CHAPTER TWO

Truth and Memory, Truth in Memory

As the previous chapter explained, creative nonfiction is a genre of writing derived from the truth, that is, something that actually happened, whether that truth is verifiable through evidence or not. It is vitally important when writing essays to keep in mind that you are making a promise, or establishing a kind of contract with your reader, who expects that you will not be making things up. If you’re writing nonfiction of any kind, you cannot lie. To do so would be to break the contract. The reader trusts that you’re not fabricating the events that you’re writing about.

In 2006 James Frey’s bestselling A Million Little Pieces, a memoir about his life as an addict, was discovered to contain many fabrications at important moments in the narrative. The controversy sparked a long, ongoing conversation in the nonfiction writing world that asks you to be aware of the need to be truthful when presenting moments of your life. In an interview with Time, Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, was asked to comment on Frey’s memoir. “I don't want to speak of that controversy,” he said, “I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.” The writer Isabel Allende agrees, stating in an interview, “A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth.”

Having to “remember carefully,” however, should not keep you from writing daring, inventive essays. An endless source of material for you to draw on is your own memory, which is notoriously unreliable. Your readers expect the truth, but being aware that human memory is faulty, they will give you the benefit of the doubt. In my earliest memory, for instance, I am being held by my father. We’re moving to a new house, saying goodbye to this one. We’re in my empty bedroom with its shaggy red carpet. I’m holding a book, one of a series displayed on my plastic Mickey Mouse Book Club rack, with Mickey’s head and ears sticking out on top. I am a little scared about why we’re moving, why everything is changing, where everything has gone. There are other people in the house carrying boxes, carrying things away, carrying my things away.

I barely remember any of these details because they only exist in loose snippets and fragments in my memory. I have to take some of it on faith, but there are still some things that I can confirm. I can check with my parents, for instance, about the year we moved from that house, which could help me to flesh out other historical facts. They might even share other details about that house and the circumstances of our move, which could trigger another memory and another. I can consult old photographs or home movies if they exist. I can search online for the Mickey Mouse Book Club. In fact, I did just this search and now have a much clearer picture of what that plastic baby-blue rack and those books looked like. Some details, however, will necessarily remain unclear because they only exist in my mind.

This early memory doesn’t seem very significant, but because I remember it, I can’t help but attach some greater meaning to it. Now in my mind, it represents the first major change in my life: relocation. The memory exists in relationship to every other moment of relocation in my life, like a collage. If I wanted to, I could develop some of these memories into an essay about moving, what it has meant to me, what it has meant historically in the United States, what it means today. Memory, therefore, is an endlessly rich source of material, which you should feel invited to draw from.

Ask yourself what your earliest memory is. Why does it hold such fascination to you? This first memory can represent any number of things to you, but it is significant—if only as the literal beginning of your life story. That is, consciousness itself is an ongoing process of narrative. Being aware of yourself as an individual in the world requires that you tell yourself (and others) a story of your identity, of your beliefs and values, of who you are. Your earliest memory, rising as if from a dream, represents Act I, when the curtain rises.

Not only is memory naturally faulty and unreliable, sometimes frustratingly so, it also changes the more we remember. That is, each time you call up your earliest memory, you alter it, even if only slightly. By handling memory in this way, we are constantly shaping who we are by shaping who we were, further demonstrating the narrative nature of consciousness and identity. Instead of thinking of this fact as a flaw, however, I like to think of it as one of its main virtues, allowing you as a writer much more freedom and flexibility to render your life as you remember it, knowing that it can never be 100% factual and verifiable.

For example, in her essay “A Not So Fine Line,” Peggy Schimmelman describes a moment from her childhood when she had felt self-conscious of her house, concerned her family would be considered “white trash” in her poor Ozark community. The specific images and telling details in the scene convince the reader of its truth. Later, however, Schimmelman reflects on the fluid and inherently unreliable nature of memory in “The Trouble with Memoir”:

To hear my older and youngest sisters describe my father, you would swear they were talking about two different men. In my memory, our childhood home stands out as the most dilapidated shack in rural Missouri, but to my younger sister it was “no worse than any other houses around there.” Likewise, certain events that were traumatic for one of us might be a dim, unimportant memory for another.

