How Truthful Does a Writer Have to Be in Memoir?
Virtual Office Hours #9
Note: This is one of a series of “ask me anything” posts I did for a group of writers I worked with in fall 2024.
Q: I’m writing a memoir. There are some things I’d like to change, to make my story more interesting. There are some things I don’t want to share, so I’d like to omit those things. And there are some other things I don’t remember, so I’ll need to embellish a little. How truthful do I have to be when I’m writing a memoir or a personal essay?
A: Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” just before taping the first episode of The Colbert Report twenty years ago. He wanted a word that meant “something that seems like the truth—the truth we want to exist.” Whether we apply the term to politics or to writing, I think truthiness refers to fiction. There are things I don’t want to write about as creative nonfiction, usually out of respect for someone I love and don’t want to hurt. When that’s the case, I choose to fictionalize it. But when might something that seems like the truth or is truth-adjacent apply to memoir, too?
There is an ongoing debate in the memoir community about how truthful a writer must be in memoir. Most writers agree we must be as truthful as we can be, while acknowledging that our truth might be different from the truths of others. We might remember things differently. We might see things differently. Our takeaway from an experience might be different than the takeaways of others.
For example, I wrote in my essay “Growing an Avocado Tree from Seed” for Persimmon Tree that, whenever I remember taking all of my mother’s plants home with me after she died, I picture myself driving a pale yellow Ford Maverick. I don’t know why I remember it that way, but I know it can’t be true, because my sister Lisa blew the Maverick’s engine ten to fifteen years before that. I know it can’t be true, because I never drove the Maverick in 1995—it was long gone.
Memory is a funny thing—if I didn’t know I couldn’t have been driving the Maverick in 1995, I might think my memory of driving it that year was the truth. I might have written it as the truth.
This tells me that there are other things I remember that aren’t true but that I believe to be true. I may have asserted those things as the truth in essays I’ve written because I remember them that way. I’m thinking those are small details that aren’t important in the big scheme of things—I remember the core truths of those events, and that is my truth.
My sister Lisa remembers things she couldn’t possibly remember because they happened before she was born. In my family, we call them “Lisa Memories.” But she’s heard the stories so many times she believes she remembers them, she’s formed memories of them, and that is her truth.
That, of course, is different from writing something that I know isn’t true.
There seems to be a spectrum of truth in memoir, a spectrum of what memoir writers believe is still true and a spectrum of what readers will accept as true:
Some memoirists believe we must be 100% truthful. No distortions, not even a little. No whitewashing, no exaggerations, no embellishments, no evasions of the truth, no creative license. They believe this is crucial to the integrity of memoir.
Some believe it’s okay to fudge a little, e.g., to imagine as closely as we can if we can’t remember exactly what happened in a particular scene, or to change some insignificant details in order to achieve the more significant goal of telling our truth. This can be characterized as the difference between factual truth and core truth.
Some believe it’s okay to embellish a little or a lot or as much as we need to, in order to achieve the desired story and impact. This view is largely disfavored, though, particularly without acknowledging that some parts of the story have been fictionalized. (Think the controversy surrounding James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.)
I am mostly a #1—I aim to be 100% truthful with respect to everything, including names, facts, and details. As for #2 and #3, I don’t imagine scenes I can’t remember without letting readers know I’m doing so. I don’t embellish. I try not to change even seemingly insignificant details. Where you are at on the spectrum is up to you, but it may also be up to the publisher. For example, when I wrote “Doors” for The Rumpus and “She Seeks Romance by the Seashore” for the Los Angeles Times, those publications required those personal essays to be 100% truthful—no changing things for effect.
But I can think of one time I changed something in a personal essay because I believed doing so both served the story and was necessary to get at the core truth. In the case of my essay “Slipstreamed” for the journal bioStories, there is one thing I changed for the sake of the core truth of the story, and bioStories’ guidelines did not preclude me taking this creative license. I’ll get to that change later in this post.
In my first draft, I changed a lot of things because I didn’t know any better. I was a fiction writer, so I changed whatever I needed to, to make it a better story. To simplify, I consolidated all three of my grandchildren into one grandchild named Mark. I changed the names of the “characters” throughout. I changed some of the details throughout, wherever I felt it served the story.
But as I learned more about writing creative nonfiction, I began to believe that the thing that most served the story was the truth. I decided to stick to the truth, even if it meant naming names, and even if it made me feel guilt, shame, or embarrassment. Sometimes, as they say, the truth hurts.
Here is an example of a choice I made to tell the truth, instead of imagining or embellishing the truth to make it more interesting: There is a scene in “Slipstreamed” where my ex-boyfriend Ronnie and I are standing in tall grass at a keg party, smoking pot and talking.
In the first draft of the essay, I wrote this: “We hung out and talked, and he made me laugh.” In response to one of my early drafts, I got feedback suggesting I put this into a scene, with dialogue—what had we talked about? my professor asked.
