Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!
The truth about memoir and memory
The one thing we definitely know about memory is that it’s unreliable. So, when writing memoir, where and how do we draw the line between nonfiction and fiction?
My Struggle
I’m writing a memoir. Except, I’m not. Maybe.
Oxford University Press defines memoir as an “historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.” But that seems to be precisely what I’m not writing. Old emails, blog posts, and journal entries reveal that events did not unfold in the sequence I remember. I discover my brain has conflated separate conversations with different people. Then, there are my memories of events that could not possibly have happened—and yet, I still recall them. Here’s an example:
When I was in my early twenties, I lived in Chicago and worked for J. Walter Thompson, an advertising agency. I worked in the reference library. The library was centrally located within the agency, encased behind glass walls. Because of this, our boss, Roberta Picolli, referred to it as “the fishbowl of the company.” The rest of us who worked there called it “the flush bowl,” because our jobs were really shitty.
One of my coworkers was Lydia. Lydia was older than me—in her forties, I believe. She was of Italian descent, her black hair threaded with a few grey strands.
One evening, Lydia went to the movies and saw Ruby in Paradise. The next day at work, she told me how much she enjoyed the film. There was one scene in particular that appealed to her. In it, the main character, Ruby, walks down to the ocean, sticks her hand into the surf, and then places her fingers in her mouth afterwards to taste the salty sea. All the while, Ruby stares out across the expanse of seemingly endless water—her life, now, full of seemingly endless possibility.
Based on Lydia’s review, I went to see Ruby in Paradise, too. Sure enough, Lydia was right. It was a beautiful scene—and still is. In fact, I just watched it on YouTube right before writing this. The scene occurs about seven or eight minutes into the film.
Only, apparently Lydia never described the scene to me. In fact, Lydia might not have seen Ruby in Paradise, at all. That’s because the last time I ever saw Lydia is when I left my job at the library in 1987, before I moved from Chicago to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ruby in Paradise was initially released in 1993—six years later.
Yet, my memory of Lydia’s and my conversation persists. I remember that the conversation took place at our desks in the library. I remember turning around in my chair in order to listen to her describe the scene in the movie. I can hear Lydia’s voice, high-pitched and slightly nasal, and her distinctive accent. I can even hear the inflection as she says, “It was so beautiful.” Even though it never happened, it remains a real and distinct memory. But, is it the truth?
The Absolute Truth about Lying
From an ethical standpoint, we’re taught that lying is, simply, not good. The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued it was never, ever acceptable to tell a lie—ever!—even if, say, you might remember you had a conversation with your coworker Lydia, but all evidence suggests otherwise. Still, even Kant differentiated between the way each of us sees the world individually (“phenomena”), and the way it actually exists (“noumena”). Because our minds contextualize our experiences, Kant believed our perceptions would always be limited. In other words, absolute reality—or, the absolute truth—remains elusive.
Contemporary memoirist Mary Karr agrees with the long-deceased philosopher, for the most part. In addition to three bestselling memoirs, Karr is also the author of The Art of Memoir, her manifesto for the key elements a literary memoir should address. “We live in an age where […] subjectivity has a new authority,” Karr says, in a video posted on her website. “There's something about saying, I don't know what really happened, but this is what I remember that I think readers trust now more than somebody coming to them saying, I have the Capital ‘T’ Truth about an event.”
Addressing truth, specifically, Karr writes in The Art of Memoir, “Truth may become a foggy, fuzzy nether area. But untruth is simple: making up events with the intention to deceive. You know the difference between a vague memory and a clear one, and the vague ones either get left out or labeled dubious.”
Huffington Post culture writer Maddie Crum allots even more wiggle room than Karr. In her article “Nothing But The Truth?: On Lying And Memoir-Writing,” Crum argues that, when we share our stories with others, the “desired effect is to allow listeners, and readers, to feel how we felt—not to merely be aware of the literal circumstances lending to the feeling. If a memoirist can achieve that—and if she must take a few liberties in truthfulness to get there—then she’s done something right.”
Still, there’s nothing remotely vague about my memory of Lydia’s and my conversation. I’m not lying. I’m not making it up. I’m not even, as Crum puts it, taking “a few liberties in truthfulness.” Instead, my recollection of our conversation is more along the lines of what Karr says: I don’t know what really happened, but this is what I remember.
