Tackling Truth in Memoir

If I asked you the main difference between fiction and memoir, what would you say?

Probably, “Fiction is made up. Memoir is based on someone’s real-life experience.”

Gold star for you! Fiction = fake. Memoir = real.

That’s obviously very simplistic. Fiction can and must have real-life emotions and elements to engage the reader. There are thousands of novels “based on real life.” But the primary difference there is how events are labeled. A reader knows going in that a based-on-real-life novel will have true and false elements, and their job is not to figure out which are which. A memoir, however, is being labeled as an author’s lived experience.

A reader should never be asking “Is this really true?” when reading a memoir.

But what is truth?

The Trouble with Truth

Here’s a quick exercise: Think back to the last argument you had. Where were you standing? What’s the first thing you said? Did the other person yell or did it just feel like they were yelling? What were you feeling in your body as they spoke? Can you remember all of that? Most of it? Some of it?

I’ve edited over a dozen memoirs, and I run into this issue frequently. I’ll ask an author to add dialogue to a scene or note someone’s body language, and they can’t always remember the details. Memory is like sidewalk chalk, and time is rain. Things get washed away pretty quickly. (Even if the memory is traumatic, the focus is tunneled, not expansive.)

Remembering things isn’t the only hard part about writing memoir. Presumably you are a human who interacts with other humans, and those humans will have their own version of events, and very likely it will be different from yours. Oh, joy! This is where subjective vs. objective truth enters the conversation. How do we stick to what’s true, and keep the trust of our readers, if we can’t remember what actually happened, and what we do remember may not have even happened?!

I hope you’re feeling at least a little bit concerned about this. Anyone writing a true account should be. You should want to tell the most honest version of events, whether in memoir or general nonfiction. So how do we navigate this?

Your Memoir, Your Truth

There have been many memoir scandals. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments, Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea, Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path—I could go on, unfortunately. But I don’t think anyone reading this blog post is planning on straight-up fabricating aspects of their story. (And if you are…leave a comment? Haha!) I’m going to assume that you want to tell the truest version possible, so let’s start there, yeah?

Mary Karr addresses this issue of “objective truth” in her book The Art of Memoir, and the perspective she brings can be very helpful as you write. Her solution is to make subjectivity The Truth in your memoir. At the end of the day, you are writing your story, from your viewpoint. Are you held accountable to tell the truth in that story? Yes. But as Karr writes, “The master memoirist creates such a personal interior space, with memories pieced together, that the reader never loses sight of the enterprise’s tentative nature…. It’s the speaker’s truth alone. In this way, the form constantly disavows the rigors of objective truth” (p. 16).

The point she’s making is that a good memoirist will cement for the reader how subjective their version is. This is how I saw things, how I interpreted events. If there’s doubt, let the reader know. Make it clear that this is your story. Assuming the events actually happened, no one can argue with your interpretation. That would be like you saying, “My favorite food is pizza” and someone else saying, “You’re wrong.”

Recreating the Truth

When it comes to memory and our washed-out chalk drawings, there’s something else to consider. There will come a time when you want to add dialogue to your scene, and you won’t remember word-for-word what everyone said.

This is when Lee Gutkind’s advice comes in handy. (I talked about this in my blog post How to Write an Engaging Memoir.) In short, Gutkind explains that there’s creation and there’s recreation. Creation is fiction’s realm. But in memoir, we’re telling our Truth. We are recreating a scene that actually happened.

So how do you do this effectively?

1. Focus on the goal of the scene. Ask yourself, Why is this in the book? What impact did it have on me? What purpose does it serve for the story and the reader? Brooke Warner, publisher at She Writes Press, calls this “the Big T Truth.” It’s the core truth you will keep coming back to in your moments of doubt.

   
   

2. Next, think about what you were feeling throughout the scene. If you’re writing about it, you should still have emotions attached to it. Tap into that. Allow it to be the undercurrent of the recreated scene. The great thing about this is that if the emotions are real, readers won’t care about dialogue being exact. They want to see how you felt and reacted and internalized events. That’s what will make the scene feel True. (If, during that scene, you were quite literally numb, focus on that instead. Use subtext to show the lack of emotion, which will actually give the scene emotion.)

   
   

3. Write what you can remember detail-wise of that scene. Pick a few very specific details. Colors, smells, sounds—anything you can. If, after that, you need to fill in the gaps with more detail, that is when your license of recreation comes into play. You have your core Truth and your core emotions. Readers will forgive you on the nonessentials.

Wrapping It Up

I posted about this topic on LinkedIn this week, and many people had interesting points to contribute. One comment was from Lee Hornbrook, who both writes and edits memoir. His message sums up beautifully what we’ve discussed here:

Memory is slippery and changes all the time. While it’s imperative to try to capture a reality, our truths and perceptions are highly subjective. So rather than relate truths, I encourage writers I work with to explain their “lived experience.” Even that has blind spots and elements of bias, but it may be the closest we can get to one’s truth. Rather than focus on truth, memoir is about shaping experience to make sense of it. There is art to how one shapes that experience, which leads to the wondrous world of memoir (emphasis mine).

So let this be your guiding light as you write your story: Tell your subjective truth, and make it clear that it is subjective. That is what readers are signing up for, after all.

About Adina

Adina Edelman is a book editor who works with authors of memoir and fiction, especially historical, mystery, sci-fi/fantasy, literary, and middle-grade fiction. She’s all about mining your message, unearthing the gold in your story—not just the grammar errors.

Adina has worked on over 140 titles in the past six years (and published one of her own). She offers 30-minute coaching sessions alongside her editing services.

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