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The Truth of the Matter: Writing the Memoir

"This brings us to the matter of how we, as writers tell the truth. A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly. You make up your characters, partly from experience, partly out of the thin air of the subconscious, and you need to feel committed to telling the exact truth about them, even though you are making them up. I suppose the basic moral reason for doing this is the Golden Rule. I don't want to be lied to, I want you to tell me the truth, and I will try to tell it to you."

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird p.52

But memoir is neither testament nor fable nor analytic transcription. A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that power of a writing imagination is required. As V.S. Pritchett once said of the genre, "It's all in the art. You get no credit for living."

Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story, p.91

Many people still assume that the autobiographic writer should have little choice when she begins to write about her life, that she is chained to circumstances to her, "just as it really happened." The trouble with such an understanding is its reduction of the writer to a mere recorder. The results would be the equivalent of C-Span.

Instead what readers really want from an autobiographic writer is her version of reality. Memoir at it's best, ought to reveal what it feels like to be the person writing....Because autobiography is in transition from writing meant to preserve history into a form that explores the mythic stories in each individuals' life, there are no set rules as to how strictly factual it must be. Each writer makes his or her own decisions about how much poetic license to take. In part it depends on who your audience is, In writing for yourself or for family, you may wish to take less poetic license. If writing for publication, you may need to take more.

While you are free to make up the truth in New Autobiography a reader is trusting you not to make up lies, not to lie about what really matters: your perceptions, feelings, motivations, your actions and those of others. Lying requires the intent to deceive. With the possible exception of famous accused felons who write quick money memoirs, most people intend to write the truth.

Tristine Rainer, Your Life As Story p 174-5