Navigating Truth and Artistry: The Complexities of Memoir Writing
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Like blogs, memoirs are sometimes accused of self-absorption: me-me-me. It’s an unfair charge. It often seems that those writing memoirs, far from being narcissists, need constant encouragement that their story is worth telling, that they’re not being self-indulgent ... To figure stuff out is half the point of writing memoir but, as Virginia Woolf said, the reason so many memoirs are failures is that “they leave out the person to whom things happened”. As with life drawing, so with life writing: we expect nakedness. You can even make a case for memoir being the most self-sacrificial of forms, the author laying herself open for the benefit of others, who feel less alone in the world once an experience they’ve been through is articulated by someone else. As Leslie Jamison, the author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering, a memoir of addiction, has said, the confessional memoir “is often the opposite of solipsism: it creates dialogue. It elicits responses. It coaxes chorus like a brushfire.”
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The motives for writing memoir vary widely… [But] the potential impact on others is an increasing consideration. All universities now have ethics committees, and life writing is treated much as sociology or anthropology would be, with consent a major issue: have the “participants” (i.e. any living person who appears in the memoir) given their permission to be written about? It’s not just universities that want to be ethically clean and legally invulnerable. Publishers do too, and memoirs can be a minefield. It’s hard enough being honest with yourself, but when you’re writing candidly about others the stakes are even higher. According to George Bernard Shaw, “All autobiographies are lies” because “no man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his lifetime, involving as it must the truth about his family and friends and colleagues.” Luckily, there are writers bad enough to tell such truths, either because they’re foolhardy or they have scores to settle.
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There’s an idea that a memoir is somehow easier to write than a novel, because it is based on real events rather than invented. But as Joyce Carol Oates has said, a memoir isn’t journalism or history, supplying “a verifiable, corroborative truth”, it is a literary text, consisting of words that have been “artfully arranged”. We might read it in a different way from fiction, with authenticity more of a consideration than aesthetics. But the two are indivisible: the authenticity can’t exist without artistry. Truth in life doesn’t automatically morph into truth on the page. And living people don’t necessarily come to life in print. It takes creativity – hence the term “creative non-fiction”.
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It’s a delicate balance. Too much artifice – flashy metaphors and show-off prose – and you risk losing the reader’s trust. In a memoir where credibility is crucial, decorative flourishes risk breaking that contract …But it is true that the boundaries are shifting. There are parts of the world that don’t recognise the difference between novels and memoirs. And the teasing, vicarious appeal of auto-fiction, that most fashionable of genres, is that – no matter how hard we comb the text and paratext for clues – we don’t know what the author personally experienced and what has been invented.
