I try to avoid memoirs like the plague unless they were written in the 19th century or earlier. It helps, when reading a memoir, to minimize the risk of a real-life, present-day encounter with the author. Especially if the author writes fiction. The truth behind an author's work can be a disappointment, as it was for me when I learned that A. B. Yehoshua had never been to India yet filled his novel Shiva me-hodu with vivid descriptions of the Ganges. Fiction reserves the right to deceive its readers in this way. So then I wonder...if Yehoshua had based his descriptions of the Ganges on first-hand experience would this have made the written descriptions any more real or imagined?
The recent fracas over James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces has prompted me to reconsider the relation between memory, experience and literature. I often work closely with autobiographical and biographical material in my research and the relation between these texts and the fictional works of an author is always unstable. When thinking about the memoir (and more broadly, autobiographical writing) the operative word is "memory," the function that shapes the narrative. I know that my memory is selective, discriminatory, self-interested, and erroneous. I could write a history of my life at this moment, but it would be from a perspective that will likely change in a couple of years. It may even change drastically tomorrow. When reading a memoir it helps to keep this in mind. The author-reader intimacy which the memoir encourages is largely deceptive. It is a closeness that has been filtered, distorted, erased and exaggerated.
Autobiographies are narrative constructs--there's no getting around this. Tell someone your first memory. How do you express it? What language do you use? What gestures? What intonations? How do you pace your story? Do you tell it the same way twice? The problem is not with the genre or how it is named. Call it autobiography, non-ficition, creative non-fiction. These are all a narratives shaped by memory. But don't trust memory to tell you the truth. Memory is a storyteller.
The James Frey "scandal" touches on major failings in the publishing business. There is no excuse for sad fact that The Smoking Gun proved to be a more diligent fact checker than Frey's editor. It also seems that Frey deliberately and self-consciously lied--so an imaginative memory can't be blamed in this instance. And in lying about one major event, he cast considerable doubt over the rest of his narrative. It was also a mistake for Frey to take his fabrications to Oprah. Oprah's interviews consist largely of events and data--What happened? Who did this to you? How old where you?--but the real moment of intimacy comes after the facts are exposed and she leans over and asks "How did this make you feel?" Frey violated the O connection.
We live in a time where individual histories are extremely well-documented. We participate actively in our public identity when we build personal websites, open a Flickr account, join Dodgeball or podcast our daily musings. But much of our online presence is also out of our hands. So even if we wanted to, at some point it is impossible to disappear or to make someone disappear. The contemporary memoir may not be able to tweak basic facts without risking great embarrassment but this should encourage memoirists to invest their creative energies into reshaping the form and language of autobiography and, in so doing train their readers to rely less on the truth-quotient of a work and embrace the craft of memory.
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