Perhaps the best guide to writing a memoir you’ve never heard of.

In September of last year, 826 Valencia teamed with Holt Paperbacks to publish The Autobiographer’s Handbook. Because I contributed (minimally, but still . . . ), I received a copy of the book. I thought it was one of the best writing guides I had ever seen. Jennifer Traig, the editor of the collection, interviewed countless authors including Elizabeth Gilbert, Anthony Swofford, and Tobias Wolff on many of the most pressing questions of non-fiction writers: getting started, dealing with people who remember things differently, trimming facts, writing through pain, etc. What I loved was that the authors had such divergent answers. Reading each chapter, you either took what was helpful, what felt true, or at least learned there was no one true answer to any writer’s dilemma.

I figured this would be a hugely popular book, especially with the introduction from Dave Eggers. But something got lost along the way. Maybe there was a shakeup at Holt, or an editor changed desks, or a publicist forgot to send a mailing. I don’t really know why no one ever reviewed this book (there are only 29 listings for the book on Google search, which is insane, and the second link is to “overstock.com”). If I were 826 Valencia, I would raise an army, and I would bring that army to the gates of Holt Paperbacks, and I would shoot flaming arrows at their windows. But I am not 826 Valencia.

Since each chapter stands alone and none of the book is available online, I asked if we could run a couple of sections on The Rumpus. But really, if you’re interested in writing memoir, you need to get the book (click here to purchase from Powell’s). You’ll turn to it again and again. – S.E.

***

The Facts vs. The Truth

This is, without question, the thorniest issue in memoir, an issue that’s become even thornier of late. The thorniness, unfortunately, is inherent. Memoir relies, per the name, on memory, which is notoriously unreliable. It is not biography or résumé, not reportage or diary. On the other hand, it’s not fiction. It has to be true. But what, exactly, is true?

In the fine William Zinser book of the same name, Russell Baker called the memoir process “inventing the truth.” In memoir, you do have to take some poetic license. For the sake of readability, time must be collapsed, events elided, dialogue reconstructed. For legal reasons you might have to change names and places. And to convey how powerful something was to you at the time, you may want to heighten the language. But—and here’s the rub—you simply can’t invent things from whole cloth and call it memoir.

Ultimately, your own memory and conscience will determine what’s true. Most publishers don’t employ fact-checkers. Most magazines do. This is why memoir excerpts in magazines are sometimes different from the book publisher’s version.  Someone from The New York Times or The New Yorker has verified every single word. Did the vein in your father’s head really throb, or did he just wrinkle his brow? Did your sister call you a “four-star dork” or just a plain unmodified dork? Were you in Prague for your whole junior year or just one semester? Was it really the coldest winter there ever, or did it just feel that way to you?  It’s difficult to write while you’re questioning yourself like that, so you’ll just have to get it down the way it feels true to you. Afterward you can go back and rework the places where you’ve taken too much license, gotten carried away by the narrative, strayed too far.  For some writers, sticking to fact is too constraining. Others find it liberating.  Non-fiction does let you do some things that would never work in fiction. A scene in Julia Scheeres’s Jesus Land illustrates this perfectly: Young Julia arrives at her Dominican Republic tough-love camp where the staff greets her with smiles and a sign welcoming her by name. Within seconds the staff has stomped the sign into a trash can, foreshadowing the way they’ll be treating her in the months to come. That detail would have been overly symbolic if it hadn’t really happened, if Scheeres were telling the story as a novel. But it did happen, and it’s presented truthfully, and it’s perfect.  You’ll find your perfect truths, too. In this chapter, our authors reveal their policies and techniques for finding theirs.

Some thoughts on the role of truth in memoir.

Tobias Wolff: There’s no question that the operations of memory have a great deal of imagination in them. Otherwise we’d all remember things exactly the same way. We’re bringing our peculiar sense of the past to bear; each of us is a filter. None of us has an objective view of the past. There are historical events that are verifiable, but the things that we like to get into as writers have to do with character and texture and relationship—these are not objective, measurable insights.  You can see this in family members discussing events of twenty years ago—they always have different versions, sometimes comically so. For instance, I may be the leading character in all my memories, but I’m not the leading character in my friend’s memories, who may be offended that he wasn’t occupying a more central role in my account of events.

There’s always that subjective slant to the act of remembering things.  I don’t have a problem with that. But when you’re intentionally making things up, you have to acknowledge that, and call it fiction. My last book, for instance, is told in the first person, and draws to some extent on certain experiences of mine, but it’s a novel and it’s called a novel.  Anyone who reads it as a memoir does so at his own peril. I made up a lot of what’s in there. This is an ancient and holy tradition in writing.  You have to know the difference when you’re writing and you have to be honest about it.

