It isn't the Truth; It's Just a Memoir

Recently, I let a few friends read the first chapter of a memoir I have been struggling with for a number of years. After getting through the first chapter, a little muddy eyed, some expressed a mixture of confusion, which I understand, and offense, which I don't. I soon discovered that they were not so much offended by the episodic narrative--which I described to them as a story written by a hamster on methamphetamine--but rather by the nature of my recollections, the very existence of the memories themselves. As I gulped my beer and listened to the grinding of their partially whispered partially pursed-lipped derision, I realized that at the core of it was a fundamental disagreement about the nature of a memoir. This became clear when I explained that my wretched book was a memoir and not non-fiction. They glowered back and one said, "But after your title you say it is a memoir." True, I thought, but "that doesn't mean," I said, "that the story relates the events exactly as they happened."  My friends' interpretation of my work moved me to attempt an explanation.

Since Opera Winfrey's public disgust with the false claims James Frey made in his 2005 memoir A Million Little Pieces, readers have come to believe (perhaps more than before) that a memoir must be an insipidly truthful account of one's experiences. A review of Frey’s book on Amazon.com illustrates this general misunderstanding: "A very basic premise of a memoir . . . is always that one is recalling true events. Things that really happened. That is the point of a memoir. Much has been founded to the contrary here in Frey's book and plausibly so. (the data is extensive and real)" (Laney, Amazon.com). As Laney claims, one convention of a memoir is that its author is attempting to recall events in his life, but the act of recalling is composed of at least two elements that lead to factual inaccuracies. First, the author is assessing events in retrospect, which encourages him to edit his past so that it informs and supports his present. In other words, the retrospective nature of a recollection encourages the author to draw causal relationships between present and past experiences, which give the events the trajectory of a narrative. That is, a conflict in the author’s life initiates a series of actions that lead to some significant self-discovery, one that, in the words of Robert Frost, “has made all the difference”. The urge to fit the slop of one’s life into such a trajectory simplifies its complexities and makes any memoir suspicious.

In addition, the author will interpret the meaning of the events he recalls, interpretations supported primarily by present realities. In this way, a memoir resembles bad science. For example, if a researcher designed experiments to justify current presumptions about the truth, then no real testing would take place and little would be achieved. On the other hand, if a researcher analyzed the data for patterns and subtle relationships, then drew conclusions based on those careful observations, compelling generalizations could be drawn. For the latter reason, a memoir told as a series of episodes would deemphasize the causal assumptions inherent in a linear narrative, allowing the reader to make connections as he analyzes the events described in the memoir. This narrative structure enacts the type of identity formation Walter Benjamin suggests when he observes that our identities are composed of “chips of messianic time.” Who we are is defined by the memories we select to support the idea we have of ourselves. Once selected, these experiential and emotional moments resemble a constellation rather than a linear narrative arc. In this way, a memoir, if told sincerely, has the foggy, sloppy, mysterious feel of memory rather than the concrete, pleasing feel of a carefully plotted story or factual newspaper article. This tension between reality and fiction is often what makes a memoir so fascinating. Therefore, Laney’s other point, that the inaccuracy of Frey’s account of his life discredits it, rests on a faulty premise.

Yet in Frey’s case the central concern really isn’t the factual inaccuracies, but the argument he makes about how to survive addiction. A reviewer on Amazon.com makes his derision clear enough: "To find out the author LIED for money, makes a mockery of what we went through. There is nothing glamorous about blacking out or throwing up. But to make it more than it is, well, that is down right wrong" (Kevin W. Loomis, Amazon.com). As Loomis’s discontent suggests, the book supports Frey’s idea that addiction can be overcome by a supreme force of will, an extreme example of Emerson’s self-reliance. One problem with memoirs that attempt to construct linear narratives is that these narratives are often put in service of reductive arguments. The formula goes something like this: “I became a great writer/person/athlete/politician because of this or that event in my childhood, adolescence, or adulthood.” However, the formula might more accurately be described as follows: “I’m a great writer, etc., [so some influential people have said] and this is how I feel I became such a great writer [even though I’m not exactly sure how “great” or “writer” is being defined].” The feeling most have, as the readers’ quotes indicate, is that a memoir should be a good faith account of the author’s life, and that that account should support a rather simplistic interpretation of what a life means. I can understand this thinking, but it undermines the potential emotional power of a memoir when it is expected to be a mere repository of fact. One way to illustrate my thinking is to consider the mimetic qualities of Claude Monet’s soleil levant. How might we describe the accuracy of this painting? The pleasure of offering such an explanation is the same pleasure we should get from interpreting a well-written memoir.

