Lars Eighner's Homepage Writers' Workshop: Memoir Tutorial

Memoir Tutorial

Truth

Because presently I will suggest using the techniques of fiction in writing the memoir, I think it rather important to make the point that a technique of fiction I do not recommend in the memoir is lying or making stuff up.

As of this writing there have been several scandals about books presented as memoirs which were made up of whole cloth or which included fictional episodes and so-called composite characters.

No one really expects a politician to tell the truth and certainly not in his or her memoirs. But if there is any value in the memoirs of ordinary folks, that value has got to be in their conveying honestly a sense of what their experiences really were like.

On the other hand, a memorialist is not a journalist. Once when I was signing books, I was approached by an employee of the Texas welfare department (which is now called by some euphemistic name I do not recall). She took me to task for writing in Travels with Lizbeth that I was not eligible for certain kinds of public assistance. She was armed with citations of various statutes and rulings which showed conclusively that I had been eligible all along for the benefits that I could not obtain. Had I failed somehow in Travels with Lizbeth because I had not taken these statutes and rulings into account? I don't think so.

To write that I was not eligible for public assistance, a journalist should have researched the statutes, should have interviewed me and officials of the welfare department, and in short, made every attempt to get all of the facts and opinions from persons on all sides of the issue. The obligation of the journalist is to come as close as possible to providing an objective and factual account. If anything, journalism fails by trying to be too fair, for example in soliciting a response from a flat-earther whenever there is a statement that the earth is round.

The memorialist (which is the word for a person who writes a memoir) does not owe the reader the same kind of account the journalist would produce. The truth the memorialist owes the reader is the truth of experience, or in other words, a memoir should be an honest account. If, as happened, the persons I spoke to at every agency to which I applied for assistance told me I was ineligible for assistance and that it would be pointless for me to pursue my applications, that was my experience and it was told honestly. That is all of the duty of the memorialist. If, as appears to be the case, the persons at the agency misrepresented the requirements, and if with a pack of lawyers I might have compelled them to provide the assistance to which, apparently, the statutes and rulings entitled me are hypotheses that are beside the point and beyond my experience. This is a good thing, because no one could write a memoir if he or she had to account for all the "what ifs" in life.

This brings us to the second problem of truth in a memoir. You cannot tell the whole truth. You cannot tell the whole truth no matter how much you might want to because literature is linear: that is there are the neat little words, one after another from left to right. But life isn't linear.

The phone is ringing, the dog is chewing on something suspicious, there is someone at the door, the wind is about to blow a potted plant off the balcony -- all in different directions, all at the same time. Your love life may be going one way, your career is going another way, and there is some peculiar happening in the video game you play whenever you get a few spare moments.

You cannot describe any of those things fully -- certainly not all of them -- and if you could, no one would put up with reading it. I wrote that a homeless life is full of tedium, but I think more than that, that most lives have a good measure of tedious moments. The reader doesn't want an accurate account of that -- well, an account of it maybe, but certainly the reader does not want the tedium reproduced. Even if it is your thesis that life is hellish boredom, long periods of tedium punctuated with sound and fury signifying nothing -- if that is what you want to express -- you won't have much luck putting that across in boring, tedious literature. Sartre didn't write a long tedious play to make some of those points; he wrote No Exit, which is, at the very least amusing.

So if my first point was that a memoir is not journalism, my second point is that a successful memoir cannot be a minute-by-minute autobiographical documentary. Which brings me to the premise of these lectures which is, what makes a good memoir is pretty much what make a good story or novel. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it about something.