it is context dependent, but I still think we generally know when we'd be lying to readers and when our embroidery is done in good faith. Kooser's comparison to social situations is a useful one, since we know that no one ever tells us the whole truth about their lives, but we recognize the difference between tact and outright deception for the sake of manipulating sympathy.
Hi Josh,
Thanks for exploring this important question of memory and the memoirist and providing so many resources and examples to consider.
As you write, even the details of a memory we remember clearly may veer from absolute accuracy, but, still, they are intact in our minds.
I disagree that your comment about my essay was rude. Along with many others, I thought it sparked a vigorous discussion and now we have your essay as a result!
In my particular case, I wanted to distinguish which memories of mine were intact from what was not. I hoped that writing what i didn't remember precisely would give credibility to the accuracy of everything that came next. But there likely was a third way available to me. I could have substituted "maybe" for "I don't recall" and chosen the characteristics of a nice day in the Hamptons. The point was the four of us were at peace until the incident with the billionaire occurred.
In any case, your analysis here will certainly help as I continue to write from memory.
Best,
David
Thank you, David! I'm glad that you weren't put off by the question. And I like your third way. There's a lot of leeway with "maybe" or even "I imagine" that can work even for events we did not witness ourselves. But the perhapsing technique is a separate essay!
I came back to your essay today to reread it. Thanks. Started Down from the Mountaintop and am fascinated by your writing with such a strong sense of place.
Thanks so much, Jill! I know you are a discerning reader, so that means a great deal.
Wonderful piece. I am one of three sisters. We each have different memories of our upbringing and even certain situations. If I were to write a memoir I’m sure my sisters would have a say about it. I appreciate the allowance given by the term— auto fiction— which used to be creative non fiction. I need those loose parameters. Meanwhile, I write Substack essays with dialogue. While I can recall a situation I am most certainly inventing the dialogue to aid in the story telling. Unless there is a one liner that affected me so deeply I could add it in.
That term "autofiction" seems like a slippery one. I don't think it's interchangeable with creative nonfiction? At least, I think of memoir and creative nonfiction as interchangeable, but autofiction is really just autobiographical fiction, isn't it? A lot of Pam Houston's stories seem like that, but we understand that even if there is a backbone of personal experience behind the story, the narrative expectations are that it's all invented. To me, the difference is that in fiction we know that someone is lying to tell the truth, and the spell of the story is paramount. In memoir, I think there's a little more latitude to break narration for some meta-reflections.
What you're describing with dialogue, to me, fits squarely within the parameters of literary memoir. Tobias Wolff has an extended scene in "This Boy's Life" about a drunken evening with his high school buddies. There are some breaks in time where he presumably lost consciousness, as well as dialogue with his friends. He's a pretty thoroughly unreliable narrator for all kinds of reasons, not the least his intoxication, but I guess I don't expect that a clinical summary of the experience would necessarily be more authentic. I know it's an approximation, a dramatization, and yet I still trust him to be trying to tell the truth about it. Does a scenario like that have to be autofiction? Maybe I'm getting old, but I would rather read a memoir where someone is wrestling with these ambiguities and embroidering in good faith or a novel where I understand that the writer has chosen every detail. Maybe I misunderstand autofiction, but I don't find myself interested in a hybrid text where personal narrative is mashed up with made-up material?
Great points. Theres also the fact that each one of us have our own truths borne of very real emotions that may completely contradict someone else’s memory of a situation.
Agree! As a recent divorcée, I'd say that that is one life experience with radically different interpretations -- each with some validity and some blindness.
My sisters played a big role in my memoir. I included moments where they remembered events differerently than I did. Some of those differences were about about narrative details but there were a few major events that I demonstrably got wrong and there were major events that I didn't remember at all.
I had too many references already, but I should have included Mark Twain's quip about having reached the age where the things he remembered best never happened at all!
Twain!
Yes I do know the other term and I associate it with the literary phrase, in this context, of that being 'true to life', as you put it, a 'could have been' without doing any injustice to the wider reality. The standard of what 'could have been' or even of plausibility certainly adds to the chiaroscuro of what mortal memory is capable. I have used this aspect of our shared human condition as a plot device more than once - in a short story entitled 'This Never Happened' (2018), for one, and in one of my as-yet unpublished novels, where the lead recalls Nietzsche's epigram 'Memory says I have done this. Pride says I have not done this. At last, memory yields'.
Funny you should happen to mention kudzu, as my only memoir - of my time as a professor in Mississippi - is entitled 'A Canadian Yankee in King Kudzu's Court'. It too is searching for a press.
Chiaroscuro is a great word for the ambiguity of memory!
We'll be dealing with David's q about transparency and risks in memoir soon where Eleanor and I answer questions here: https://marytabor.substack.com/s/write-it-how-to-get-started
This is a biggy and the Frey incident is unforgettable--though his book is, as I understand it--still a best seller. I think David Shields is risky and brave. Have you read _Reality Hunger_?
Thanks, Mary! I have read "Reality Hunger," and I'll confess that I love all the quotes from other people and find myself disliking Shields's own additions (hope we can still be friends!). He seems much more of the D'Agata school to me. But I've not read any of his other books, so perhaps I ought to take another look.
