by Tracy Kidder
• Say difficult things. Including difficult facts.
• Be harder on yourself than you are on others. The Golden Rule isn’t much use in memoir. Inevitably you will not portray others just as they would like to be portrayed. But you can at least remember that the game is rigged: only you are playing voluntarily.
• Try to accept the fact that you are, in company with everyone else, in part a comic figure.
• Stick to the facts.
Stick to the facts. The words sit there in all innocent simplicity, as if sticking to the facts were no more complicated than stopping at a red light. But the facts are often at issue in memoir, and in a way that goes far beyond the fraudulent memoirs that from time to time scandalize the publishing business.
In an author’s note to his memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy, Walter Kirn says, “There are, I suspect, a number of inaccuracies, but no deliberate deceptions.” Most memoirists, struggling for accuracy, would endorse this rough code of conduct: faithfulness to fact defined as faithfulness to one’s own memories. Of course, this does not entirely resolve the issue.
Like the act of remembering, the act of writing your own story inevitably distorts, if only by creating form where disorder reigns. To make sense of your life or a portion of it is to tell a story, and story often stands at odds with the ferment in which you have lived. That’s one point of a story: to replace confusion with sense. The impulse of memoir is itself a fictive impulse.
What is true in macrocosm is true in microcosm. At the level of moment-by-moment rendering of the past, the factual becomes all the more problematic. One can see the problem enacted, in a brilliant form, in Frank Conroy’s memoir, Stop-Time, a modern landmark in the genre. When the book appeared, in 1967, it became the literary equivalent of breaking news. The original dust jacket bore just two blurbs—one from William Styron and one from Norman Mailer, two of the most respected American novelists of the day. Stop-Time is an account of growing up rich and poor. (Conroy’s mother was divorced from her well-off husband and took up with a drifter.) It was far from the first memoir about childhood, but it had a freshness and immediacy that made it seem like something new. The book served as a rebuke to the conventional sentiment that a writer ought to have achieved something in the world before presuming to write a memoir. To people who felt that way, young Conroy (and his young followers) said implicitly, You are holding my achievement in your hands.
An intensity of detail distinguishes Stop-Time, as one can see in any number of passages. Here is a scene set in a hardscrabble shack in a failed real estate development in inland Florida:
At just that moment the screen door opened and Mrs. Rawlings threw out a basin of water. It flashed through the air and struck the ground where the light spilled from the window. A thousand gleaming flies lifted from the greasy sand the instant the water hit, and fell backward the instant afterward, like a green blanket.
You don’t have to read more than those few sentences to realize that you are in the company of a good writer, and when you read a succession of such sentences your appreciation is confirmed. You also may find yourself thinking about the nature of memory. When he wrote the book, Conroy was thirty, recalling events two decades past with a precision that we know the mind provides only on rare occasions. That blanket of green flies has the insistence of a memory, but did Mrs. Rawlings throw the water on that day or another, did the water land in the spot where the light spilled from the window, were the flies out that evening or on some afternoon? Does a reader care? The particulars are inconsequential, and yet it is the particulars that help to persuade us of the reality of the experience. More simply, they provide much of the pleasure of the book.
Many moments in Stop-Time must have been remembered in just this way, at once remembered and reimagined. These are memories that happen as they are being written. They are not fraudulent. They are completely unlike the made-up events of hoax memoir, but they are not reliably factual either.
Memoirists operate on a continuum between recollection and dramatization. Once one decides to re-create scenes, a line has been crossed and some invention necessarily follows. “Imaginative memoir” might be a good name for Conroy’s book and the subgenre it represents. Even if most memoirs are not as fully imaginative as his, none that strive to dramatize moments in the past can be wholly faithful to knowable fact.
Clearly, the rules for reporting and remembering have to be different. For remembering, they simply have to be looser. How much looser depends on the writer and the writer’s material. Some writers in some situations are strict constructionists. For example, Geoffrey Wolff in The Duke of Deception, an admirable, scrupulous, and extremely entertaining book. The book’s two central characters are the author and his father, a confidence man, or, as Wolff calls him in the first chapter, “a bullshit artist.” It must have been obvious to Wolff that some readers were going to wonder: Like father, like son? Factual accuracy is usually an implicit issue in nonfiction, but Wolff makes it explicit. The Duke of Deception is a reported memoir. Wolff interviewed other people, including his mother, and he makes those interviews part of his story, complicating and sometimes contradicting his own memory. He lets the reader see how he knows what he says he knows. He is also unusually restrained in his use of dialogue.
Many memoirists quote pages of talk that was uttered decades back, dialogue they can’t possibly have remembered exactly. Memoirists do this so often as to leave a reader with only two options: to stop reading most memoirs, or to accept remembered dialogue as artistically licensed in this genre, as a convention of the form, like a papier-mâché sky at the back of a stage or the propensity of characters in an opera to break into song.
