Should you hide your memoir by writing fiction instead?

You want to write a memoir, but you’re wondering if you should instead change your experiences into something fictional. It’s a question almost every memoir writer I’ve known asks.  You don’t want to hurt anyone. You don’t want to be called a liar. You don’t want to be sued, so you’re thinking you can avoid all the complications of writing your true story.

All writing stems from the spark of the real.

Let me tell you a story.

August 10th, 2018 marked the 27th year since my first date with Noah.

Noah is my partner for those who don’t just automatically know these things. We met through a mutual friend. There’s a more complicated story behind the simple statement of a mutual friend, but it’s not pertinent to this particular story so I’ll leave it for another time.

There’s lots I don’t remember about our first date. I don’t remember if he asked me or if I asked him.I don’t remember what we talked about or if we held hands. I do remember drinking beer at a bar and then walking from the south end of Manhattan all the way up north in shoes I bought specially for our date to impress him. The were black patent leather with thick strap extending across the top. Heavy-soled, flat-footed, clunky things that hurt my feet so badly I couldn’t walk for days because of blisters.

I also remember peering down to my shoes as we walked uptown, wondering if I’d ever see him again.

We both cut work for about 2 weeks, he got fired and our first date became history.

Then 27 years passed. There are an endless host of stories between then and now. Most of them, a blur.

Objective truth doesn’t matter in a memoir.

I can recount for you the bones of my objective truth.

We moved to Brooklyn.
We had two children.
We left New York to travel.
We ended up in Salta and stayed.

In between, a million endless starry-eyed tales fill in the flesh between the bones. I confuse the details, can’t remember what happened when.

It doesn’t matter.

When we write about the past, our senses spark memories and fill us with emotion. The crunch of vanilla wafers reminds me of pre-school. The odor of roses transports me back to my grandmother’s garden. Intense heat and humidity replay the summer Noah and I met. The feeling, the subjective truth beneath, guides the stories we write.

I asked Noah last night if he remembered the shoes.

“Yes,” he said. “I remember they hurt your feet.” Then he told me how it touched him that I got the shoes to impress him, something new to mark our first date, that I kept walking just to be with him even though I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again.

Right there is the essence of whatever happened all those years ago. Our connection began with a pair of shoes.

He remembers the night differently. It doesn’t matter. He remembers the shoes.

Memory is hopelessly corrupt.

This past weekend, we went to an asado at a friend’s house where I sat next to Luuk, a Dutch expat living in Salta with his family. (Do I need to tell you his name isn’t really Luuk?) Our stories of first moving to Salta came pouring out.

Janis, Noah’s biology professor from City College, invited us to a conference in Salta. We’d traveled with Janis and his wife previously on a research trip to a subtropical rainforest in Brazil. I remember blue morph butterflies everywhere, flying around the rocky shoreline, following us along the paths as we hiked deeper into the forest.

Noah doesn’t remember the butterflies.  We have no photos and no one to corroborate the truth.

It doesn’t matter.

Janis introduced us to a group of people who seemed to be a cult of sorts. Not the kind of cult that tries to seduce outsiders to join them. No, they preferred to keep us out, but they did allow us to stay in a little cabina at the edge of their property.  Outside the gate of their land, I stepped out the front gate of their property each morning to an unpaved road and donkeys instead of cars.

“Now that’s something you don’t see in Brooklyn,” I thought.

Mostly, I remember a tinge of nervous adventure beginning in the pit of my stomach and spreading into my limbs, my eyes, my heart. I was seeing something I’d never seen before. I didn’t know it then, but looking back I see a straight path from there to where I am now.

Memoir isn’t that different from fiction, anyway.

I have no idea if the group we met in Salta was a cult. I don’t remember how many donkeys were on that road.

I told Luuk about the donkeys. I recounted the days Noah got sick. The cult’s doctor Miguel told us “Oh, that’s just his brain swelling.” At least, I think that’s what he said. Miguel only spoke Spanish, and we didn’t speak much yet.

I was scared, not able to understand anyone around me and Noa’s brain was swelling, so I packed our bags and moved us to an aparthotel in the center of town.

We fled the moldering walls of the cult’s cabina, away from the water aquifer covered in mosquitos, and away from the sweet loving puppies, the sprouting vegetable garden, the chickens Lila fed and the cat she called Aye Que Linda Fruta! She sat with that cat in front of the chicken coop, playing.

“I’ve never heard these stories of yours,” said Luuk, surprised.

I’d forgotten about them until that night when suddenly all the details came flowing.

Mary Karr talks about this process of uncovering memory in The Art of Memoir. “Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt,” she says.

I highly recommend reading this book if you plan on writing about real life in any way.

Your stories are important. They deserve to exist.

Tara Westover discusses discrepancy in memory in her memoir Educated. She grew up with survivalist parents on a mountain. Her father believed himself to be a prophet. There was no room for her memories, and her family has since mostly cut her off. In families like hers, she says “there was no greater crime than telling the truth.”

We’re scared to tell our truth for various reasons, most of those reasons because of other people. Someone else’s opinion is no reason not to write your story. If you write it as fiction, people recognize themselves anyway. Sometimes, people see themselves in images you’ve created even if they’re not really there.

We cannot control what others think and feel about our writing.

When people tell me they have a story to tell but they’re not sure if they want to tell it as memoir or fiction. I always say, write the story you need to write. You can decide later if it must be fiction or memoir.

Truth or fiction? Which should you choose?

Truth and fiction entwine in ways we can’t quite grasp, and the Truth of Life is never the same as the Truth of the Story we tell.

Real life is unruly. The details stick out in all directions and cannot be tamed. The stories we tell, whether memoir, fiction, personal essay or something else, we smooth the edges. We make them clean to offer an insight, a moral, a warning, an adventure your readers will follow, breathlessly.

Write the story you need to write. Write your shitty first draft and in the process, you’ll learn quickly enough whether you’re telling your story or the characters will take over and become their own people. You’ll follow them where they want to go.

But the truth. The core. The kernel. The center. You and your message remain the same no matter what you write.

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