Sean Wilsey: I approached my book with the attitude that no cheating was allowed, that I had to write it like a reporter, because I was at The New Yorker, and at The New Yorker immediately following Janet Malcolm’s time in court for cleaning up quotes and resetting scenes. I obviously don’t have a transcript of everything that happened to me, but I struggled to make sure every conversation was accurate. I immersed myself, talking to people, revisiting events that were really unpleasant to recall, and reconstructing as accurately as possible. I can’t judge anyone else, and there are different ways to approach it.  But since I was writing about someone who would take any opportunity to sue, that pushed me to be extra reportorial. Besides, from a craft point of view, I don’t like the idea of playing with stuff—I think it’s a great challenge to make a book both alive and as accurate as possible.

Frank McCourt: Most of us have lives filled with interesting things.  You don’t need to create fiction. Just tell your story, that’s all. Hemingway just told his story. It’s enough. Everybody’s story is enough. If I lived another hundred years, I could write a hundred books about my family, and they could write a hundred books.

Laura Fraser: Well, this has been getting a lot of ink. I say stick to real events and real time and real content of conversations. Of course, the dialogue is not written the way it came out of someone’s mouth, but the key phrases and ideas were there. Memoirs are about memory, and so you write in a way that is as true to your memory as possible. Our memories are tinged with emotion and are always interpreting and can never be mistaken for objective truth. That said, I think if you’re going to make shit up, you should call it “fiction.”

Azadeh Moaveni: I bear in mind the question of intent, and sometimes when I need to make a choice of this nature, I project myself into the future and try to imagine whether I’d be able to defend the license I’d taken if someone found out or took offense. If I could make a strong case for what I want to do, I go ahead and do it. Otherwise, I’d find some other way to move that bit of the story along.

Steve Almond: You’re allowed (required, actually) to be radically subjective in memoir. But you have to be radically subjective about experiences that objectively took place.  Every narrative is shaped. You don’t just write every single thing that ever happened to yourself, or your characters. You choose the ones that push us into compelling danger. That said, you shouldn’t knowingly lie in a memoir. You should be aiming at the truth of an emotional experience, but not by contriving actual experiences. Embellishing for humorous effect, sure, fine. Condensing time, okay. Reconstructing dialogue.  Yes, if need be. But don’t invent, unless you want to write fiction.

Sarah Vowell: I’m not particularly judgmental about other writers stretching the truth a tad. No one is ever going to remember dialogue word for word, especially if it happened long ago. So just try your best. Obviously, if you’re calling your work non-fiction and your truth stretches include, say, erroneously maligning a physician’s medical ethics, that’s wrong. Personally, I would never combine two characters into one in a work of non-fiction. Nor would I change chronology. I guess if you feel like you must do those things, for Pete’s sake, say you’re doing it up front. Really, though, the whole reason non-fiction is sort of (to me) more fun to write than fiction is that so many unbelievable things actually happen, whereas fiction has to be somewhat plausible.

David Matthews: Dialogue, sensory details—neither can be recorded faithfully in a memoir, and I’d argue that you shouldn’t even try.  Describe the events a) as you remember them, and b) as entertainingly as you can. When in doubt, go with b.

As far as documentable events—divorces, births, deaths, etc.—you must do both a and b. That’s the hardest part of memoir writing. No matter what, just don’t be boring—which is why I think you should  have written a lot of other stuff, even just for fun, before you tackle a  memoir. Just having a story to tell ain’t enough. You’ve still gotta be  a writer at heart.

Elizabeth Gilbert: You know, I’m surprised by how much un-truth people automatically assume is present in any memoir. I got a letter recently from a woman who’d read Eat, Pray, Love and she had a small favor to ask—she wanted me to write to her and confess all the parts of the book I had made up.  There was nothing vindictive about her request, she said; she was simply wondering. She didn’t mind that I had made up so much of my memoir, she assured me; it’s just that she was curious to know which  parts. She had some ideas. For instance, she was pretty sure I’d made up the bit at the end about falling in love with the Brazilian guy in Bali—that was obviously too good to be true and clearly I had invented it just to manufacture a happy ending. (Meanwhile, I had just married that actual Brazilian the week earlier, after a three-year courtship.)  I don’t even know what to do with letters like this, or questions like this, which come up now all the time. Why do people assume that if a story has adventure, coincidence, amazing characters, snappy dialogue,  or a happy ending that it all must have been invented, or at least mightily manipulated? I don’t get this. My friend Shea—an artist and traveler—thinks that this new suspicion of true stories speaks to an absence these days of public imagination, or a lack of real-world experience. He told me once, after having traveled around the world for a year and having come back with great stories, which few people believed, “I just say to these people—you go travel around the world for a year. You see what turns up.”  My memoir is full of coincidence and crazy characters and episodes of almost unbelievable good fortune and happenstance because that’s what my journey was filled with. The difficult challenge for me, while writing this book, was not trying to figure out how to embellish the truth or invent “interesting” scenes, but how to decide what parts not to tell, because there was so much interesting stuff to choose from. I lived that year full-tilt, and I collected enough real material for a lifetime.  The truth is wild and amazing enough. I don’t think it needs much embroidery. Stories need to be polished, as I learned growing up in a family of terrific storytellers whose tales got better and better over the years as they figured out how to bring out the best, shiniest, funniest parts of a true anecdote. But they didn’t invent those stories. They just cut out the boring parts and highlighted the wonderful parts and perfected their delivery. I learned from childhood that stories don’t need to be flat-out invented, not when life is generous already with true wonder, and not when you know how to tell it well.

