Is It Real Or Is It “Memoir?”
There’s a fight going on in the
publishing industry and I was briefly part of the dust-up.
Perhaps you are aware of writer James Frye
who wrote a best-selling memoir of his life on drugs, in prison and other
unsavory experiences which led to the NY Times best-seller list and a spot
on Oprah’s couch.
The only problem was, much of his book was
fiction and he was verbally spanked throughout the publishing world and
almost literally spanked by Oprah. Fiction is fiction and memoir is memoir
or so it would seem.
Not so fast. Since the new millennium
began, memoirs have been flying off bookstore shelves (okay, not flying,
but being purchased. The essence is still true.) hundreds of times faster
(a slight exaggeration perhaps) than fiction books.
Got a book to write? Memoir is in if you
have dollar signs in your eyes. Or, in my case, if you couldn’t write
fiction even if a publisher put an Uzi to your head. Okay, a slight
exaggeration but still true. I could write hideously bad fiction rather
than having my ears blown off but you get my point.
Memoir means memory. You remember the stuff
you write. If you invent entire escapades and lifestyles, it’s fiction,
dammit.
Well last month I made my annual pilgrimage
to New Orleans for the Saints & Sinners GLBT Literary Conference.
There, I had the honor of serving on a panel with other memoirists to
discuss the meaning of the genre. The title of the 10 a.m. session was
Truths Stranger Than Fiction: Lives Revealed in Memoir.
After partying much of the night on Bourbon
Street, drinking innumerable Hurricanes and stumbling back to the hotel
while singing showtunes, a 10 a.m. panel was cruel and unusual punishment.
Okay, I had exactly four Hurricanes, not innumerable. I’m trying to
stick to the truth here. By night’s end I could enumerate the number of
drinks I had but not pronounce innumerable.
Well, the session on memoir turned into
quite a brawl. Hell, nobody actually wrestled anybody to the floor but to
substitute “loud discussion” would have readers snoring. I will stop
with the wordsmithing now. You get my drift. The panel and the audience
did indeed have a lively and provocative hour and a half.
After fairly universal agreement that
making up events out of whole cloth and deceiving readers with fake
exploits was heinous, shades of grey started to emerge. Author Mark Doty,
who has written a splendid memoir called Firebird and many other
delightful books was ready to give a whole lot more artistic license to
writers than some others on the panel. He spoke of memory as recalling
both the real and the quasi-real, exploring where the mind might take us.
Robert Leloux, author of Memoirs of a
Beautiful Boy, a current best-seller, seemed to add his voice to Mark’s
point of view.
I respectfully disagreed. “I believe what
we write has to have happened. We can add color, exaggerate for effect and
craft words for humor. We can shape time lines to make stories less
confusing and more readable. But stories have to be true to call it
memoir.” I said.
“Absolutely!” shouted a woman in the
second row. “I agree! You have a contract with the reader, asking them
to believe what you write!” She was taking no prisoners as s he
continued to engage Mark and Robert in a debate, citing truth as
incontrovertible, with others on the panel agreeing with her, then Mark,
then me, then others. But above all this dynamo in the second row kept us
returning to truth as sacred.
It wasn’t too many minutes into the melee
(again, a verbal melee, no uppercuts to the chin) that I realized it was
memoirist Dorothy Allison (pictured at right), author of the astonishing
and brilliant Bastard Out of Carolina who was taking my side in the
debate.
Wow. For a minute I was too humbled to
speak again. I got over it.
Pretty soon talk shifted to Augusten
Burroughs whose five memoirs and essay collections have been NY Times best
sellers. His memoir Running With Scissors was positively heartbreaking and
hilarious all at once, but its veracity has been challenged in the courts.
The loony (according to the author) psychiatrist that Burroughs went to
live with after his mother abandoned him—the shrink who purportedly
predicted good or bad days by the positions of his turds in the
toilet—sued the author for defamation and falsehoods and the case was
settled out of court. When I thought the memoir was all true, I was much
less disgusted by the telltale turd story.
In the final analysis, everyone on the
panel and in the audience that day pretty much agreed. Truth matters. The
controversy is in the degrees. And I guess that’s what makes horse races
and good memoir.
It’s a pity Scott McClellan’s book
about the Bush administration hadn’t come out yet. The former press
secretary’s scathing indictment of his White House days has members of
the Bush team shrieking “Liar, Liar, pants on fire!” Somehow, I am
certain that McClellan subscribes to the Dorothy Allison theory of
memoir—shirts, shoes and truth required.
Meanwhile, back at the conference, we all
partied together —and how it gets retold in memoir will surely be very
different for each of us.
In my case I was thrilled to be sharing
stories and cocktails with Dorothy Allison, mystery writer JM Redman, and
the many friends I have made over the years in New Orleans. When I get
around to writing about the adventure I will not leave out the part about
my spouse sleeping it off in the bathtub, yours truly knocking over more
than one Hurricane at the Good Friends bar or hanging out with our
boyfriends at a tavern where scantily clad boys cavorted on the bar. And
you can bet your sweet Hurricane, I may change the names to protect the
guilty and leave out a boring incident or two, but the gist of the tale
will be: we were fried and it was true.
Memoirs
are made of these.
Fay Jacobs is the author of As I Lay Frying—a Rehoboth
Beach Memoir and Fried & True—Tales from Rehoboth Beach. Contact her
at www.fayjacobs.com.
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