Richard Goodman makes a similar note about crafting dialogue in nonfiction, reminding us that “no writer is expected to be a tape recorder. No writer is expected to render with court reporter precision what someone said a generation ago.” In Goodman’s case, he was writing about events that took place more than forty years previously in his essay “Arina.” In order to capture something of the truth, he advises writers to inhabit who you’re writing about as a way to begin remembering what they said. In order to create artful creative nonfiction, you must follow Schimmelman’s and Goodman’s lead, acknowledging the faultiness of memory but not allowing it to hinder you from writing in the first place. Their essays tell the version of the truth as they remembered it.

While it is important not to lie or make things up when writing creative nonfiction, the purpose of writing it is not to be 100% factual and verifiable anyway. The purpose is to create art. There may be other purposes beside art. For instance, bibliotherapy can have great healing benefit. In fact, when mining and developing your remembered life for material, you may find that you are also dredging up traumatic, emotional, or otherwise difficult memories. It is not unusual in a creative nonfiction classroom for a person to begin crying while sharing their work. My former writing professor, Maria Maziotti Gillan, would say that if you’re crying, you know you’re onto something important. She would encourage you to go even deeper and to share those difficult things because others will likely be able to identify with your experiences. Traci Brimhall agrees in her essay “On Writing ‘Philematophilia,’” which discusses her desire to eat her baby (“Well, ecstatically kiss, maybe. Or pretend eat.”), admitting that “anything that makes me feel that uncomfortable almost always has to become a piece of writing for me.” In her essay “Proposing a World without a Mother: Grief and Creative Nonfiction as a Sense-Making Tool” Jennifer Gravley acknowledges the difficulty of writing about while grieving over the death of her mother:

The writing is terrifying. Unthinkable that you could write when your mother was under the ground….You are one telling of the story closer to a telling that will make it hurt less but also one telling of the story closer to a telling that will make it hurt more, and that is essential.

Gravley is able to work through writing as “a time-honored tradition of grief work.” Even so, you do have to feel safe to share such things in your writing, so it’s important to cultivate a supportive community in the classroom or a writing group. In my experience, sharing painful memories and expressing emotions are themselves tools for establishing just such a community. The writing classroom can become an uncomfortable space if we do not admit up front that we are likely to encounter such memories. As a writer, you will need to choose how vulnerable you are willing to be when sharing your work with others. Either way, as a good member of the writing classroom community, it is absolutely vital that you express sympathy and support for those who do so.

In our everyday lives, we may instinctively avoid thinking about painful things in order to get through the day, but when dredging up memories as a writer, you may find yourself confronting things that are difficult to dwell on. Whitney Curry Wimbish discusses this question in “Write What Scares You vs Trauma Porn,” describing two unhelpful ideas in the world of nonfiction. First, writing about trauma might be construed as “self-indulgent…naval-gazing” that amounts to little more than “trauma porn.” Second, by avoiding personal traumas in your writing you may be missing an opportunity. Wimbish suggests that these ideas boil down to two imperatives: Be quiet. Entertain me. Instead, she offers the following helpful advice:

Ignore the idea that you should be quiet. Likewise ignore the idea that your story may exist only if it follows a certain script, and even that you must write it for an audience. Instead, just consider whether you, like me, have had to endure things you shouldn’t have. Understand that you’re not alone. Then go from there.

Where you may go when thinking or writing about difficult memories can only be determined by you. You are never required to write about something you would rather not, but you are always invited to share openly and honestly pain you may have suffered. Either way, the writing community you are a part of is meant to support you.