Anthony Swofford: Characters should never be combined in memoir. If you tell the public you have written this memoir, and it is true, you can’t go making things up, especially at the level of character. That is a lie; your credibility is gone. If you are combining characters you should probably not be writing a memoir about this particular event, you should just write a novel. The reconstruction of dialogue is obviously a necessary tool. The memoir is not a documentary, and the reader knows this. But you must know these subjects well enough to be able to inhabit their voices and their ethos, to put their words in their mouths. Nor should the writer diverge from factual events. For different people the truth of those events might have been different. Rashômon is everyone’s favorite example, and a fine one, but the events themselves must not be altered. That is what novels are for. In terms of time, this is why the nonlinear form is my favorite for the memoir—otherwise you are bogged down by, “Five months later Florence and I returned to Costa Rica to see how … ” Bad news.

Firoozeh Dumas: This is a sensitive topic for me. I am very angry with writers of non-fiction who lie. It casts a shadow of doubt on everyone’s work. A memoir is simply the author’s memory. It is understood that dialogue is not verbatim, but an honest recollection. Nothing should be invented. If a conversation did not happen, do not say it did.  It’s okay to combine characters for the sake of story, as long the characters actually existed.

You can play with the truth, but you can’t invent people and events that did not happen. In Funny in Farsi, I changed the name of two people, one because I shared a very embarrassing story about him, and the other because I knew she had passed away and I could not locate her family to get their permission, or rather, their blessing. (It was a sweet story, but I just wanted to be protective.) Changing their names did not affect the story one bit. The people existed, the events happened. One more detail about memoir writing: I might describe an event as boring but my brother might describe it as thrilling. We’re both telling the truth. That’s the beauty of a memoir. It’s all about one person’s perspective. In that sense, the “truth” can seem flexible, but we all know the difference between telling our truth and completely making things up.

Beth Lisick: To be brief, I don’t think it’s okay to lie on purpose in order to make your story better or more marketable. If you’re the only one who knows you’re lying, and you can live with that, congratulations.  I often go out of my way so I don’t have to make things up. I find the “inventing” of truth very difficult. Not to say I don’t elide, combine, and reconstruct because of course I do, but even if I am just describing a sweater someone wasn’t wearing, in order to create an image, I think,  “I can’t believe I just fabricated an outfit someone actually wasn’t even wearing!” It makes me feel a little unclean.

Alison Smith: Truth is hard. It’s harder than it sounds. Just ask your family about a memory you have of them. I guarantee that someone in your family will disagree with your memory. I bet at least one family member will tell you that you got it wrong. They will tell you that things you know in your bones happened didn’t ever happen, and vise versa.  Memoirists have only two tools—memory and imagination. They must use both of these tools and they must use them judiciously. I do wish there was some standard, some yardstick we could use to measure the truth factor in a memoir. But such a thing has yet to be invented.  In the meantime, writers need to understand the weight of their words.  They must honor the people they write about by writing about them with compassion, with candor, with generosity. It’s the only decent thing to do. And it makes for a better book. The more nuanced, the more multifaceted, the more empathic you are, the richer the work will be.

Jonathan Ames: Maybe because I write out my life in small doses—individual events—I don’t have to do as much time collapsing or character-melding … Dialogue, of course, has to be reconstructed. I think that once you start changing events or creating events that didn’t  happen, it’s no longer memoir, but autobiographical fiction.

Dan Kennedy: I stick with what happened, really. I’m a terrible liar anyway. The truth is always funnier. The bottom line is: I guarantee you that the little, tiny, seemingly benign truths about the way things really happened—the way it all really went down—those are where the best material is. In Permanent Midnight, Jerry Stahl doesn’t take the time to convince you he was a hardened criminal in his worst moments—he’s  going to tell you the truth, that story about the dented canned food scam being his big bad-ass criminal moment; and when he tells it, it’s brilliant, and sad, and hilarious, and true.

Phillip Lopate: I take the liberty at times to collapse several events into one, to change names or addresses as a way of protecting others, to reconstruct dialogue. Beyond that, I try to tell the truth as much as I can. I like the truth, I prefer the truth to invention. It is not a policy so much as a quasi-mystical belief: that life experience has an underlying form, and that it is the job of the autobiographical writer to find that form. Why invent when the facts are interesting enough, if only one can arrange them properly?