In her classic growing-up memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy talks about this very problem and sets out an unusually clear and thorough set of rules for writing engagingly in the present while being faithful to the past. “Quotation marks,” she tells us, “indicate that a conversation to this general effect took place, but I do not vouch for the exact words or the exact order of the speeches.” She reflects on the memoirist’s dilemma, particularly if the memoirist happens also to be a novelist. “Many a time, in the course of doing these memoirs, I have wished that I were writing fiction. The temptation to invent has been very strong, particularly where recollection is hazy and I remember the substance of an event but not the details—the color of a dress, the pattern of a carpet, the placing of a picture.” But she resisted.
A candid admission of the frailty of memory can certainly be overdone, but it can establish a bona fide with the reader, and perhaps achieve something more than that, by naming, at least, what cannot be re-created. Mary Karr, in her memoir Lit, describes a domestic quarrel in some detail, but then remarks that its aftermath, a reconciliation, is irretrievable: “If we talked about the night before, I don’t recall it, which isn’t fair to either of us, for it doesn’t show our reasoned selves paring away at our scared ones.… The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.”
For some writers there comes a moment when the “truth” of experience seems not just out of reach but somehow at odds with the facts, or when the facts seem simply insufficient. Maybe that is the time to forsake memoir and write a novel. Something like this seems to have happened to one prominent memoirist, Tim O’Brien, but with the unusual result that the facts refused to be ignored.
Perhaps no contemporary has better demonstrated the tension between memory and memoir than O’Brien, most of whose writing life has been informed by the harrowing year he spent as an infantryman in Vietnam. Soon after the experience, in 1975, he published his memoir of the war, If I Die in a Combat Zone. Critics honored the book for its immediacy and its honesty. None expressed any doubt as to its authenticity, but it seems to have left O’Brien himself unsatisfied.
Years later he published The Things They Carried, which drew on the same experience but which he des
cribed as a “work of fiction.” If you were an appreciative reader of the first book, then The Things They Carried, though equally if not more powerful, was oddly disconcerting. The book seemed to insist that it, not the memoir, was the true story of O’Brien’s war. “I want you to feel what I felt,” O’Brien writes. “I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” This can be understood in a perfectly straightforward way: only by heightening reality could O’Brien communicate the true dimensions of his own emotions. But things get more convoluted than that. This is a “work of fiction” that insists on its own veracity. To start, O’Brien refers to himself by his own name, and as the book’s dedication reveals, he also uses the real names of the men he served with. (Their names had been changed in his memoir.) And after more than one scene, he disowns what he has just written, stepping back to say: No, that wasn’t the way it was. Here’s the way it really was.
Take for instance the chapter “Speaking of Courage,” which tells the story of a soldier named Norman Bowker. We see Bowker after the war has ended, aimless and assaulted by memories of his experience, lamenting his failure to save a dying comrade. The scene of the death is grotesque—a monsoon-soaked field that has been used as an outdoor toilet by the villagers nearby, “a field of shit.” The wounded soldier drowns in the mud and excrement in the middle of the night. Bowker wants to talk to someone about what happened, but he trusts no one to understand. He imagines saying that he could have won the Silver Star had he saved his friend, but it becomes plain he is masking his guilt, and the story he really wants to tell is about the complicity he feels in the man’s death. Taken as it stands, the piece would be a fully realized short story. It is soon obvious, however, that it is not meant to be taken as it stands, because O’Brien undercuts (and enlarges) it, in a subsequent piece called “Notes.” He writes: “… I want to make it clear Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to [the dead soldier]. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own.” The author says, “It was hard stuff for me to write.” And having been shown the ways in which the author has tried to avoid writing it, the reader is invited to feel the shame that he, Tim O’Brien—a living man, not confined to a printed page—presumably does feel.
Or maybe not. One could argue reasonably that if the book is fiction, then anything in it might be invented. The playwright has stepped onstage but he’s still part of the play. We can presume to have no idea what he is really like. But at that level of contrivance the essential effort of the work would be dissipated; the reader wouldn’t “feel what I felt.” The device, not the emotion, would become the subject. The book as a whole resists such a reading. It seems to want to tell the truth about a real Tim O’Brien in a real war. We are left with the strange sense that the “work of fiction” is the true memoir, not true as to “feeling” alone, but also true as to fact. Or to the facts as O’Brien knows them.
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The desire to tell the truth haunts the serious memoirist, and so it should. But there is a step beyond truth. For the writer, the ultimate reward of memoir may be to produce a work in which the facts are preserved but the experience is transformed.
In A Fortunate Man, a meditation on the working life of an English country doctor, John Berger writes: “Perhaps this is the true attraction of autobiography: all the events over which you had no control are at last subject to your decision.” Writers in all genres are attracted to the promise of control over past events—if by “control” one means creating form or finding patterns in a life or a mind or the world, and, in the case of memoir, finding a road through the wilderness of one’s past.
