Memoirist\'s Commitment to the Truth

¶ … memoirist's commitment to the truth of absolute importance?

It could be called the 'that's not how I remember it' phenomenon. Anyone who has tried to rehash a childhood event with a sibling knows that controversy often erupts: who received more Christmas presents? Who had the better grades? What color was our parent's first car? All of these are facts, yet because memory is imperfect it is very easy to misremember things. The emotional intensity of life as a child causes certain things to 'stick out' in one's memory, and other aspects of the world to recede. Yet this apparent 'misremembering' is also part of the experience of painting a portrait of the past. The fact that someone remembers his or her brother constantly picking on him (even if this memory may be exaggerated) reveals something about the individual recalling the experience just as much, if not more so, than the brother.

Memoir is not journalism: it does not purport to be a list of objective facts. It does not even purport to provide a full and complete picture of an individual's life, like an autobiography. It is a portrait of a moment of emotional time. "As its name implies, memoir depends for its accuracy on memory" (Kertes, 2006, p.39). To demand objectivity from someone who is attempting to relate their subjective memory would be to effectively stifle the development of the genre. Comparing the controversial memoir by James Frey a Million Little Pieces to Tom Wolfe's nonfiction classic the Right Stuff is comparing apples and oranges. Wolfe's book was journalism, a tale of how astronauts prepare to go into space; Frey wrote about himself as an unreliable drug addict (Zinsser 2005).

Frey was decried in the media because many of the hard, factual aspects of his narrative were not supported by documented evidence. In fact, it could be joked that other than the fact that he admitted he was a liar and an addict, everything else was fiction. Frey defended himself stating that: "I believe, and I understand others strongly disagree, that memoir allows the writer to work from memory instead of from a strict journalistic or historical standard. It is about impression and feeling, about individual recollection. This memoir is a combination of facts about my life and certain embellishments. It is a subjective truth, altered by the mind of a recovering drug addict and alcoholic" (Frey 2006).

Defenders of Frey were even more explicit in noting that telling a good story and creating a vivid image in the mind of a reader often demands the use of certain literary techniques. Lee Gutkind, in an article titled "The Creative Nonfiction Police" pointed out that even Henry David Thoreau compressed certain elements of Thoreau's famous two years spent on Walden Pond into one for the sake of creating a more compelling narrative (Gutkind 2004). Compressing certain events can be used to create the impression of how an event 'really felt' even if it is not how the event really was, much like how time sometimes seems to slow down or speed up, or how in the mind of a child a teacher might seem like an ogre, even if this memory is unfair. Creating such impressions through distortion is part of the memoirist's art. Furthermore, any time a reader sees: "I said" or "I thought" on the page of a memoir, charges of fraud could arise. It is unlikely the writer has the ability to accurately recollect conversations and thoughts in their entirety, years after the events took place.