The purpose we are focusing on is not creative nonfiction’s therapeutic functions and benefits, which may come as a matter of course when writing through trauma toward healing. We are primarily interested in creating art, which I have suggested in the previous chapter is meant to make the world strange again. What better way to make the world strange than by admitting the inherent strangeness of memory itself? To do so, however, you must embrace some new ideas about memory. Namely, you must give up the importance of the what in favor of the why and how. In creative nonfiction, it usually doesn’t matter all that much what has happened in the past. Rather, what is important is why you remember it in the first place and how you render it in language. What is absolutely crucial is not the event itself but your relationship to the memory of that event. In my earliest memory sketched out above, it doesn’t really matter that as a young child of maybe three years old I remember the day we moved to another house. Nothing dramatic, significant, or life-altering actually happened. Ho-hum. I was just a little boy being held by his father while carrying a Mickey Mouse book. What is significant, however, is what I make of that memory, how I shape it and put it in conversation with other memories, other facts, other histories. That memory does not contain a merely singular meaning. It is infinitely significant based on my own current mind as a writer.

This fact about writing and memory should ease a bit of the pressure on you. After all, you might assume that in order to write about your own life, you need to have experienced something dramatic or spectacular, remarkable or strange. The writer Flannery O’Connor once asserted that if you survived childhood, you’d have enough material to write about to last the rest of your life. I agree. However mundane or boring you might think your life has been up to this point, it is still very much worth writing about. The smallest, most fleeting of memories can be the seed of something that grows the deepest roots and bears the most nourishing fruit. If you understand your memories as seeds in this way, the next step is to plant them, water and care for them, then observe what blooms, and share it with others.

You may also believe that you have to write about memories that already fit into a larger narrative structure with a traditional beginning, middle, and end. It’s true that readers will have certain expectation of storytelling in creative nonfiction, but I want to encourage you to embrace the essay’s ability to wander, to meander, to diverge, to begin with Montaigne’s “grotesques and monstrous bodies” rather than what we normally think belongs centerstage. Memories do not arrive to us with a ready-made narrative embedded. Rather, in our treatment of them, we discover their meanings and offer them to the reader in whatever ways we can. The only requirement is that the writing is interesting.

That’s a vague word, isn’t it? Interesting. It’s like nice or fine. Nowadays, it either doesn’t communicate anything at all or comes across as dismissive. Let’s reanimate that word, however, by returning to its Latin roots. Inter- means between, and -est comes from esse, which means to be. To be interesting as a writer means you recognize relationships between things rather than worrying about singular events or experiences. To be interesting as a writer means that you live in a state of between-ness. To be interesting as a writer means you are involved, something important is at stake, your curiosity—and therefore the reader’s—has been piqued.

Exercise: Commit to Memory

Nearly everything we write as practitioners of creative nonfiction relies on our memories, whether our essays are lyrical and autobiographical or research-driven and journalistic, in which case we have to remember the facts as we’ve gathered them. We must also acknowledge that memory is always faulty in some way or other. Because memory is unavoidably unreliable, it is often a good idea—both as an ethical and an aesthetic matter—to acknowledge our own fallibility. Similarly, each time we remember something, each time we reach back into the past to recover and refigure events in our lives, we also alter our memories, revising not just what happened but also our understanding of what happened. In the end, what happened is less important than our relationship to what happened, what we make of our memories.

This exercise will ask that you reach back as far as you can to recount one of your earliest memories, connecting it to some other memory, and then articulating uncertainty about its validity by asking a question. You will also offer the reader an interpretation of the memory while connecting it to your present self somehow.

• Try to recall one of your first memories, however fragmented, blurry, or confusing it might be.
• Connect this memory to another clearer memory that you feel more certain about.
• Ask or imply a question, i.e., express some uncertainty about what is happening in this memory.
• Suggest (to the reader or to yourself as the narrator of the passage) what the memory (or cluster of memories) might mean metaphorically or symbolically.
• Connect the memory (or memories) to your present self.
• Render at least two vivid images in the passage, and appeal to at least three different senses. (See the chapter on imagery and the senses for a more thorough discussion of sensory language.)
• Adapt or ignore the above objectives as needed.