Similar in spirit to Monet’s painting, Jim Harrison’s Wolf is a better example of the memoir genre. Harrison’s account of his maturation is sparse on interpretation in terms of explicit explanations of how a past experience lead to some present reality and the implicit causal relationships required by a linear plot. Rather, his account is episodic and moves within the fogginess of a lived life. Of course, feeling the pressure to placate those who equate memoir with simplistic fact, Harrison refers to his book as a “false memoir,” which in a collection of interviews he describes as being 95% true. His cheeky nod to empirical measures indicates how silly assumptions of truthiness can be. As in Monet’s painting, truth lies in the impression made by those scenes that compose the constellation of our lives. The interpretation of their meaning should be left up to the reader, whose understanding of the relationship between experience and truth might be further nuanced for the better of all involved.   

Spider-man, "Meanwhile," and Memory

Note: This is a personal essay

Slumped over on our sides, elbows stuck in our sleeping bags, my brother and I read Spider-man comics in the domed tent that smelled of burnt pine sap and wet socks.



We had spent the day jumping from rounded rock to rock along the shore as waves rushed in, leaving faint lines of seaweed and masticated clam shells to graph the lake’s energy. Our sister chased after us, yelling for us to “wait a stupid minute,” but we continued up the shore, climbing among the ancient boulders, following the faint lines of flotsam to stagnant pools, reliving Spider-man’s adventures in “meanwhile.”

“Here comes the Green Goblin,” I said, sliding off a boulder and splashing ankle deep in a pool of icy water. My brother and I crouched close to the surface to examine the black water bugs--their thin legs stretched across the surface, hovering over the film of bacteria and insect larva. In an instant, they darted away from us toward the lipid ovals of mosquito larva, living drops of oil. We tried to capture these living accidents in plastic sandwich bags or empty candy wrappers. They were elusive, sensing our movements—the vibrations of our organs, those mortal frequencies, gave us away, the animating essences that only these creatures, spread eagle before us, could register—one furtive moment begetting another and another and another, connecting all things among poorly tuned strings.

Returning to our tent, we dumped our wet shoes outside and tossed our socks over our daypacks, and flopped down on our sleeping bags. We grabbed the comics our dad had bought us at the campground convenience store and began reading: “The Green Goblin has returned . . . .”

Spider-man fought the Green Goblin, trying to keep him from destroying the city and his family. They battled over the tops of tall buildings; they crashed into concrete pilings and glass windows, the scenes coming alive in hazy drawings swimming in flat primary colors. Spider-man and the Green Goblin bellowed nebulous insults and cheeky puns at each other, tainted with a malevolence that at that time was titillating, but would become real at one than another job—a poison curling the tongues of the fearful and ambitious, hooking the gait of the misbegotten.

*My attempts to swallow that bitter swill failed, and I am here, wine in hand, thinking what you now are reading.

I was enthralled by Spider-man’s battles, imagining a life of danger and soft-focused heroism—no one really gets hurt, no one’s life is actually in danger. Like Spider-man, I wanted to exist on these terms: smart enough to do well in school and strong enough to compete physically. “Let me lift it.” I understood no bifurcation between mind and body, as would seem expected of me later. Society seemed to hold apposed experiences in opposition: either this or that, but never this mingling with that--life as process. And that process, as we all know, is so often lit with failure and tragedy, experiences those silly comics foreshadowed.

*A willow switch tracing the trail a doomed snail makes, and off to the side a child laughs.

