Memoir, Revisited
SPOILER ALERT!!! Please read Blackbird before reading this lecture!
In her memoir, Blackbird, Jennifer Lauck describes her childhood up to the age of 11. It is shocking and horrible and fascinating. But is it true?
No one disputes that the broad outlines of it are factual. But since the memoir was published, Lauck's stepbrother and stepmother have disputed the truth of several sections of the book. Her stepbrother is furious at the way she depicts him in the book. "She's lying her freakin' head off," he told Salon magazine. Her stepmother is also furious. In an e-mail to Salon, she said, in part, "...I want a sort of mental taser [sic] or aqueous foam to immobilize the bitch, hoping to sober her up and make her think twice before going after other people with her dolorous tales of misery. Sort of like President Bush telling the Taliban that if they don't stop we would begin bombing. I really don't wish her harm."
They say that they were not the monsters they were portrayed to be, that they did not abandon her, and in particular that she exaggerated the story of having to move her bedroom set 11 blocks all by herself. They say the distance was a mere two houses--maybe 100 yards. Her stepbrother, in fact, wants the publisher to reclassify the book as fiction.
Jennifer Lauck says she may have gotten a few of the details wrong, such as someone's hair color or the cost of a dog, but insists that the basic facts of her account--especially the part about moving the bedroom set--are true.
All of this brings up a larger issue: if a work is a memoir, a work of memory, how much responsibility does the writer have to be absolutely accurate? And "accurate" in what sense?
Memory is a funny thing. Think of family reunions, for example: you tell a story about an event you remember from your childhood. Your brother or sister or friend who was there says, "Yeah, that happened, but not the way you said. Here's how I remember it" and tells it an entirely different way, even remembering the facts differently. So whose version is "accurate"?
No way to tell. But our experiences and memories shape our attitudes and our lives and have a greater effect than we realize. Our memories are our reality--whether they are historically accurate or not.
So memoirists feel an obligation to be loyal to memory. Michael Gladwell of the New York Times says, "What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade him or her that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand."
A memoirist writes, not about his or her entire life, but about central events in that life--events which have shaped his or her life. George MacDonald Fraser says, of the memoir, "Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happening, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place."And how important are those "dates and places or even the exact order" of events? That's the issue. Some memoirists feel obligated to get every fact correct. Others feel obligated to capture the essence of the experience. Thus, the line between fact and fiction begins to blur.
But where memory is concerned, it's already a little blurry anyway.