Imagination, Speculation, and Perhapsing

In his 2003 essay in creative nonfiction journal The Fourth Genre, “Finding the Inner Story in Memoirs and Personal Essays,” Michael Steinberg notes the writer Judith Kitchen’s list of five things that her writing students often “deny themselves”: retrospection, intrusion, meditation, introspection, and imagination, adding to this list: reflection, speculation, self-interrogation, digression, and projection (188). Taking each in turn, you may think of this list as a series of tools that you might call upon when rendering memory into writing:

Retrospection: looking back, often to summarize or assess the state of affairs from your current position in the present day.

Intrusion: stepping in as the writer to comment upon the event or the experience you’re writing about.

Meditation: dwelling deeply in thought upon the memory, as though turning it over in your hand looking for different facets or perspectives.

Introspection: looking inwardly at yourself, honestly appraising your thoughts and actions.

Imagination: developing alternatives to the memory that aren’t true but might be.

Reflection: thinking things through and searching for what meaning might be discovered in the memory.  

Speculation: asking the question what if? and taking your answer seriously.

Self-interrogation: asking yourself hard questions about yourself and sharing your honest answers.

Projection: suggesting a thought or emotion to someone else while acknowledging that you might not be correct.

Digression: allowing yourself to wander or diverge from the memory at hand for the sake of discovery.

Confession: admitting something about yourself that you would rather not.  

Each of these tools may be the basis for a fruitful exercise, but the ones I want to draw your attention to here will allow you to develop more material from even the scantest of memories: Imagination and Speculation. In an interview with Jill Talbot, the essayist Jill Christman defines speculation as a “way of finding ideas and empathy beyond the limited confines of my own geography, intellect, experience, and physicality. Speculation cracks memory open like an egg, surprising me and pushing me to a deeper level of accountability and truth.” Ironically, by speculating and developing something that isn’t true, we can arrive at this deeper level of truth. The memoirist Lisa Knopp gives us a handy word to describe this kind of speculation: perhapsing. In her essay “‘Perhapsing’: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction,” she suggests that writers of nonfiction take advantage of imagining possibilities when factual details are missing or fuzzy. By introducing a passage of writing with the word perhaps (or other similar words like maybe, suppose, if, what if, might have/could have, possibly, imagine, wonder, perchance), you can develop writing that is vivid, clear, and engaging while not breaking the nonfiction contract with your reader.

You might think that perhapsing is cheating, that you’re getting away with something, that you may as well be writing fiction. I would say that instead of revealing a factual truth about the past, perhapsing reveals an inner truth about you and your relationship to the past. Your speculation says a lot about you. What’s more, as Knopp points out, “When an author’s memories of concrete details are sketchy or absent, the technique of perhapsing not only allows her to recreate the scene effectively, it also helps establish her as a reliable narrator.” By admitting when and how you are imagining and speculating, the reader is more likely to trust you. Don’t “deny yourself” the valuable technique of perhapsing.

A good example of perhapsing comes from Matthew Oglesby’s essay “A Quiet Procedure,” in which the author visits the abandoned Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. While touring one of the buildings, he renders an image the former superintendent, who isn’t really there: “I could almost see him there now, standing in a window like a ghost in repose…. He is a thin and well-fit man, as I imagine him, with short blond hair and a gossamer complexion so fine you can see the capillaries beneath his skin, little cobwebs of blood.” Oglesby is not making things up. He is sharing his imagination with the reader. This image is not of the actual superintendent, but it’s a vivid peek inside of the authors mind as he experiences this place.  

Follow-Up Memory Exercise: Perhapsing

Starting with the memory in the previous exercise or surfacing another early memory, make a list of things you don’t know for certain about what you remember. Fill in these gaps by using the word perhaps (or the equivalent). Take some liberties, but always remind the reader that you are speculating. Reflect on how this technique changes what direction you might take this piece of writing.  

Pictures of You

When mining your own memory for the raw material of creative nonfiction, it is helpful to have some things at hand that might further inspire the vivid details of your life to return, especially if you are remembering events from long ago. Consulting home videos or family photographs can be an extremely valuable way not only to clarify your memory but also to jar loose things that you never would have otherwise thought about at all. Sometimes, these mnemonic images may disappear from the final draft of your essay, but they might also be integrated into the writing itself as a frame. Either way, visual evidence of the past can be extremely helpful.  

