The Boundaries of Memoir

But where exactly is the line between fact and fiction? Memoir continues to inhabit a nebulous place in the literary world where emotional truth may not match historical truth and where ethics and aesthetics collide. In search of clarity, Cascade convened a panel of literary thinkers to consider the pitfalls of the form.

Below are edited highlights from the discussion. Click here for AUDIO excerpts.


Laurie Drummond is an assistant professor of creative writing and author of a short story collection, Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You. She is at work on a novel and a memoir about her former life as a police officer. She teaches seminars on writing memoir.


Gordon Sayre is a professor of English and ethnic studies, who teaches courses on early American ethnic autobiography. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to translate a memoir recounting the misadventures of an 18th century French soldier in frontier Louisiana. Peggy Seltzer was a student in one of his ethnic studies classes.

David Bradley is an associate professor of creative writing and the author of two novels, South Street and The Chaneysville Incident. He has published articles in Esquire, Redbook, The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. He chooses not to write memoir.

Laurie: I think it's popular in part because people want to read true stories about real people, but I also think it's part of the larger cultural interest in having access to private lives. We see this on TV, with the unfortunate plethora of reality TV shows. Especially post-9/11, there's been a real interest in how people live their lives. But I also think it is, in part, the fact that the publishing world has marketed memoirs in such a way to connect to readers.

David: I think we have to make a distinction between different kinds of memoirs. In The New York Times today there was an editorial that talked about three different kinds of Washington memoirs: "I-reveal-the-honest-truth" kiss-and-tell designed to settle scores; "I-was-there-at-the-start," designed to make the author appear to be the lynchpin of history; and most tedious,
"I-knew-it-was-a-terrible-mistake-but-I-didn't-mention-it-until-I-got-a-book-contract." When we start talking about memoirs, I think we're talking about a literary effort that's about private people. It's someone's personal experience and it's interesting to us.

Laurie: Not celebrity "tell all" memoirs either.

Gordon: The term memoir is not one that I've often used in teaching literature courses, but I have used "autobiography" a lot, so I started thinking about what the difference is between those two terms or genres. One idea I had is that the autobiography is by a person who is famous for other reasons than just that book. So the Washington memoirs you've mentioned would fall into the category. The private-lives-revealed kind of genre, that you mentioned, Laurie, would be the other side of the coin.

What is interesting in the case of memoir is the fact that the author is anonymous -- is just like you or me perhaps, but emerges into this public space by revealing sometimes intimate, sometimes surprising or notable or heroic details about his or her life.

But the very fact of anonymity is also what makes it impossible, in many cases, to verify the truth. If it's Barack Obama, there are many other people, there are many other documents, there are news conferences and so on and so forth that can establish the accuracy of what the memoirist says. But in the case of private lives we really can't. And that's what made the Love and Consequences story possible, right?

David: I don't write memoir, because I don't think that I, all by myself, am that interesting. I write about experiences. I write about race from the perspective of being born in 1950, which is a very tricky time. Things were changing, but they hadn't changed yet, so it's a cusp period and I saw a lot of things, but I didn't do any of them. I'm writing about a personal experience, but I'm not writing about me. I'm the guy sitting in the corner with the beer watching everything else go on. I like to write about other people who have what may be memoirs, but I steal them. Sometimes I get caught up in events, but it's still not about me.

Laurie: Initially, I started writing about my experiences as a police officer as fiction because I started taking fiction classes. Being a police officer was the largest, most important experience I'd had in my life. It had a far-ranging impact on my life, and I'd seen a lot. I started primarily because I felt that police officers weren't depicted accurately in TV and film and books -- especially women. When I came into police work in the late '70s, female police officers in uniform patrol had only been legally allowed for several years. In fact it was at a time when women in Seattle sued the Seattle Police Department for the right to be a uniformed police officer, not just a juvenile detective or a meter maid.

As I began writing fiction, I realized there was some material that didn't work for fiction, that deserved complete honesty. Any kind of writing is an act of discovery, but I think with memoir in particular, the impetus for a writer often is to understand one's own life. You're trying to discover things about yourself and what it means to be human within the context of the events of one's own life. For me, exploring something like racism in the police department never worked in fiction. To immerse myself in my experience, in my own culpability as well as the department's and the larger world of Baton Rouge, the South, the United States, etc., memoir just seemed a much more honest way to approach the material. The material just speaks and says "this needs to be memoir; this needs to be nonfiction." 