Some memories cry out for this kind of control, as in the case of a young man with a painful past who had a powerful story to tell, but was uncertain about whether to tell it. His name is Pacifique.* He grew up in an African country beset by civil war. His parents—farmers and herders—were virtually illiterate and yet they valued education, and Pacifique managed to attend grade school, often in peril from trigger-happy soldiers. He did well. His test scores were among the country’s highest and earned him a secondary school education. Then, at nineteen, through a series of improbable accidents and charitable acts, he was brought to the United States, where he spent a year at the private secondary school Deerfield Academy.
English was still strange to him when he arrived. (He was fluent in French as well as in his native language.) He had never read a great novel or poem, but as a child he had conceived a fondness for the kinds of stories that elders had traditionally told—mixtures of fact and fiction that the elders always claimed were true, with complicated structures leading invariably to a moral.
A frequent lesson of the elders’ stories was the importance of discretion. Pacifique came from a culture that values silence, and so by training he was disinclined to tell his new schoolmates much about his past. Moreover, he worried that American students and teachers would be afraid of him if they knew about the violence in which he had grown up. They might think that it had left him violent too. But as he learned more English, he began to set down some of his experiences. When his teacher told him that some of what he had written was “damn near publishable,” Pacifique said he only wanted to improve his English. The very idea of making his stories public seemed to frighten him. He worried that his stories were unfit even for his teacher to read because they contained so much horror. His teacher tried to reassure him, telling him that art had the great power to transform the experience of suffering and injustice into something beautiful. This idea made a strong impression on Pacifique.
In one of the stories he wrote—he called it “The Color of a Sound”—Pacifique begins with a glass breaking in the dining hall at Deerfield. The sound triggers a memory. His native village is being attacked—on “one of the days my mother apologized to my brother and me for having given birth to us.” The family’s house is burned down. He and his mother and brother spend the night hiding in the forest. In the morning, standing near a clearing, Pacifique witnesses the killing of a young schoolmate named Patrick. The boy has been tricked into approaching a rebel soldier. The soldier is holding a glass. The soldier drops it on purpose, and the glass shatters. Pacifique explains a superstition in his country, that if you drop something you are eating or drinking, you may blame a person near you for wanting it. The soldier accuses Patrick of having wanted his drink, then orders him to pick up the shards of glass and put them in his mouth. The soldier forces Patrick to chew, then shoots him in the forehead. The story ends this way:
Because I had seen so many killings and would see ones even more horrifying, I thought I would forget Patrick’s, but eleven years later, when I arrived at Deerfield Academy, Patrick returned. In the dining hall whenever I heard a glass shatter, I did not think of the superstition. I thought of Patrick’s mouth full of glass and would see him trying to bite. My mouth would be full of food and I could not take a bite. It was as if the food in my mouth had become the pieces of glass.
When my fellow students heard a sound of a glass breaking, they knew someone dropped a glass and they would laugh at that person’s clumsiness. When I heard the sound of a glass breaking, I would not laugh. I would see a red color instead. The color of blood in Patrick’s mouth. A color no one else could see.
During his first year in America, involuntary memories were an important problem for Pacifique—the dreadful things he could not banish from his mind, gusts of memory that could come at any time. Two years later, he felt that something important had changed. While writing, he said, he had discovered a partial defense against his memories: “That’s how it started. I wrote a story and I felt relieved. I could control it. In the head, I could not. It’s as if you had your hands on it and you could control it and make it beautiful. So instead of it having power on you, you had power on it. When it comes as a memory, it dictates to you, it controls you. After I wrote that story about
the breaking glass, I would hear a glass breaking but it never came back that way. I mean, I would remember what happened, but it was never as before. I would think of making some modification in the story, to make the story better. Then if a memory woke me up, I could get back to sleep by writing it down, thinking I could turn it into something beautifully written. I mean, that’s what I wish.”
He didn’t show his stories to other students. He still wasn’t eager to make his past public, but he wasn’t afraid of that anymore. He was afraid that other students would tell him the stories weren’t well made, and because their command of English was superior to his, he would be obliged to believe them. Most writers are vulnerable to criticism. It is hard to imagine one more vulnerable than Pacifique. Writing had been a great discovery for him, a defense against the invasions of memory, a way to get to sleep. But when he wrote stories that included the horrors of his past, he had to believe that the stories were well made, or could be remade until they were. Otherwise, memory would regain its hold. “If it isn’t well written,” he said, “it is as if it comes back into you.”
Many writers have spoken about memoir as a way to “objectify” experience, to get clarifying “distance” between oneself and one’s past. But that was not precisely what Pacifique intended when he spoke of having power over his memories, nor is it the highest use of memoir. One can also use memoir to get closer to the past.
The memories that surface suddenly—merely unpleasant for most people, horrifying for Pacifique—are bolts from a bigger storm, capricious, even random. If you can go back to the source and see your memories whole, you can create truer versions of what you remember. You tell the stories as accurately and artfully as your abilities allow. If you succeed, you replace the fragments of memory with something that has its own shape and meaning, a separate thing that has value in itself. The past becomes an assertion that your life is of the present and the future.