Memoirs

[vison]

In the new issue of Vanity Fair there is an article about Augusten Burrough's "memoir", Running With Scissors.The article makes dismaying reading. For it seems that this "memoir" is not "true", but something else. Reminiscent of "A Million Little Pieces", it would appear that Burroughs either manufactured or exaggerated much of his life's history and in the doing caused enormous pain to some of the people who were part of his actual past. Burroughs claims it is all "true" or "fact", but in fact he contradicts himself in what he HAS said in interviews and letters, and refuses to answer the charges from his "adopted" family that nearly everything he wrote is hurtful lies. And some of what he wrote, quoted in the article, is so awful I think he MUST have made it up. It's lunacy.

I haven't read either book. But this matter is of immediate concern to me! Here and elsewhere I posted my "memoir" of my experiences with breast cancer: there are no "lies" in my writing, but there are truths not told, and truths altered, compressed, elided. And, furthermore, should it be likely that my writing find another means of being published, such as on paper, I would make more alterations still.

Recently I've been writing other things. I find stories, people, incidents, from my childhood bubbling up, and not just from my childhood, but from my present life and family. Yet I would never write them as "fact", since, first, my recollection may be faulty, and second, it is only a jumping off point for me, I am not trying to "record history", but merely to take some real word or real happening and see what I can "make happen" with it.

The other thing is, and I would be willing to bet this is true for many other people, that a couple of my siblings have very different recollections of our lives growing up than I do. One sister seems to want to believe that she was brought up in a coal cellar on bread and water whilst I was fed steaks and slept on golden sheets: an exaggeration, but you know what I mean. One of my brothers is . . well, nuts is the word. He has told certain stories to himself so often he now believes them, including one of being pulled bodily from the water and saved from drowning by Jesus Christ Himself while my Mum and Dad -alone - picnicked laughing and careless only a hundred yards away!!! And no, I'm not making it up, but he is. The near drowning is not true and it is needless to say that Jesus wasn't there, either. He is the only one in the family who remembers the events of that day in that way, the rest of us were all there and have no idea what the hell he's talking about except that we think he and my cousin Fred stole some of Dad's beer and drank it. And should he write a book? He would believe he was telling the "truth."

Then there is the "real" reason I hate this kind of thing: my son, who tells incredible, detailed lies about his life. The worst is he claims to have been physically abused by my husband: and he wasn't. I can't explain fully how painful that is, that he would lie such awful lies about his own father. And they are lies, I am not lying about it. It hurt my husband so deeply that he simply will not talk about it, not to me or anyone else, it just made him harden his heart against our son and to be honest, I don't blame him. Not at all. I wish I could harden my heart. And yet a year ago my husband gave him another chance, it was his decision, I didn't try to talk him into it, or interfere, and the result was more lies and more pain. Our son has told certain stories so often that I think he now "believes" them, but he also makes up new stories: one being that his paternal grandmother was a cocaine addict who made him run errands for her dealer and who later gave him cocaine herself, that she ran a crackhouse, etc. Please forgive me for writing this down, it is horrible, horrible, but you know he could turn around and write a book and people would swallow it!

So this is what I'm saying, that Burroughs might be a pathological liar, I know from bitter personal experience that such people exist.

If I write about something "real", that is, for instance, my breast cancer diary, I work very, very hard not to lie. To be totally honest, and yet to make sure that no one other than me was going to be exposed or possibly hurt. I changed names and circumstances for a couple of friends: so that no one would know who they were, I have no right to tell ANY part of their stories. Did that make what I wrote untrue? Not in my mind, since it was MY story I wanted to tell, my feelings and fears and dreams.

I don't really know what I'm posting this for, to be honest. I guess reading the article really got to me, since I could see myself in the poor women who were so horribly hurt by the book. Maybe it's all true and the family WAS a family of monsters. But I suspect not. I suspect a sad and miserable and talented man has taken some realities and twisted them, and has outright fabricated much else, and has foisted it on a gullible public.

[baby tuckoo]

This very issue has caused some distress to my sophomores, who are reading October Sky, which was called Rocket Boys when it was first published.

The level of preverication within is not so great as in the two memoirs cited by vison, but it exists, and to a greater degree than at first admitted by Mr. Hickam, who claimed to have "changed a few names and conflated a few incidents." At least he had the "essence" of truth. But those pesky journalists and bloggers and academics got to snooping and found that key elements of the story (the most sensational) were simply not true.

At the moment of this writing, I am in the middle of the Dec. 18 New Yorker, which has a Personal History, an occasional department that is always interesting whether the author has a name or not. (The one by Jonathen Franzen was amazing.) This current one is by Tad Friend, who writes the also occasional Letter From California.

These histories are indeed personal, usually about the families of origin. The New Yorker is famous for its fact checking, but I wonder if there is any way on earth the facts in the memories could be checked. It would require the cooperation and accuracy of family members, some of whom are not fondly portrayed. And much of it is not fact at all, it is feeling. Yes, the details of place and time could be checked for plausibility, but not precisely.

In the novels called memoirs there seem to be large claims of sensational moments that are indeed checkable: prison records, marriages, public acts of certain note. Do you suppose the authors never thought their work would become so popular that someone would bother to check? Do you suppose they told the story often enough tha they began to believe it? Do you suppose they believe it doesn't matter? Novel or truth, so what?