Christopher Gonzales’s pair of essays “Return of the Lost Son” and “My Own Lost Mexico” each lay bare how the writer consults photographs. Both of these pieces are also very much about memory: retrieving it and losing it. In his reflection on writing them, the author explains that he was interested in exploring the idea of writer’s block,

an idea which for me meant those layers of personal archeology and memory lying beneath the surface of consciousness, waiting for articulation and discovery. As a person, not a writer, I knew the artifacts were there, the question was how to dig them out without damaging them, losing them, or forgetting where they came from.

In order for Gonzales to retrieve these “artifacts” without damaging them, he starts with photographs. In fact, he begins “My Own Lost Mexico” by describing a photograph of himself writing “Return of the Lost Son.” Sometimes these photographs are from his own life, used to jar memory, but he looks at older ones as well to learn about the time before his life as he tries to reconstruct his father’s past, “as if the photographs would provide some reason why he denied his family through his willful forgetting.” Gonzales consults “a collection of photographs from 1939 of Taylor, my father's boyhood home before his family moved to Austin, displayed at the Library of Congress website,” allowing him to paint a concrete picture of this town, populated by “Mexican-American farmers, withered and thin, wearing rugged clothing,” while “Farm buildings recede along the road, bordered by utility poles, a few scattered trees, farm wagons, barns, and sheds.” Family photographs reveal images of his father as a child, but Gonzales does not find the clue he longs for that would explain his father’s troubled life. Even so, the essay ends on a hopeful note: “Putting those memories into words made me feel stronger.”

Another essay that uses photographs to jar memory is Mike Ingram’s “A Curious Inheritance.” “The clearest image I can conjure of my grandfather actually comes from a photograph,” he writes, describing how eerily similar he looked like his grandfather when he was young: “We have the same hairline, the same jawline, the same cheekbones, the same eyes.” The essay explores the many similarities he shares with his grandfather, from his drinking problem to his agoraphobia. The essay ends in a moment when his grandmother, suffering from dementia, mistakes him for his grandfather. “If this were a piece of fiction,” he admits, “I could invent a moment of poignancy. I could allow her to go on believing I was her long-dead husband, and in that disguise I could apologize for everything I’d ever done, all the messes I made and foisted upon her.” Ingram holds true to the nonfiction contract with the reader, but the imagined scenario offers us a glimpse into his own desire for closure and reconciliation. Magically, through the art of creative nonfiction, he has it both ways—and so do we.  

Sometimes, you may be inspired not only to use photographs as a way to remember the deep past, but also to integrate photography into an essay itself. Tyler Dunning’s “Steel Reflections,” for instance, which describes a trip to Gateway National Park, is accompanied by seven pictures that his friend, the photographer Alexander Newby, had taken while in St. Louis. While the essay stands on its own, the artful photos add another layer of veracity and verisimilitude. When Dunning notes, “Lightning strikes in the distance right on cue, bringing punctuation to my darker thoughts,” the reader marvels when seeing a nighttime photo of the arch with a streak of lightning in the dark sky across the river.  

Exercise: Get the Picture?

You will read about a mode of writing in the poetry section of this book called ekphrasis, which in Greek simply means description. Ekphrastic writing tries to describe a piece of visual art vividly, such that it seems to come to life on the page. For this exercise, you will do something similar. First, find an old photograph, either of yourself or of people you know well enough that you’re comfortable writing about them. Second, simply describe what you see in the image, trying to render the depicted scene as clearly as you can. Third, add other senses to this image. What does this photo make you smell, feel, taste, and hear? Then, place this image in relationship to other things that might be happening beyond the frame of the photograph itself, moving through time and/or space to connect to a larger narrative that you might develop. Ask yourself the journalistic questions: who, what, when, where, why, how? Think of the photograph as a clue to a larger story of what happened in the past. Finally, ask yourself: what happens next? As an alternative to this exercise, take some new photographs to document your time in a place. Write a scene that incorporates your favorite pictures that you’ve taken.