Telling the Truth in Memoir

The topic of truth in memoir is one that comes up often in my classes. We talk about how the story in memoir isn’t about what happened in our lives, but what we make of what happened in our lives. This principle is essential in guiding our stories.

But right away, as we begin to grapple with the past, we encounter challenges. Memory is a fallible thing. There are all sorts of gaps we have to figure out how to fill when we look back on our lives. What exactly are the rules for filling those gaps? That’s truth-telling challenge number one.

The second challenge is that we want to create a compelling experience for the reader, but sticking to the facts risks being boring. The temptation to include what we know didn’t happen for the sake of an improved story is real.

Here’s the thing—if you tell me you were wearing a yellow nightgown on the night of the fire, when it was actually pink, I won’t know and won’t think about it. I’ll acquiesce here that it doesn’t matter. But if for some reason I do start thinking about your details, if your scenes feel made up or I learn you’ve included falsehoods, I will not be interested in what you have to say. I won’t be interested because you called it “memoir” and not “fiction.” Somewhere there’s a line. And if I sense you’ve crossed it, I’m out.

I share similar sensibilities on the topic of truth in memoir with the memoirist Beth Kephart. Here’s what she says in her book Handling the Truth—

It begins, I find, with the knowing disruption of a single, minor detail. The car he drove. The horse’s color. The size of the caterpillar. No harm in that, the writer thinks. But all of a sudden there’s a hole in the dike. There’s a little of gush of fiction flowing,..Vigilance is constraining, it’s a wagging finger, it’s an old school marm. It’s so much easier to lie; like comfort food, it can feel good at the time. But truth—your best rendering of it, your most honest try—is, in the end, what you must stand behind. Don’t lie on the little things. Don’t start the precipitous slide.

I’m thinking about all this because The New York Times recently interviewed James Frey, the author of the memoir A Million Little Pieces, who weathered an Oprah-led cancellation over fabrications in his book. He’s back, this time with a novel. Here’s a quote from the article:

Today, lies are told with gusto, while facts are distorted and erased at the speed of tapping thumbs. Just scroll on X for a bit, and the Frey affair might look like a horse and buggy that was ticketed for trotting too fast.

Every memoirist lies, says Frey. He compares his lies (and he calls them lies) to Picasso’s self-portrait techniques. He’d like us to reconsider our commitment to the truth in memoir. When my students wonder what they’re allowed to make up when writing their own pieces, I imagine Frey would tell them to make up whatever’s necessary to create the best story, the best effect. But of course, don’t get caught doing it.

It’s a new world. The internet has changed us. It’s become harder and sometimes impossible to distinguish fact from falsehood. We live in a world of fabrication and distortion. But that doesn’t change the fact that telling the truth in memoir is part of the very essence of the genre.

Not everyone agrees with me, obviously. Some teachers and memoirists are okay with limited inventions—fabricated conversations, concocted situations, composite characters. But if you’re making things up, it’s fiction, and I think readers deserve to know that.

Look, you do not remember everything, and a reader doesn’t expect you to. Memoir is not journalism, and memory requires that we give it some leeway. There’s an unspoken agreement between reader and writer that all memory is faulty to an extent. And even though you say you remember it this way, we know you could be wrong.

So here’s how you handle your own faulty memory—you embrace transparency. You qualify memories where you need to, disclose uncertainty, and make it clear when you are imagining or guessing. Because of the provisional nature of memory, words like “probably”, “perhaps”, and “it seemed like” will be useful to you. If you present your guesswork as guesswork, the reader will accept it.

But if for some reason I do start thinking about your details, if your scenes feel made up or even embellished, I will not be interested in what you have to say. I won’t be interested because you called it “memoir” and not “fiction.” Somewhere there’s a line. And if I sense you’ve crossed it, I’m out.

One of the biggest temptations memoirists have to resist is the desire to make up dialogue. Good creative nonfiction employs the techniques of fiction (characters, plot, setting, etc.), so a writer can feel pressure to include dialogue in every scene. But what we demand from a novel we do not have to demand from a memoir.

You must be mindful when using quotation marks. Quotation marks signify this-is-what-someone-said. And this is where a memoirist runs the most risk of their story becoming suspect. You can’t expect your reader to believe you remember three pages’ worth of a verbatim conversation you had with your teacher when you were five years old.

A better approach is to use snippets of remembered dialogue and put longer conversations or hazily remembered ones into indirect dialogue. This allows you to tell us what people said without having to remember *exactly* what they said, and without having to make something up. There are many celebrated memoirs that include very little dialogue. You can go for the truth without making up the facts.

Readers know that your recollections of conversations and events will not be tape-recorder accurate. But they should be close approximations. You can’t invent things you don’t remember just because it improves the story. If the reader starts feeling like you’re making up some facts, they will question the entire memoir, and you’ll lose their trust. Readers will forgive an inaccuracy, but rarely a lie. And lying and getting caught is hard to live down. Just ask James.