Syndicate and Hague

The NY Times Books section had an article about David Sedaris this week that dwelled on those “memoir issues” that keep coming up. I’ve written about the incredible problems of passing off experience you’ve never had (surviving the Holocaust, being in a gang) as your real, lived experience.

However, when people are fact checking Sedaris’s stories, I just want to roll my eyes.

I think that it’s a no brainer that “many readers, for whatever reason, seem to hold humor writers to looser standards, almost assuming that they will embroider their anecdotes.”

But let’s be honest here, there is a big difference between a writer who claims to have been a victim of the Holocaust and any exaggeration Sedaris’s stories may or may not have.

There’s also the question of memory. Two personal stories of late come to mind on this.

Last week, Jessie and Kate came over for dinner and we were talking about a table in our kitchen that has expanded our counter space. I was telling the (highly entertaining) story of this furniture placement and I said “We were trying to figure out what to do with the table and I thought maybe it could fit there.”

Megan looked at me like I was crazy. “No,” she said, “I’m the one who said we should put it there.

We stared at each other for a moment, each sure that we’d come up with the idea and wondering how the other could remember it differently.

In the end, I think she was right. It was her idea to see if the table could fit.

But this minor, domestic footnote about something that that happened maybe two months ago points to the fluidity of memory and reality. If David Sedaris remembered things differently than they actually happened or if he changed dialogue to get to the heart of the story or if he created some sort of memoirish truth–I think all of those things are fine. Things become enhanced in memory, and writers embellish, but I’m pretty sure we can all remember if we were truthfully in a gang or a concentration camp.

As Sedaris was quoted as saying in the article, “memoir is the last place you’d expect to find the truth,” with the lead up to that statement being that “reality is a subjective, slippery concept, particularly as no two people have the same recollection of the same event.”

This takes me into the other situation of late. It involves lawyers, thankfully nothing to do with me, but it involves lawyers asking me to remember my experiences with a person. We will call this person “X.”

I am not a fan of X. For all kinds of reasons, and I remember quite vividly the scenarios I was telling the lawyer about. But as we talked, and as another person talked, there were other things I remembered as well. Nothing quite as vividly as the story I specifically set out to tell the lawyer, but stories that emerged from the muck of my brain; stories that felt true and intersected with the memories I had, but weren’t ones that I could play the scene out in my head.

It’s like when Megan and I were in New York last week and one of my friends would say “Remember when …” and some memory I had forgotten years ago came back and suddenly whole chains of memory reemerged.

But were those chains of memory accurate? Who knows. If I wrote about them, I would say they were true, but I’m not sure how much of the life story I tell people about could actually stand up to cross-examination–and you can’t be sure of yours either.

As for the lawyer, I avoid the messy sludge of memory there. Just the vivid memory.

I could go on about the lawyer thing. I severely dislike the personal destruction that often seems to be the goal of court stuff. But I also know you have to play the game you’re in and you can’t stay on the high ground if the other side is willing to go dirty.

But, ah, memory…