Gordon: I think the controversies we've seen over hoax memoirs in the last couple years seem to be predicated on the idea that the consumer deserves some kind of protection plan and should be able to get a full refund if the book is not what was advertised. By teaching and by studying the practices of publishers and genres in the past, I want to place the onus on the reader and say that the reader should not believe what the dust jacket says or rely on which list it's under, or which section in the bookstore. The reader needs to ask him- or herself questions about what, upon reading the actual work, leads the reader to believe: I find this convincing, I believe this is true. Or, I find this suspicious, I think this is entirely made up. So ask yourself that question, look back at the text and try to figure out what techniques a clever writer can use to lead you to believe that it's true even if maybe it's not. Or conversely, there are many pieces of fiction presented as autobiography which are not. But a clever writer will stick in certain clues to push the envelope, to test your belief of whether it's an autobiography.

David: I've got to disagree with that to this extent: First of all, Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer is guilty of civil fraud and possibly criminal fraud. That has nothing to do with the writing; that has nothing to do with the book. She presented it as one thing, accepted funds for it, allowed it to be packaged. She signed a contract that said certain things, she made representations. If she had said, however, "This is a novel," she probably would not have been able to get it published. And so we also need to talk about the pressure the publishers exert on the authors.

The worst thing you want to be as a writer in America is a 20-something white male. You are almost forced to make up something; you've got to make up abuse, you've got to make up addiction. Otherwise you're not going to get in the door. If it's just "I'm a good writer and I've spent all my time crafting these sentences," forget it. If you get your foot in the door under whatever guise and you say this is nonfiction, the first thing that happens is they take you to the attorney. And the attorney tells you to change things, because otherwise, you'll get sued, because you'll be invading peoples' privacy. So automatically, even if you try to use exactly the right names, they'll say, "Can't you make their hair a different color?" or "Can't you change the names to protect the guilty?" or something like that. So you're forced to falsify, you're forced to fictionalize.

Laurie: I agree in large part with what you're saying, David. I guess one of the places I disagree is that I think it starts with the writer and the writer making the decision of "I want the best chance possible to get published so let me come up with this memoir, let me twist these facts to make it more dramatic or more exciting or more unusual." Then they sell it that way. They present it that way to agent and editor. There are all these pressures: the lawyers, the salespeople, the publicists, the Barnes and Nobles, the Borders who seem to dictate so much. But I think it starts first with the writer, and that's where I have a problem. If you say this is memoir, if you say this is nonfiction, and you've made things up, it's wrong.

Laurie: I don't think any of us can tell the complete truth in a memoir because our memories are faulty. It's the same reason my brother and I argue vehemently about something that happened over 30 years ago. Our experiences are colored by our previous experiences, our emotional state at the time. To me, it's one of the great joys and challenges of working in the form: acknowledging and working with faulty memory, which is different from making stuff up deliberately and knowingly. I can think of another example: Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff, two brothers, both of whom published memoirs:  Tobias Wolff, This Boys Life, and Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception. Their parents separated when they were 9 and 11, and Geoffrey went with his father and Tobias went with his mother. And they both wrote memoirs about their childhood with very different versions of events that they were both present for.

Gordon: Well, I can't resist raising the case of Dumont de Montigny, the Louisiana officer whose memoir I'm editing and translating. I've been astonished how accurate his memoir or autobiography is. There are corroborating letters and documents for nearly everything he writes. But when he turned his memoir into a published book called Historical Memoir on Louisiana, he basically rewrote it in the third person, effacing his own autobiographical voice. And he also changed a key fact about one of the most notorious and lurid episodes in the history -- an Indian uprising in Natchez in 1729. In the published book, he claimed he had been there until the day before the uprising, explaining that if he would have stayed, he would have been killed; but in his manuscript memoir that I'm editing he actually reveals that he left Natchez 10 months before the revolt occurred. So he was more truthful in the version he did not submit for publication.

David: I was teaching a course here in creative nonfiction and a young man in the journalism school was in the course, a very good writer, who was born and raised in Laramie, Wyoming. Now, if you remember the Matthew Shepard case, there was all this hoopla and this young man didn't like his hometown being slandered and invaded by all these people from back east who think only people who bash gays live in Wyoming. Flash forward many years: He's at the University of Oregon in my class and he starts to write about this experience. He's writing about how he now feels about it, about the people coming into his town and painting it falsely. He says he was so distraught about the candlelight vigil that he couldn't even go. He turns the piece in. He gets an A. He comes into my office and he says, "I have a problem. You know how I wrote that I was so disgusted I couldn't go to the candlelight vigil?"  I said, "Yeah."  "Well," he said, "I showed this piece to my old girlfriend and she reminds me that not only was I there but I also wrote about it for the school newspaper, and she sent me the article that I wrote." I said, "Now you have a really good nonfiction creative piece, you can write about repressed memory."