While following these battles, I noticed the word “meanwhile,” hazy in a pink box above Aunt May’s withered image. The Green Goblin had knocked Spider-man unconscious and the Goblin was glowering over him, quipping, “How’d you like that Spidy?” The Green Goblin’s lean muscles popped like the segments of a tootsie roll, nothing like the juiced physiques in contemporary comics, secondary sexual characteristics gone off the rails. In this cell, “meanwhile” was accompanied by the depiction of an ill Aunt May pondering Peter’s whereabouts. The squiggly lines of the image made her appear to quiver, a visage, a ghost, a mere fading thought.

*“What are you gunna do now?”

“What does meanwhile mean,” I asked my brother, who, being six years older, knew about such things, about how a word begets an idea, and an idea furtively changes the world.

“It means two things are happening at the same time.” Aunt May, then, was worrying about Peter at the same moment he was being beaten unconscious. Later in life I might’ve asked about prophecy or the terrifying dimensions of coincidence. But then, toes in the slick sand, the immediate enveloped my time and was all of place I could manage. I hollered and it echoed; I fell and it hurt; I asked and was answered. Just then I could sense that when I was so were those I knew.

Yet Aunt May’s concern was comic, not near as visceral or obscene as the fear I’ve seen in my mother’s eyes. The multitude of experiences contained in them caused me to quake. She had looked down allies and glimpsed the dark corners of houses I wished never to inhabit. With “meanwhile” I knew reality ticked along on different levels and at different frequencies and nothing could be more unsettling. The beginning of the loss of control—the first lasting whispers that I was not all that important.

*"I never know how you feel. How you feel about me. You are so scared."

Yet along with that sinking feeling came the realization that memories mattered, that they were worth capturing and keeping. I think my brother had known this and we both sought those kitschy trinkets among the tourist shops that crowded the campground gates. With cents dredged from between the hot vinyl seats or from under the partially melted console, we bought pins, spoons, or cap guns. And these fragile toys were no longer just playthings; they now pulsed with ideas that linked our gallop through hawthorn brambles to the men we might become and those kids we would soon leave in the Black Hills, or on the shore of Lake Superior, or at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Nothing we did would be isolated. Instead a long string of effects would follow each increasingly self-conscious cause our halting steps initiated. Like Spider-man, what we did mattered; however, unlike Stan Lee we’d have little control over the arc that narrative followed.

*“If you have to leave, where will you go? What will you do? Will you take me with you?”

The "Creepiot"

Our students often offer provocative insights about issues we rarely consider. This happened the other day when my students and I were having one of those obligatory discussions about facebooking and apparently insipid facebookers. Sometimes so witty and easy to laughter, my students mentioned a type of Facebooker many of them have come to despise. After some word play and maybe a little noun wrangling, we decided to call this person a "creepiot." This term combines the word "creeper," a voyeur who visits sites just to eye-grope, and "idiot," someone whose behavior is devoid of self-reflection. My students feel that this person represents the kind of degeneration overuse of  Facebook may cause.

Of course, my students were having fun, developing the term "creepiot" during their heated discussion of Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid" (2008), in which he explores the effects internet technologies are having on our cognitive abilities. In essence, most weren't convinced that these technologies are making us stupid, but they did feel that they are making us lazy, maybe a little boring, and certainly too insular. And, as with many witticisms, something real still stains the tongue after the wine is drunk.

The rosy residue is the encouraging thought that my students see the limits of these social media--that too deep a reliance on these architectures, constructed by those who don't have our best interests in mind, can undermine one's intellect as well as a more organic relationship to one's community. To much facebooking can lead, they feel, to becoming a viewer rather than a reader, a passive consumer of images rather than a developer of ideas, and this loss of one's intellectual and social capacities leads to the incestuous union between the creeper and the idiot, the "creepiot." You might take a moment to check the bend of  your fingers. Now I need to facebook my friends.

• Interview with Nicholas Carr

New Creative Work and Scholarly Article

I have posted new creative works and a scholarly article.