Truth and/or Truthiness

Recently, there’s been a dust-up in the publishing world: Controversy surrounding the successful memoir The Salt Path by Raynor Winn.

It is one thing to use novelesque devices in order to pen a literary memoir. To cast an alter ego or stand-in for yourself. To write the memoir in third person. To change names to protect the identity of certain people. For clarity’s sake to eliminate characters or even to create a composite—as long as you alert the reader, such as in an introduction or disclaimer in the front matter. This is all acceptable. Real problems occur when one intentionally writes fiction and then tries to pass it off as memoir.

When one writes in order to deceive then that writer has crossed a line. They not only harm their own reputation, but also break trust with their readers. Imposters such as James Frey with his A Million Little Pieces was intentional in his deception.

Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes might have gone around a few curves in spinning his memoir—but the essence of the book, his memories/memoir, are from his perspective. Not made up whole cloth.

Hopefully the following will help to shed some light on the distinction between truth and truthiness, literal and artistic truth, As part of a panel discussion on truth and invention in nonfiction writing at the 1996 Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Convention, memoirist Fern Kupfer gave a talk titled “Everything but the Truth?”

“The question of lying comes up all the time in the creative nonfiction classes I teach. Iowa State is a tech-ag-engineering kind of place, and most of my students are fairly literal-minded. ‘But that’s how it happened,’ they sometimes say [when] I suggest changes that would tighten a narrative and pep up the prose. ‘Your memoir shouldn’t read as slowly as real life,’ I tell them. We need to give memoir writers permission to lie, but only when the reconstructed version of the story does not deceive the reader in its search for the aesthetic truth.”

In Regarding the Pain of Others: Collective Memory Susan Sontag states that remembering is an “ethical act.” The act of remembering, just like the act of writing is not so much about being true to that memory as being true to yourself. Facing the truth of one’s past and learning from it. Even if that truth is subjective.

Cheryl Strayed wrote a memoir where she unflinchingly faced her past. Remembering how her life unraveled after the premature death of her mother must have been painful. Strayed wrote about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, hoping to pull her life together. There were times when reading Wild that I wanted to put the book down—that’s how honest her story was. She wrote from her gut, close to the bone, never shying away from embarrassing details. It is this kind of truth that kept me reading. It is the kind of memoir that wins rave reviews.

Anne Sexton is quoted as saying: “It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”

Memoir is not democratic. Family members may not all agree that certain events happened a certain way. Here is another quote attributed to Kim Barnes: A “memoir is not about what happened, but why you remembered it the way you did.” The truth of memoir is telling your story your way. This doesn’t disregard facts or give the memoirist permission to lie, but acknowledges that within truth is a lot of truthiness.

It comes down to what you as the writer is comfortable with—writing your memoir as fiction or writing it as memoir. Write what you know.

A final coda: When it comes time to send your manuscript off to an editor/agent/or publisher (even if it is only an e-book) that is the time to be clear with yourself. It cannot be published as memoir if the balance of story leans more toward fiction than non-fiction. The same goes for fiction.

When submitting flash to literary journals I check to see if they have a non-fiction category. If it is flash memoir I submit it as thus. I’ve never submitted a flash fiction as non-fiction. If the flash category is left unspecified, then I have the freedom to send anything in my flash portfolio, though I might mention in a comments or query section that it is memoir.