Posts Tagged ‘ memoir ’

Fabulousness in memoir

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…

2008
06/12
CATEGORY
Personal
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What ever happened to fiction?

In the last week, there have been two “memoirs” whose authors have been outed as more than just embellishing the truth. In both situations, we have something that would be cast one way as fiction–but when passed off as memoir, these works become harmful.

First, and less publicized, was a Holocaust memoir:

A best-selling Holocaust memoir has been revealed to be a fake. The author was never trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Neither was she adopted by wolves who protected her from the Nazis, nor did she trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents or kill a German soldier in self-defense. She wasn’t even Jewish, The Associated Press reported. Misha Defonseca, 71, right, a Belgian writer living in Dudley, Mass., about 60 miles southwest of Boston, admitted through her lawyers last week that her book, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” translated into 18 language and adapted for the French feature film “Surviving With Wolves,” was a fantasy.

This just tears me. Once you decide to alter the world a narrative lives in, you need to take responsibility for it. What are the reasons to masquerade a fictional tale as memoir? For someone like James Frey, it was that juicy memoirs get published–so he added more than embellishments to his story. That, to me, is harmless enough–also a laugh at the publishing industry. You know, ‘you wouldn’t publish my fiction so I fictionalized my memoir and it sold like crazy, jerks.’ Or something to that effect.

But fictionalizing a memoir about the Holocaust? On what planet is that a good idea? It’s one thing for a writer to write a fictional memoir, quite another to write a fictional memoir and pass it off as real.

Then there was Margaret B. Jones. You know, a half-white, half-American Indian raised in poverty in the foster system who was enmeshed in gangs and drugs. Er. Wait. No, that’s Margaret Seltzer. The white, well-off girl who was raised by her biological family. Potato, potahto.

Jones, 33, admitted to the Times that her memoir was fully fabricated. Many of the experiences recounted in the book, she told the newspaper, were based on the experiences of friends she had met while doing anti-gang outreach in Los Angeles.

“For whatever reason, I was really torn, and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” she told the paper.

I call bullshit. Memoirs are profitable business right now–if you expose yourself and you’re interesting enough…well…you get book deals and movies. Let’s ignore, for the purposes of this blog post, that there are tricky details that happen whenever you try to represent others’ voices (because I think creative people have every right to step out of their lives and into others’ in their work).

Instead, let’s rant:

Margaret–you wanted to give the people you wrote about a voice? Why didn’t you write a biography, a memoir of your time doing gang outreach, an essay, a book about the gangs, a fictional world of the gangs inspired by the real world? Same goes for you, Misha. You wanted to publish, you wanted money, you didn’t want to give voice to anyone. You fetishized and capitalized on the pain and hard lives of others and you SUCK.

I want to reinforce again that I think writers should write what suits their fancy. And if you want to write a fake memoir because it seems to fit what you want the work to do–go ahead, but it better be shelved on the fiction shelves (meaning: you say you wrote a memoir of a fictional character – or a character inspired by a real person(s)). Dammit.

2008
03/05
CATEGORY
Society
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