Is it legitimate to invent or change events or individuals in a memoir? If so, when, why and to what degree? Some considerations facing the writer are the momentum of the story, the integrity of the piece, and the need not to deceive the reader.

TRUTH AND IMAGINATION IN MEMOIRS

Recently in a writing class, I was working on my next memoir. But I just couldn’t get the right angle on my material, and I therefore could not hold the group’s interest. One suggestion after my third rewrite was, “Embellish it.” Someone else said, “Just make things up. You can do that in a memoir.” Several heads nodded in agreement.

I was startled at the ease with which these writers were willing to fictionalize a memoir. For one thing, James Frey was still being hotly discussed – and condemned – for calling something that was largely fiction true . For another, their view was so antithetical to my own. I have always believed that if you possess the insight and skill to really capture an event, the truth of it will provide all the drama necessary to rivet the reader.

This is not to say that every event about which a memoirist writes requires every last detail to be exact. The memoirist relies upon her memories, which contain lacunae and distortions. I remember the event one way; the other person in the recalled scene remembers it differently. Maybe I don’t recall a particular conversation or essential incident at all.

However, if you are absolutely certain your memory is correct, then that is the way to write the story. You simply do your best. As Tobias Wolff says, “It all has to do with the intention.” That intention, as Colleen Mondor writes, is to tell “an honest story.”

But what about the times when you’re not certain your memory is correct? One approach to the material is to tell your readers, “This is the way I remember it.” Your uncertainty can in fact become part of the story, part of the ambiguity of a life of which you are trying to make sense in your memoir.

However, another requirement of memoir is that you must keep the story moving forward. Sometimes this precludes signaling the reader that the next scene may be inaccurate.

In “MY MOTHER’S HOUSE, A Memoir,” my first book, about ninety-five percent of the dialogue between my mother and myself is exact. We were very close –sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad – and all the episodes and periods of our relationship about which I write were very emotional, fraught with an intensity that made the details, especially our verbal exchanges, indelible in my mind. Moreover, my mother had a flair for language that added to my awareness of her use of it.

But what words did my mother use when she explained her treatments of the cancer she eventually conquered? I just couldn’t hear her in my mind.
Should I tell the reader, “Well, here my memory is a little hazy about exactly what we said, but it went something like this.” However, throughout the rest of the book, I’ve got our sundry conflicts, diatribes and conversations nailed. Ultimately, I decided that pulling the reader into my memory process by explaining it would also take them out of their experience of the story. I recalled enough bits and pieces of what Mother and I said to inventively fill in the rest as best I could. So, for the sake of the narrative, that’s what I did.

Similarly, you may indeed recall an event exactly, but that very exactitude might derail the momentum of the story or distract the reader from the meaning of the scene. In my book an incident occurs in which I deliberately altered a detail for both reasons. In reality the scene took place while my mother was sitting on the toilet. I moved it to the kitchen table.

Then there are those moments you are recounting in which you cannot possibly know what the other person felt. They never told you, and you were not there when the incident occurred.

If you make up the scene and don’t inform the reader, you will be deceiving her. But another way to resolve this quandary is to say, “I can imagine the terror/pain/joy she must have felt when – ” and then, knowing the person, go on to imagine those emotions for the reader. Similarly, you can “just imagine” the way this person thought or what she must have done when she got that job or caught that plane.

Some memoirists employ very large swaths of fiction among their memories. But where the intention is an honest story, the writer will signal the reader in some way that these are fabricated deviations from what actually happened. The problem comes when that signal is absent. While Frey is the ultimate liar, another memoirist, for the sake of story convenience, might give us composite characters – while leading the reader to believe they are actual people. To me, that choice exceeds legitimate alterations.

In the end, the key thing is for the writer to maintain her integrity and the trust of her readers. The public already must contend with a staggeringly obscured reality. Politicians lie; some lie like crazy. They all spin reality. The corporate media quotes the lies and spin without discrimination or investigation and comes up with its own myths. Digital cameras can transform any visual reality into any other visual reality. What is true ? What really happened?

We can’t even depend upon the food we eat to be real. Currently, one company is considering placing mouse genes in pigs and not labeling the meat as such. Once they get that down, they will clone the pigs. Then we’ll be eating the genetically exact same animal over and over, with its genetically identical mouse genes, and not even know it.

We ought at least to be able to rely upon someone who is telling us some aspect of their own life story, from which they learned this or that, and from which we might learn the same from them, to tell it truthfully.