Memoir and Fiction

What a great deal of fuss we make about the distinction between memoir and fiction, between story-telling and truth. Publishers, understandably, need to put things into categories so that they can market them. Bookstores need categories so that they can correctly place their books on shelves. But these necessities have absolutely nothing to do with writing, or even with forms. Every memoir is a form of recreation, just as memory itself is. By the time something comes into language it has passed through an immense process of ordering, reordering, systematizing, arranging, adapting itself to the particular grammar and syntactic requirements of the language in which it will come to expression. To imagine that we arrive at truth in this process, at anything that accurately records actual experience, is as silly, I think, as imagining that a photograph, more than a painting, depicts the real world. Everything passes through the subjective on its way to becoming what it is. You try to describe a scene, something real, that really happened, when you were a child, or even twenty years ago. How can you say that you are not inventing, editing, compacting, confabulating, fill in gaps and spaces, arranging things to make them tellable, to make a story out of them? As for fiction, does it even exist? Isn't it always, no matter how disguised, a question of autobiography? Buddenbrooks, one of the most respected novels of the twentieth Century, a family, generational novel in the realistic tradition, is in fact a detailed, often precise study of Thomas Mann's own family.

I have been consistently writing, with great fascination, right along this elusive line between memoir and fiction, feeling free to invent when the invention tells more of the emotional truth than any actual occurrence, yet binding myself to the telling of emotional truth as rigorously as I possibly can. Sometimes unknown characters emerge, right in the middle of a "true" story, to carry and express a point of view that would seem pompous, didactic or inflated if given to the narrator, the I who is telling the story. A friend has recently told me that when she reads through my seemingly autobiographical work it is clear to her that these various personas, who narrate the stories, frequently have nothing in common. They too are characters invented to tell a story, even a true story, even a story that truly happened to me. I could as well consider any number of my books novels, and certainly all involve story-telling. I always think of myself as a writer of fiction who happens to have written books that seem so believable no one has to notice that they are fictional. My most obviously fictional work, The Flame Bearers, in which I invented a heretical sect of Jewish women that never existed, has seemed so true to some people that they have come to consult with me about how they could make contact with and join the sect. And they were right, the story is true even if I invented it; the sect exists, even if no one has ever encountered it in the external world. In this novel, this seeming fiction, I am also telling my own story, through an entirely fictional character, narrated in the third person. Indeed, this third-person creation, this invented being, may be the only narrative person in all of my work who is really me.

Related Books

In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story (UPDATED!)	The Flame Bearers: A Novel	Sex and Other Sacred Games (with Renate Stendhal)
Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey	In My Father's Garden	My Life as a Boy