How do you tell the truth, narratively speaking?

An obligation to truth-telling is a defining feature of memoir, but knowing how to depict the truth can be more complicated than it sounds.

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How “true” does a poem have to be? A well-known poet I once met at a writing residency told me that The New Yorker once fact-checked a poem he wrote from the perspective of a son to a father. The magazine called the poet’s father to see how often he and the poet were in touch. They wanted to make sure their frequency of communication actually paralleled that of the poem-speaker and poem-father before they published it. This seems like an outlier in the range of perspectives on how autobiographically accurate a poem must be. Most poets I know believe that poetry, as an artform, owes its loyalty to its expressiveness, not to the authority of factual experience. 

But for memoir—the truth is expected! It is, in fact, one of its defining features. Credibility is key to the reader’s experience. 

How exactly a writer can portray the truth in memoir was one of the first questions that dogged me as I began to write it. As a poet, I was used to questioning the idea of “truth” in a very minute way. Poets may think and write a lot about the very ability of language to correlate to our experiences in the first place. The idea of truth in narrative form brought with it a raft of new questions. 

I knew that what I chose to say and not say in my memoir—because you can’t say everything—would shape and color the interpretation of events. How do you figure out what is important to include—from a truth perspective—and what is not? In the scene where my friend and I get into a huge fight in her kitchen, do I describe another fight we had three years prior—even though it’s not directly relevant? Could that absence affect the “truth” of the current fight? Is it dishonest not to say her mother was sitting there in the kitchen when we were having this discussion, even though she wasn’t saying anything and her inclusion would weigh down the narrative? 

Just the fitting of events and people into a narrative arc disfigures those events and people, even if you don’t knowingly alter anything about them. This is the case especially for the narrator herself. In my manuscript, she is, of course, not the “true me”—she represents a facet of me, defined by the narrow sliver of experience this book traces. This killing off of all the other me’s for the purpose of giving this one me life is surely a form of falsehood. 

You can paralyze yourself with these questions—and I almost did.  I have landed on the conclusion that I have to let what is best for the narrative itself be the driving factor in such decisions. This means being OK with the one, limited version of me—who is, of course, a narrator and not really “me” at all—as this is the best way to focus the book.  It means not including the mom in the kitchen or the previous fight because they are not within the scope of the chapter’s focus.  

Further clouding the issue of truth-telling are the opinions of other memoirists about what liberties might be taken with transcribing experience. One friend is of the school of thought that says, "If the shirt is blue, you can say it is green,” or in other words, you can alter superficial details of what happened but nothing else. Another says it’s perfectly acceptable to change the order of events as long as they actually happened (you can say you  did something on Tuesday when you really did it on Friday). I took a class with one famous memoirist who said she invented one scene and its characters whole cloth. She said she felt no guilt about it because the invented scene illuminated the emotional truth of the situation (though it's worth mentioning that somehow her editor found out and made her remove it). 

Some memoirists write composite characters—the friend-character who is both a professional folk musician and a math genius was actually two people (you can see the appeal of this as the combo-character sounds fun to write about). But for many memoirists, the truth of events is sacrosanct. One chapter in Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir is called “The Road to Hell is Paved with Exaggeration.” She is, maybe obviously, strictly against “manufacturing stuff.”

My opinions fall somewhere between the extremes. I have no interest in creating composite characters or events or making anything up. Writing a memoir is, of course, not just about the events at particular points in a life but about figuring out the implications of what happened—the takeaways, the insights, the revelations. My experience so far is that I’m not going to get to the emotional, social, or philosophical resonances of these events if I don’t at least try to depict them as they happened.

That is not to say I have a faultless memory or believe there is only one way (or only a hundred ways) to depict the truth of any occurrence. And I have to agree with the friend mentioned above: I don’t see how you can create a narrative from the raw material of events without sometimes manipulating their order—or at least their order of presentation—but these are maybe issues for future reflections. 

All this to say: I had to come to my own conclusions.

And editors, apparently, have their own opinions about all of it.