But I couldn’t do that. I remember a lot about that night because it was a significant night to me. But I don’t remember what we talked about, and what I’ve come to prefer to do when I don’t remember something is to be honest about it and let the reader know that. So, what I wrote in the finished piece is this: “I remember standing in grass up to our knees, and I remember he made me laugh, but I was wasted and can’t remember anything we talked about. I wish I could.” I conveyed my wistfulness—a sad longing to remember the conversation. But also, am I embarrassed that I was so trashed I can’t remember our conversation? Yes, I absolutely am. But it was important to me to be truthful rather than fictionalize a scene between us.
The truth hurts. And I’ve come to believe that admitting our human foibles, as hard as that may be to do sometimes, is what best serves memoir and personal essay. It makes us human and relatable, and it gives our readers permission to be human too.
There is one thing I went back and forth about and did decide to change, though, and I want to share that with you. I changed the order of the last two places we visited on our road trip. In the essay, we visit Monterey on the drive north to San Francisco, and we visit Sacramento last. In reality, we visited Monterey last, on our way back home from Sacramento.
I tried writing it both ways. I got feedback that, when I wrote about the visit to Monterey last, it seemed out of place and the ending felt too pat. I agreed for three reasons.
For one thing, when I braided the chronological progression of my relationship with Ronnie with the trip, it was far more natural for Monterey to come before San Francisco and Sacramento. Monterey County is where we fell in love, San Francisco was where we began to fall in a love a second time, years later, and Sacramento is where he ended up after we parted ways. Sacramento is where he fell in love with and married someone else. Monterey was the beginning of us, and Sacramento was the end of us.
But more significantly, when I took into account the progression of my inner journey, Sacramento had to come after Monterey. Because my truth—the beginning of the resolution of my character journey—happened on the banks of the American River in Northern California, when I was panning for gold with my grandchildren. But full resolution doesn’t come in a flash like that. That moment—that realization that I wouldn’t change a thing about my life—was the beginning of the healing process for me. But healing from grief doesn’t happen in a linear fashion, and the next night, at the baseball game in Sacramento, I still felt the remnants of that grief. I wanted the reader to know that—I’d only begun to heal.
But, last, I was happy in Monterey. Too happy, if there can be such a thing. Too happy for the purposes of the truth I wanted to convey in the essay, which was that I was still grieving the past and only beginning to hope I might be free of it. I was able to set that grief aside that last weekend in Monterey because I was surrounded by family, and we were busy doing a lot of fun things, and Monterey will always feel like home to me. But to end the essay with me being so happy wasn’t true to where I was still at emotionally. I was happy in that moment in Monterey, but I would continue grieving for a long time after that.
Everything I wrote about each segment of the trip is true. I did feel another overwhelming wave of grief that first morning in Monterey, because again, grief isn’t linear. But the things I initially wrote about the rest of the weekend in Monterey didn’t make it into the final essay. I’d written about surprising my grandkids with the visit to Monterey—they thought our trip was over when we were driving home from Sacramento, but to their delight, I pulled into Monterey for a bonus weekend. Some of our family met up with us to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I was happy and surrounded by family. I’d kind of moved on from ruminating about my past—for the time being at least.
The last night, we had a wonderful family dinner together at Louie Linguini’s. My daughter-in-law drove up from San Luis Obispo to join us. My nephew and his family joined us—we’d met them for breakfast in King City, on our way north. My sister-from-another-mister, the kids’ Aunt Gina, joined us—she’d met us for lunch in Salinas on our way north. One of my grandsons said, “Everyone we met along the way on our trip is meeting us here at the end of our trip!” It was like something out of a movie or a novel about family, and on the last night, after everyone else had gone home, the kids and I went out for late-night ice cream.
Our stay in Monterey that last weekend was wonderful, but in terms of the themes of the essay and the message of hope and healing it was meant to convey—in terms of my personal journey and my “character arc”—the feedback I got was that ending with Monterey actually tied things up too neatly into a bow. It made it seem as if I was completely over it all by the time our trip ended, within a matter of a couple of days. That wasn’t the truth, of course. That wasn’t my truth. I was a little bit over it that last weekend in Monterey, but I wouldn’t be completely over it for a long time.
In the big scheme of things, the order of our visits to Monterey and Sacramento didn’t matter. It didn’t change anything, because nothing significant happened in Monterey in terms of the story I was telling in the essay. I could have left Monterey out completely—most memoirists agree it’s okay to omit things, and there are things I omitted that would have made the essay more convoluted. But I chose to leave Monterey in because I did have a moment that first morning in Monterey that triggered some memories of Ronnie, memories that helped me tell our story in chronological order. And the Sacramento ending more accurately conveyed the truth about my journey and where I was emotionally as I returned home after the trip.
On the banks of the American River, I began to heal. The next night, in Sacramento, walking into the baseball stadium with my grandchildren, I was still sad. I was still grieving. But in that moment, walking into the stadium with my grandchildren, grief and hope co-existed. I wasn’t okay, but I knew then that I would be.
And now, five years later, I am.