Well done! This is a topic adjacent to my heart as both a philosopher and a fiction author, who has written but a single memoir. The post-war archetype of the 'hybrid' text which was neither/nor was Castaneda's 'Don Juan' and sequels. Even at the time, I was told Berkeley Anthropology doubted its authenticity as a dissertation, but let it pass due to its compelling quality, and the possibility that one might have to issue the same reservations about the entire history of ethnography, given the legendary 'Two Crows denies this' problem, which Geertz speaks of later that same decade. One can thus distinguish between 'veracity' - is it convincing? - as opposed to 'veridicity' - does it have anything to do with reality or even truth? The other side of it, historically speaking, is that memoir was originally very much a kind of politics - did Augustine really do all those things in his supposedly misspent youth? - and the problem of origins in general, which is cannily addressed perhaps best by the human science dictum 'if people believe something to be real, it is real in its consequences' (W.I. Thomas, 1923). Thus more tellingly than memoir, because the reader can take it or leave it after all, is indeed the political scene, where one can begin some kind of rumor - Biden is the Anti-Christ - and for many, somehow this becomes a new reality.
This is excellent discourse! The term "veridicity" is new to me, and I might need a little help understanding it. A related term is "verisimilitude," which is often what I mean when I encourage memoir writers to allow themselves more latitude. If a memory takes place in northwest Montana, kudzu wouldn't have been taking over the backyard. But there might well have been an aspen grove, a stand of Douglas Fir, or an old Ponderosa along the edge of that yard. Simply choosing a tree species for verisimilitude -- which I think means the same thing as veracity, in your formulation -- might not be literally true, but would be true to the place, true to what likely could have been.
Your example of alternative facts and the distorted realities they engender is another can of worms.
Josh,
Such an interesting question and one that keeps writers (many of us) awake nights as we compose memoirs. After years of teaching composition and literature at the university level, I left, feeling constrained by the process of generating knowledge that was too heavily invested in (and dependent on) linear thought. My opinion is that memory is not solely the product of linear thinking--in fact someone, I don't recall who, described the storyteller (or writer) as someone standing at the edge of memory and invention. I think this complicates memoir writing because we (memoirists) are composing a story, based on memory--which may or may not be concrete. Our challenge is how to define truth and relate it to readers?
One way is to follow the example of writer, Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried), who insists his book is a work of fiction even though he's clearly experienced the events contained in the story. O'Brien points out that writers (or story tellers) respond to something he describes as "story truth," a kind of truth that creates coherence in the story, even as it moves between reality and fantasy.
Then, there's the work of Dr. Galit Atlas, the psychiatrist who recounts stories her clients have brought into therapeutic sessions which they are not able to articulate. Many are based on embodied memories, and she discovers them by exploring the reasons behind certain behaviors, reaching the conclusion that we may all be living stories we may have never heard or been told. What does this say about truth in storytelling?
IMHO, it begs the question of where does memory live? Is memory a product of the mind? What is its relationship to knowledge? To truth?
I address this in my own memoir (coming out later this month) and must admit, it was quite uncomfortable to navigate the truth waters as I wrote. After a lot of soul searching, I made the decision to write about memories I could never prove but felt and carried across my lifetime. I also discuss the way memories may be constructed by the rational mind in ways that are difficult to see as we experience an event--such as the doctor you mention. The nature of narrative writing, as you know, is to allow the writer (and, eventually, the reader) to re-experience an event in ways that add layers of meaning.
Thank you for opening and continuing this dialogue.
Thank you, Jane! I love your phrase "navigate the truth waters." Atlas takes things to a level that I'm not sure most memoirists are equipped to address, but I appreciate your mention of O'Brien's "story truth." The kind of coherence that emerges in fiction is, in my opinion, very different from the one that drives good memoir. That is, while writing my unpublished novel, I felt no constraints whatsoever on invention. The story could seek its truth in any direction. As a memoirist, I have a more limited set of parameters for story truth. I might hedge with "maybe" or "I imagine" or "It might have been," and I might make creative choices with structure or chronology -- I might even invent setting details for verisimilitude or reconstruct dialogue as it might have been said. But I can't veer completely into figurative meaning for a nonfiction story, as D'Agata did, or completely invent portions of my past, as Frey and Seltzer did.
I know that truth is never singular and that the same event can hold different meanings for different people. But I can't accept postmodern relativism, either. Did you settle on some rules for yourself that are similar to those that I describe here, or do you find my (and Kooser's) strictures too didactic?
Look forward to hearing more about your memoir, too :)
Yes, I use "maybe," frequently. My memoir is really a book (short) about writing a memoir and the frustrations I encounter while searching for truth or, at the very least, some "verisimilitude." But the driver (or purpose) of my memoir is the way women, in general, have been silenced and, in particular, how that condition shaped my career as a journalist and writing prof.
I change family names, explain that I can only offer an interpretation of some events and provide a whole chapter as a disclaimer in the introduction, where I discuss why the book was so difficult to write.
In the beginning, I tell a story from the pov of my two-year old self, based on an interpretation of a visual memory and, in the end, admit that I'm trying to tell a truthful story whose fidelity to truth seems to evade me in the process. It's a big piece of exploratory work. I suppose I could use the defense, "The story made me do it." :-)
Yes, it's a tricky balance of when to show your hand and when to *not* call attention to the process of truth seeking in memory. I suppose much of it is context dependent, but I still think we generally know when we'd be lying to readers and when our embroidery is done in good faith. Kooser's comparison to social situations is a useful one, since we know that no one ever tells us the whole truth about their lives, but we recognize the difference between tact and outright deception for the sake of manipulating sympathy.