What Makes a Memoir True?
I’ve puzzled over memoir ever since, when my youngest went to kindergarten, my mother asked me if I was “going back to work.” When I told her I was going to write fulltime, her eyes welled with tears. “You aren’t going to write autobiography, are you?” she almost begged.
You would think I’d had a horrible childhood full of beatings and trauma. In fact, I had a normal working-class childhood in a stable home, with parents who loved each other and us, and a younger brother that I alternately loved and fought with about the average amount.
My mother’s horror of memoir aside, I’ve mulled over personal writing a lot. How true are my memories? How true is it to convey the essence of feelings or wordless thoughts in writing? Would someone else who had been in the room remember things the same way?
And does that matter? What’s insignificant to one person can be of great consequence to someone else. What one person saw from the light and angle of one corner of a room would necessarily be different for a person in another corner.
In the past few years, there’s been a lot of uproar over memoir, from James Frey to David Sedaris. There’s a terrific article on The Daily Beast by Ben Crair about whether our current spate of fake memoirs is a new phenomenon, or just one that’s more easy to expose than it used to be. And the logical next question: what if we knew certain celebrated memoirs, such as Casanova’s, were proven fakes (or at least, as seems likely in this case, exaggerated), would that change their literary merit?
So what makes a memoir true? Whether it’s “true” or not, what makes a memoir worth reading? Share your thoughts in comments.