In September of 2003, I enrolled in graduate school in Boston. I had pushed off registering for classes until the last possible minute, so when it came time to decide which writing classes I would take for my Master's Degree, I was relegated to the bottom-of-the-barrel picks. Over the phone, I haphazardly arranged a schedule that I thought would be suitable.
One of the classes I so fortuitously ended up with was Travel Writing, a non-fiction course that had never before been offered. In college, I had taken precisely one non-fiction class, under the heading Literary Fiction, which permitted writers like me--fiction writers--to arrange the details of their actual lives into specifically shaped and engaging stories.
And so, it was with that in mind that I entered Travel Writing, with the belief that to rearrange the truth in the service of a story was part of the game. Fiction-writing comes with its own rules. Writers are taught that storytelling involves more than plot or character. Consider structure, they tell us. Consider climax and denouement. Consider the progression of a character from Point A to Point B. Consider the terminology of flat and round, static and dynamic.
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But applying this logic--what it takes to write, and write well--to the genre of non-fiction is a different story, no pun intended. The story is important, true, but so is the truth. The memoir has come under scrutiny as of late because writers (namely James Frey, author of the bestseller A Million Little Pieces) have supplanted invention with an accurate recounting of the truth.
About a month ago, I found myself corresponding with a former professor of mine regarding the topic of truth in non-fiction. My argument had always been that memory is subjective; under no circumstances can we remember every detail from our long and laborious lives. We remember the essence of things--a conversation that transpires between friends or lovers, maybe--but not the exact words. This is what differentiates memoir from biography, since one genre relies on the subjectivity of memory and one genre relies on the reliability of historical fact.
It was once my position that such subjectivity provided an opportunity to rewrite (literally) history. On this subject, I once wrote the following, arguing to the aforementioned graduate school professor that sometimes subverting factual detail was necessary to arrive at the greater truth behind a story. "I subscribe to the theory that altering the truth in the service of a story is ok," I wrote. "Especially if the ultimate truth--and here's where things get tricky--doesn't change. I am a fiction writer, which means I remain dedicated to structure and content. Sometimes the actual story needs to be altered ever-so-slightly in order to express better the theme." What I had in mind was no large matter. I had never proposed killing off people who had not truthfully died; nor had I proposed anything more drastic than a re-creation of dialogue that fit better with the actual story. But my professor did not agree. His argument was that such compromise was only available to the writer in fiction, and that non-fiction required a full disclosure of (gasp!) the truth.
Why was this important? I wondered. Why belabor the point? What is so wrong about writing that I ate a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch when I actually ate a BLT? For a while, it seemed a moot point. I used to believe what Maureen Dowd recently mocked in her dedicatory column to deceased Times reporter David Rosenbaum. "When Mr. Frey went on 'Larry King Live,' with his mom to defend his book's 'essential truths,'" Dowd wrote, "Oprah Winfrey called in to back him up. She sounded disturbingly like Scott McClellan. Despite doubts about facts in the book, she said, 'the underlying message of redemption' still 'resonates' with her."
As far as I was concerned, that underlying message was of paramount concern. But I see now that it was more or less a battle of integrity, and not a battle of telling the story that deserved to be told. What happens in the wake of Frey's dishonesty is that the idea of memoir as non-fiction becomes a national joke. The writer Mary Karr, best known for her critically acclaimed memoir The Liar's Club, wrote in Sunday's New York Times that "objective truth (a phrase it's hard not to put quotes around) has lost power; subjective experience has gained authority." Have we become a society so clouded by what should be true that we fail to acknowledge what actually is?
The short answer is yes, and with one look that the world it isn't hard to imagine why. We take in stride the fact that our government is not honest with us. Adultery, perhaps the most cursory type of dishonesty, runs rampant. Our respect for the truth can be dismissed with the ease of celebrity sanction. The underlying message resonates, so who cares about the facts? Truth is what shapes the world, though. Without the honesty of investigative reporting, there would be no Watergate and no Abramoff. Without the honesty of investigative reporting, there would be no My Lai, no Abu Ghraib. Without truth, there would be no progress. And this is precisely what James Frey did not understand when he tried to arrive at some greater understanding of the world-at-large. Forsaking honesty is not the answer; utilizing honesty is.
