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I am the author of Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, which is used in creative writing programs across the US, and of Lifesaving: A Memoir, winner of the 2000 Lambda Book Award. I teach literary memoir at many universities and am on the faculty of the new low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska. In my classes, students inevitably have worries about the accuracy of their memories. I believe that memoir is "the story of your memory" and as such is more forgiving of inaccuracies than is journalism or, say, a nonfiction article in the New Yorker, which is famous for its fact checking. But there is a huge difference between the slipperiness and changeability of memory over time, and outright and deliberate deception. Current research into the brain, shows that memories change over time, and common experience shows that no two people in a family will remember an event in exactly the same way. But what a reader of memoir needs to trust is that the writer is struggling to recapture events and make sense of them honestly. There are a few bad apples who set out deliberately to deceive the reader. These cases get an inordinate amount of publicity and readers are outraged. Perhaps the degree of outrage matches the degree to which readers of memoir want to trust the writer - want to feel intimately addressed about real life experience: after all, most of us have little time to share in that way in our present-day lives, so memoirs are called upon to fulfill that human need. When the reader feels betrayed, the outrage and attention far outweighs the notice given to the many honest, well-written memoirs which are treasured by many.

I am currently at a writers' retreat (Soapstone) in the Oregon coast range. 503 368 7458.

posted 5 years, 2 months ago
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