Of course, the easiest way to deal with this conundrum is to leave the Lydia story out of my memoir altogether. Except, I never intended to use it anyway.
While I was completing an assignment for my masters program, outlining the research I would need to do in order to write my memoir, it was a memory I could quickly fact-check—a simple pre-exercise, if you will, for what would follow. I knew the dates when I worked with Lydia, and I could easily access Ruby in Paradise online.
What I expected to discover was that the scene Lydia and I discussed did not happen exactly how I remembered it. Or, maybe it would turn out that it didn’t occur in the movie at all. But I never suspected that our conversation about the scene had never happened!
This concerns me because the brain that apparently manufactured this memory and continues to lodge it inside my noggin is the same brain I use when I write my memoir. Unlike my Lydia story, most of my memories are not well grounded in exact dates and timings. Inconsistencies won’t be as readily apparent, if at all. But, more importantly, why does this false memory exist in the first place?
The Truth about Memory
According to psychologist Daniel Schacter, there is no such thing as calling up, or retrieving, a pure memory. In 2012, during an expert panel discussion on memory hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences—“The Mystery of Memory: In Search of the Past”—Schacter explained that “when we encode information from the world, the mind doesn't act like a camera or photograph, just taking a little picture of what's out there. […] Part of what we store about that experience may be our own reactions to the experience, or inferences that we make about what's happening, whether it's actually happening or not. […] We could have a distorted memory from the very beginning.”
Memories can be further altered by our attempts to access them. According to Schacter, neurologists have demonstrated “when you recall a memory, it's not just simply a readout. You've got to store that memory or consolidate that memory all over again. And the memory at that time can be vulnerable to changes from [new] outside influences.”
In other words, while we might think a memory becomes clearer as we continue to think or even write about it, we could actually be distorting the truth even more. Or, consider the novelist André Aciman, who also participated on the discussion panel, and his experience while working on his memoir, Out of Egypt.
“I had written this scene when I first started writing this book,” Aciman explains. “I wrote about a walk I took with my brother on the last day in Egypt. And then, the editor said, You know that brother of yours? He's one child too many in this book. Can we eliminate him? So, we changed that. I removed my brother and […] reconstructed [our conversation] so I was having it as an internal dialogue with myself.”
(Talk about taking liberties with the truth! One word from an editor and—poof!—a family member is deleted from history.)
After he rewrote the scene, Aciman returned to Egypt to revisit the city where he grew up. He was awestruck by how accurate his memories turned out to be.
“I had forgotten nothing. I could walk and never get lost,” he says. “Except […] there was a change.” Aciman realized that his memory of his walk with his brother had been replaced with the new one he had written at his editor’s request. He could no longer recall the original account.
“I was walking down the same street—once with [my brother], once without him, and now I'm on the street itself, and here's what happened: I had overwritten the scene. I did not remember what had really happened on that street. […] I don't have that [memory] any longer. I erased it. […] I have forgotten what really happened on that night.”
Memoir versus Memory
But if memories are so elusive, so fragile, so easily distorted, how can we determine what’s true and what’s not when writing memoir?
“I wouldn't bother,” Aciman says, “because it's not important.”
Yeah, but … what?
“Ultimately, it is the emotional truth that makes us. If we have a centre, it's all in our emotions, and that's really what matters to a writer. […] In other words, you consolidate something when you write about your memories. You give them a kind of narrative arc, and that arc could be a falsification of your entire life, but the narrative itself is quite authentic.”
Falsification of your entire life? Even Aciman admits that “people will say, No, that's a novel.” Then, he adds, “I couldn't care less, you know, what they think.”
Maybe, then, I shouldn’t care, either? Why does it matter whether or not Lydia and I actually had a conversation about Ruby in Paradise, as long as it’s emotionally true? Yet, isn’t that sort of like…lying? Which made me wonder, How do other authors, who don’t write memoir, tackle these issues of memory, objective fact, and emotional truth?
Autofiction, the Autobiographical Novel
“All autobiography is storytelling, all writing is autobiography,” claims author J. M. Coetzee. Coetzee’s fans—and other writers and readers of “autofiction,” or the “autobiographical novel”—appear to agree.