David Rakoff: Because my training, such as it is, was in magazines that employ fact-checking departments, the policy is to tell the truth and be prepared to back it up. I’m very pleased to say I’ve never been challenged on that front. But it really depends on the kind of writing you’re doing. I like truth, myself (sadly reflected in my book sales, I’m afraid). Obviously events get compressed for the sake of concision, but I really try not to alter the truth of things I choose to put into the story.

Gus Lee: Our extrapolations must be ruthlessly consistent with our understanding of the characters and their times. Otherwise, we’ve crossed the line into fantasy—a fine country for the pen, but not the one you’ve declared it to be. I like the theory of writing about what is difficult— to face fear, which is the unique place in which we can meet courage.

Paul Collins: Fiction is fabricated by the author; non-fiction is what is left after the author has cut away materials from the extant world.  So non-fiction is necessarily a massive process of omission. That is not the same as fabrication, and it’s facile when authors conflate the two. I don’t believe in the concept of greater poetic truths. I really don’t. It’s a convenient lie for dishonest artists.

Janice Erlbaum: Be as honest as you can be. You’re going to have to leave out stuff that happened, but don’t put in stuff that didn’t happen. You will have to recreate dialogue, but don’t create dialogue. Don’t make people say things they never said, or never would say. If you have to change the timeline, try to keep it as close to the actual events as possible. And I’ve tried compositing characters in order to protect people’s identities, but it didn’t work—people recognized themselves anyway—so I don’t think there’s a good reason to do so. Whatever you do to change the story must be acknowledged in an author’s note before the text. If you don’t feel like being honest about your life, call it fiction.

Caroline Kraus: I think when dealing with facts, a memoir should be scrupulously true and vetted. And when dealing with feelings, perspectives, and memories, which extend from those facts, readers should understand that subjective truth is operating. Some of the techniques used to bring both objective and subjective facts alive include dialogue, scene description, and time manipulation. It’s not too complicated.

Tanya Shaffer: A memoir is not journalism. It’s a personal essay based on memory, which everyone knows is unreliable. It’s a trip inside an individual’s head, to look at that person’s experiences through his or her eyes. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to combine insignificant characters and trivial events for the sake of advancing the story. If you had to keep every tiny detail in line it would be so boring that no one would read it.

Having said that, we have to acknowledge the fact that a memoir is not being sold as fiction. That means that larger events and people can’t be invented out of whole cloth. In my view, you have to stay true to the basic events, but it’s okay to manipulate details to make it possible for the reader to experience the essence of the tale more clearly.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal: I think you just do your best. Unless we could put a wire into the brain and there was some computer program that could turn your memory into words, it’s a really tricky, difficult thing. If you’re a writer, and if your intent and your integrity are there, I think that counts for a lot.

The fact is, we all remember things differently. It’s like Rashômon, the same story told four different ways, four people remembering the same incident differently yet they can all be considered versions of the truth. It’s fascinating. How do you account for that? How do a household of people, of siblings and parents, for instance, remember the exact same events differently? In Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, I worked really hard to make dates accurate—and in cases where there was recorded data, it was factual. But in cases where I was tracing a memory, like in the childhood memories section, for instance, I just did my best to map it all out. If I was a little off, I hope readers will forgive me. Memoir writers are not journalists; we’re not reporting  “facts.” We’re trying our best to grab at that elusive stuff of our lives and record it honestly.

Tamim Ansary: I’m sort of dogmatic. You can’t make things up, because then it’s not a memoir. For me, the premise is that the original story-like essence is actually there, and I am very committed to that. When you start changing things to make it a better story, you lose that.  I was at this memoir workshop and another memoirist there made an interesting point that clarified things for me. He said of course you make up stuff in a memoir. But you do that to recreate the truth as you know it. It’s a different thing when you make up stuff because you want to glorify yourself or create a truth that wasn’t there. When I went to Afghanistan people told me stories that were difficult to repeat—they were too horrible. At some point I started thinking they weren’t factual.  But I think they were telling me that to give me a sense of how painful the events really had been for them. It made it more lurid, so I could feel how they felt when the thing happened.

Art Spiegelman: Well, the nature of comics involves reconstruction.  In Maus, I couldn’t fit in all the language that was in my father’s tapes.  So it has to be turned into a shortened version. The nature of comics in general, and of writing in general, is to create concision. So what you’re left with is a fractal of what was there. After that it’s a matter of sifting to “figure out”—big quotes—what objectively would be true.  The main thing I know is that when I do something that is genuinely fiction I have trouble because it’s like playing tennis without a net. It’s too arbitrary.

When I have something that is genuinely true then I can feel free to lie with impunity, because it’s all a matter of trying to get to the truth.