Guest Post by Wayne E. Groner
Rotary International encourages members to use its Four-Way Test in all personal and business matters: Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
Which brings me to memoirs; to what extent are writers of memoirs required to tell the truth? After all, a memoir is a collection of remembrances, not an exercise in journalism. The best memoirs tell good stories with conflicts, lessons learned, issues resolved or not, and changes that bring growth. Can a memoirist accurately and fairly remember all that stuff, especially the dialogue? And do readers really care?
Storytelling has its extremes. Local and regional liars’ clubs encourage the telling of tall tales for fun. Mary Karr, in The Liars' Club: A Memoir, tells of “a terrific family of liars and drunks” with tidbits and chunks of redeeming truths. Some critics claimed to be unable to tell whether, in some cases, Karr is retelling a fabrication or creating one. James Frey was embarrassed by the national media when it revealed much of his bestseller, A Million Little Pieces, was made up; Oprah Winfrey publicly rebuked him for lying after she initially praised him. A lot of movies are declared to be based on true stories. Based on are the operative words; many of the opening credits should include, “Some of the following is true.” Does memoir qualify as creative nonfiction, that ambiguous and relatively new term for using fiction writing techniques to tell true stories? Lee Gutkind posits creative nonfiction encourages personal viewpoint and conjecture.
Ben Yagoda and Dan DeLorenzo, writing for the Nieman Storyboard project at Harvard University, declared there are no simple answers for the complex questions surrounding truth in memoirs. That said, they tried to take on the problems of memoir inaccuracies by constructing a scoring system, a system they admit is half-facetious and half-serious. They rate inaccuracies according to their negative reflections on people, living or dead; corroboration of facts; questionable dialogue; clichés and flat writing; and self-deprecation. A passing score is 65 out of 100. They applied their scoring to nine memoirs from the year 397 to 2009. Ernest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast received a 69, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces got 29, and Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue: An American Life got 69. Read the full scoring report and download a printable worksheet to evaluate your memoir. It is a subjective process, since we are all biased about our own work, but it could prove insightful.
What does all this mean for today’s writers of memoirs? If you want to be accepted and respected then you must be as accurate and truthful as possible. What does it mean for today’s readers of memoirs, who are the final judges because they approve or reject memoirs based on what they buy? As Yagoda and DeLorenzo said, “. . . an informed reader has to make the call.”
___________________
Wayne E. Groner is a personal historian and memoir writing coach who blogs at www.waynegroner.blogspot.com
4 comments :
Important topic. Bottom line: "If you want to be accepted and respected then you must be as accurate and truthful as possible." We owe that to our readers. If we're not certain about a fact, or if family members have a different perspective on a given situation, in order to maintain our credibility I'm in favor of admitting to the differences of perspective. Speculation is also a way to get around fuzzy memories: "I wonder what she felt when (such and such happened).... Was she angry? Depressed?...." Thanks for the good read, Wayne.
Linda
Well said, Linda. If we don't hold to the truth we don't have much of anything.
Very well said. What I like about blogging is that I can go back and edit a piece once I find out I was mistaken. Rereading old journals, I discovered that my memory was a bit skewed on one important point. It was good to be able to fix it. However, the key is "accurate and truthful as possible."
An author once suggested writing fiction in cases where the truth and lessons learned will put loved ones in a poor light. That goes along with what you say here.
Thanks for the pointers.
Excellent post,Wayne on dealing with truth in memoir. Honoring the essence of the truth to the best of our abilities seems to be the goal. In the end, we have to be able to live with ourselves so what we put out there needs to be as accurate as possible. Thanks for an informative and thought-provoking post.
Post a Comment