Coetzee, a Nobel laureate in Literature (2003), wrote the three-volume Scenes of Provincial Life, which comprises Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime. Described by Coetzee’s publisher as a trilogy of “fictionalized memoirs” and by critics as “semi-fictional autobiography,” Coetzee describes these works as “autrebiography.” Unlike the traditional first-person narrative of memoir, Scenes of Provincial Life is written in the third person, but its main character shares both Coetzee’s name and birthdate, and his life parallels the author’s, as well. It’s hard to imagine any reader who would not mistake the protagonist for Coetzee himself, an idea that even the author doesn’t debate.
During his reading from Youth at Santa Fe’s Lensic Theater in 2001, Coetzee said, “When I presented the manuscript of Boyhood to my publisher, he […] wanted to know what genre it fell into—whether it fell into a genre of memoir, or the genre of fiction. I asked whether it could not hover in-between. He said, as far as he was concerned, that was fine—but it wouldn't work with the bookstores because they had fiction shelves and biography shelves, and it had to go in one or the other. What is apparently happening with Youth […] is that in the United States, it will be marketed as fiction, and in Britain, as biography.”
“Ugh! Autofiction,” my mentor says and rolls her eyes, when I bring it up during our meeting over Skype. She looks as if she just took a bite out of something rotten. “Don’t even get me started…” Still, it’s a genre I’m becoming increasingly interested in, especially as I grow more critical of my own recollections.
A combination of the words “autobiography” and “fiction,” autofiction is (very) loosely defined as a first-person, reflective narrative by a protagonist who shares the same name as the author, as well as verifiable life experiences. Supposedly, that’s where similarity between autofiction and memoir ends. In autofiction, authors can freely employ fiction—modify events, create characters, invent entire scenes—in their search for self, and neither Kant nor Mary Karr will judge them. While I’ve only recently come across the term itself, it turns out that I’ve been reading it for years.
I’m not a fan of war stories, either true or fictitious. However, one of my favourite books is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a collection of stories about the men of Alpha Company, a US military unit serving in the Vietnam War. While O’Brien maintains that the stories and characters in The Things They Carried are, in fact, fiction, because they’re based on O’Brien’s actual experiences from when he served in Vietnam, critics describe his collection as “semi-autobiographical fiction.” In addition, Alpha Company includes a character named Tim O’Brien who, like the book’s author Tim O’Brien, survives Vietnam and becomes a writer. O’Brien’s even dedicates his book to the soldiers of Alpha Company, although he claims they don’t exist.
In his essay, "How to Tell a True War Story," O’Brien explains why he turned to fiction to share his stories about Vietnam. He writes, “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” For O’Brien, autofiction allows him to be more honest and better capture the truth than relating his factual, lived experiences.
And bookstore shelves are full of the stuff: My Struggle, the six-volume, international bestseller by Karl Ove Knausgård, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, Stone Butch Blues: A Novel by Leslie Feinberg, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus—not to mention, arguably, anything penned by David Sedaris. (Poor little Jimmy Frey. Why wasn’t autofiction in vogue when A Million Little Pieces was being published?) Even Dave Eggers frequently employs autofiction technique in his lauded memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—characters break the fourth wall, Eggers engages with them in made-up conversations, and timelines get compressed. The difference is Eggers is clear to point these instances out to his readers. Sheila Heti, on the other hand, is an autofiction novelist, so she doesn’t have to—and, honestly, that kind of appeals to me.
Heti’s How Should a Person Be? was picked by The New York Times as one of the 100 Best Books of 2012. In 2017, her novel Motherhood was released. Like the author, the narrator of Motherhood is also a writer, living in Toronto with her boyfriend. During her interview with The Agenda with Steve Paikin, when asked how much of Motherhood’s Heti character is Heti herself, the author replies, “Well, a lot of the thoughts and feelings and struggles are mine, but the scenes are often made up—the people around her, the other mothers, the other women. So, that's where the fictional element mostly comes in.”
Why not write a memoir, instead? For Heti, the answer is obvious.
“I can't remember my life. […] I'm interested in creating a world that feels emotionally relevant,” she explains, sounding an awful lot like André Aciman. “I think it's just more, like, that's how my mind works. It’s always mixing up imagination and reality together. I think most of our minds work that way.”