[Primula Baggins]

A member of my writing critique group wrote and workshopped a memoir with us, so I've seen the writing process from start to finish. I didn't envy her. She's conscientious and wanted everything to be as close to true as possible, but there are few incidents in an ordinary life that are recorded in any checkable way. She didn't keep a journal. She moved around a great deal and was bringing up, essentially alone, a son with a severe congenital heart defect and what appeared to be cerebral palsy. So the actuality of many events depends on her memory of them, and she's painfully aware of how unreliable those memories can be.

She chose to tell "the story" of her life, meaning that she chose to trust her memory that far. Key incidents where other people were involved, she discussed with them when it was possible. I'm convinced that her memoir is as literally truthful as she could make it.

But that's not very.

I'm not defending outright lies and invented incidents, just trying to point out that a memoir of the private aspects of anyone's life (and most lives are almost entirely private) is bound to be factually unreliable even if the writer is honest and conscientious. What we discussed many times in the group is the fact that the purpose of a memoir written by someone who is not famous is not to tell the story of that person's life; there needs to be a reason the story is worth telling, something the reader can take from it. My friend is a normal human being and can't recall precise details of dialogue and weather and what people were wearing and what food was served at dinner and so on from thirty years ago, yet these details need to be given for the story to be readable; people expect it. So that's what she wrote, in hopes that the story as told would not wound her son or former husbands and that it would provide some illumination for readers: that it was "true" to her life even if not literally true in every detail.

Maybe some of these memoirs with major "errors" are a product of carrying that principle too far?

[vison]

In the novels called memoirs there seem to be large claims of sensational moments that are indeed checkable: prison records, marriages, public acts of certain note. Do you suppose the authors never thought their work would become so popular that someone would bother to check? Do you suppose they told the story often enough tha they began to believe it? Do you suppose they believe it doesn't matter? Novel or truth, so what?

I wonder about that, too. Perhaps the books are a kind of exorcism, or purging, or perhaps they are revenge. Was it the act of writing it down that mattered and things just took off from there? I haven't read the books, only bits excerpted in reviews. Are these guys good writers? Or are these "the one book we all have in us"?

When books become as notorious as Running with Scissors, or A Million Little Pieces, it is inevitable that "the truth" will come out: meaning a different version than the author's. Does the author then cringe in fear and shame, knowing his lies are found out? Does he attempt to bluff his way through it, brazen it out?

Does he REALLY believe he's telling the truth?

That is the one I have a hard time with. I think that there are many factors involved, one being, certainly, the truth that everyone remembers things differently. But when I think of my brother claiming that Jesus Christ in bodily form snatched him out of a raging river and away from certain death: I think delusional. Remembering a dream as reality?

I don't think Frey and Burroughs are delusional, I think they could be another kind of crazy. Crazy is the wrong word. But I know what a personality disorder is, the kind they call "disassociative disorder", and I know what kind of lies such people can tell. They go through life lying and while they always get "caught", they can always move along to new territory. Only, when your lies are world-wide famous, what then?

President Clinton recently published his memoirs. Now, here is another book I haven't read and here I am discussing it. (I think that's wrong, btw. I should read Burroughs' book, and Frey's, but I ain't gonna.) Mr. Clinton had to have been more careful what he wrote, being a public figure. Even then, he probably got things "wrong", or even "told lies". For sure many of the people he mentions will recollect certain incidents differently than he did. He would, presumably, try to put the best spin on things, which is natural enough, but he would also know that about a million people would be reading every word looking for deceit.

"Ordinary" people ought to be just as careful. But then, who'd want to read it? Burroughs and Frey should have just called these books novels right from the start. Then the world could look through the books and say, "Oh, these are autobiographical! All first novels are autobiographical." And the exaggerations and fabrications would be literature instead of lies. What's more: people would believe them.

[Primula Baggins]

Burroughs and Frey should have just called these books novels right from the start. Then the world could look through the books and say, "Oh, these are autobiographical! All first novels are autobiographical." And the exaggerations and fabrications would be literature instead of lies. What's more: people would believe them.

Marvelously cynical, vison, and therefore true.

[Impenitent]

All we can ever do is experience life through our own lenses; and then, of course, we remember what those lenses filmed for us and we regurgitate that through our emotions.

I don't think that any 'memoir' can be taken as fact. It can only ever be received as a version of emotional memory and is very useful from that perspective - a view of an individual's insides, not a recitation of fact or history.

[vison]

All we can ever do is experience life through our own lenses; and then, of course, we remember what those lenses filmed for us and we regurgitate that through our emotions.

I don't think that any 'memoir' can be taken as fact. It can only ever be received as a version of emotional memory and is very useful from that perspective - a view of an individual's insides, not a recitation of fact or history.

In a general way I agree with you. Experiencing life through our own lenses is good way to put it.

But the more I learn about Running With Scissors, the more disgusted I am that the publishers of this book blithely went ahead and published it without the least attempt to verify some of the more outlandish claims. As baby tuckoo says, some things are matters of public record: in this case, school records and custody documents.

I can't see this book as simply the author's truthful recollections --- truthful in being his REAL recollections, but a mean-spirited trick played on the family he vilifies and the public who bought the story as "true".

[Impenitent]

Oh, I agree with you! It is no excuse to say, "these are purely my memories through the lense of my emotions" when one is actually villifying others. That is reprehensible.