Truthiness Defined

This weekend I attended a roundtable on publishing autobiography and biography (catch the video on the website), and one major theme was defining the line between fiction and memoir. Three of the panelists basically said this: fiction is made up, memoir is not. Simple, right? Not exactly. David Shields (author of the terrific The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead) had a looser interpretation. Not James Frey loose, but he definitely had a broader idea of what constitutes a “true story.” It generated vigorous debate.

Some interesting comments:

- We read to see our reflections. We find ourselves in memoir and biography, and in turn those books’ subjects become part of our virtual community.

- Fiction is real life, cleaned up.

- Fiction is story; nonfiction is contemplation.

- There’s a difference between factual and true.

- It’s best when writing memoir to lay out the facts that suggest the truths, and let the reader figure those truths out for herself.

- It’s also essential to portray yourself honestly, in all your warty toad glory. The way we remember our lives is often a form of “tactful memory,” where we conveniently forget the times when we were weak or petty or hurtful. Memoirists need to work very hard to include all that. (This goes for fiction, as well. My professors always tell us, “Write about the thing you’re most ashamed of, because that’s the stuff of great fiction.”)

- Nabokov said, about his memoir Speak, Memory, that it’s true to his “remembered life.” The panelists defined this as a sincere belief about the past, a remembering to the best of your ability.

- Poetry is the only genre where there’s no distinction between fiction and nonfiction.

When recreating your past you have to take your best guess at dialogue and the exact nature and sequence of events, because unless you have a photographic memory or happened to have a tape recorder running (a bad idea for so many reasons – hello, Nixon), you won’t get it precisely right. But there are some obvious limits – one night in jail does not a year in San Quentin make.

So what responsibility do memoirists have to their readers? I’m fine with details and dialogue being repackaged to fit the story, maybe even pushed to make for better flow, a funnier moment. But it better be generally true to what happened, or I lose faith in the writer. I feel betrayed.

When you turn that first page, you and the writer have made a pact. After James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces was revealed to have huge chunks of entirely fabricated “history,” some readers said they didn’t care because regardless of if it’s the truth or not, it was still a great story. I disagree – call it a novel “based on fact,” but don’t call it fact. How do you feel about it? What are your limits?