Call it what you will—semi-autobiographical fiction, semi-fictional autobiography, fictionalized memoir, metaphorical memoir, or a novel from life— but if autofiction blurs the boundaries between autobiography and fiction, whereas memoir fudges fact with emotional truth, then are the two genres really that different?
“Memoir rightly does belong to the imaginative world,” author Patricia Hampl, whom the Los Angeles Times called “the queen of memoir,” said in an interview with The Associated Writing Programs Chronicle. “Once writers and readers make their peace with this fact, there will be less argument over the ethical question about the memoir’s relation to ‘facts’ and ‘truth.’”
Summary
However, for me, it still comes down to: I don’t want to lie.
Some might assume I’d be more comfortable with ambiguity—I’m transgender, for god’s sake! But even I winced when, in The New York Times article “The Coming Age of Transgender Literature,” writer Rivers Solomon said, “Genre, like gender, is a social construct.” Still, Solomon might have a point. Or, perhaps it’s as simple as semantics. If I swap out “nonfiction” for “not-fiction,” for instance, then do I feel better?
Regardless, and according to neuroscience, I’ll probably never know whether I’m telling the factual truth or not. In Food Rules, not-fiction writer Michael Pollan claims everything he knows about food and health can be summed up in seven words: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Simple, but effective. Maybe the best I can do is apply the same strategy to my writing: “Tell my story, don’t lie, mostly facts.” Then, when I’m done with my book, I’ll let my publisher decide which genre it falls under.
My memory about Lydia still remains, though, as strong as ever. So far, I haven’t been able to track her down, to try and solve this false memory mystery, and finally put it to rest. But, if I did manage to find Lydia and call her on the phone, I can imagine how our conversation might go.
“Lydia?”
“Leith? Is that really you?” Lydia’s voice—still high-pitched and slightly nasal. A little older sounding, maybe, but beneath it all, still Lydia.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Oh my gawd, I can’t believe it! How are you?”
“I’m good, good. You?”
“We haven’t talked since…”
“Ruby in Paradise?”
“Oh my… I haven’t thought about that movie in years. Remember when I told you…”
“About the scene by the ocean? When Ruby puts her hand in the water?”
“Oh my gawd—yes! It was so beautiful.”
“Hey, Lydia? You know we never talked about that movie, right?”
“Oh, yeah, I know. But still… what a beautiful scene, huh?”
A Few Works, Poorly Cited
Aciman, André, and Daniel Schacter. “The Mystery of Memory: In Search of the Past.” YouTube, New York Academy of Sciences, 4 Dec. 2012, youtu.be/vtdSDXl_QE4.
Coetzee, J. M. “J.M. Coetzee with Peter Sacks, 8 November 2001.” YouTube, Lannon Foundation, 6 July 2002, youtu.be/1BWkltTJJbI.
Crum, Maddie. “Nothing But The Truth?: On Lying And Memoir-Writing.” HuffPost US, 28 Sep. 2015, huffingtonpost.ca/entry/memoir-writing-facts_us_56044f0be4b08820d91c2132.
Hampl, Patricia, with Laura Wexler. “An Interview with Patricia Hampl” The Associated Writing Programs Chronical, March/April, 1998.
Heti, Sheila. “The Agenda with Steve Paikin: Ambivalence Over Motherhood.” YouTube, The Agenda with Steve Paikin, 17 Aug. 2018, youtu.be/ZKe4-NW5cYk.
Karr, Mary. “Mary Karr on Memoir: A Conversation.” YouTube, HarperBooks, 14 Sep. 2015, youtu.be/L254wu7bhko.
Karr, Mary. The Art of Memoir. Harper Perennial, 2016.
O'Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story.” Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology, 1998, pp. 174-183.
Pollan, Michael. Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. Penguin Group, 2009.
Ruby in Paradise. Written and directed by Victor Nuñez, October Films, 1993. YouTube, DoolyKim, 7 May 2013, https://youtu.be/w-S0VjuN4Oc.
Solomon, Rivers, qtd. in “The Coming of Age of Transgender Literature” by Peter Haldeman. The New York Times, 24 Oct. 2018, nytimes.com/2018/10/24/books/trans-lit-transgender-novels.html.
'Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!' © 2019 Leith St. John