Memoir and the Emotional Truth
Here’s the real truth—most of us can’t remember the outfit we wore 20 years ago, the precise thing someone said, or if it was late afternoon or early evening when an event occurred. Time periods blur together. If you are writing about your childhood, you may know two events happened during the summer (that is a fact), but was it the same summer? Or maybe you lived in New Hampshire as a child, and an event occurred in winter when it snowed a lot. You want the reader to understand your life … “I was trudging through the snow in my well-worn boots” … because maybe this was something that happened weekly and an important part of your life at the time but are you absolutely sure it was snowing on that exact day? The answer is probably no.
So, what is a writer interested in writing personal stories/memoir to do?
First, what we need to remember is that when we write memoir, we follow our emotional truth.
Does that mean we are making things up to make the story more interesting?
No, but at the same time, memoir should not be subject to rigorous, journalistic lie-detecting. The stories may be true but rarely are they factual.
Why? Because fabrication is inherent in memoir writing because:
It is impossible to have an unbiased view of your own life, period.
It is impossible to write about something in the past tense and not see it through the lens of the present.
Real life doesn’t follow a story arc. It doesn’t often present challenges and growth in a straightforward path that would please a reader.
When we write memoir, we need to understand the difference between literal truth and emotional truth. Essentially what that means is it doesn’t matter if you don’t remember all the tiny details as long as you remember the significance of the event itself.
That sounds great, but what does that really mean?
Here are some examples that may help illustrate it for you …
• Details matter. Let’s say your dad had a green plaid shirt he wore a lot, and emotionally, it feels connected to him. Now here you are today, writing an emotional scene that took place on Thanksgiving in 1985. You are not 100 percent sure he was wearing “the” shirt, but emotionally, it feels like the right detail to include. It tells the reader something about him, who he was, how you saw him, etc. And that is okay. That is what we do. We are not making up a shirt. It is something that existed and was emotionally significant, and it works in the story.
• Don’t shy away from dialog. For many writers of memoir, dialog causes a lot of stress. The question is, do you need to remember word for word what was said? The answer is simple—no. None of us walked around for our entire life with a tape recorder. No memoir you have ever read has 100 percent accurate dialog. First of all, when we write a true story, we omit the boring stuff. If a scene takes place at the dinner table, we don’t leave in how you talked about how your day was for 20 minutes or if your sister could please pass the salt before you got to the meaty part of the conversation. Nope, we get to the heart of the matter and give the reader the important parts. In other words, you don’t need to convey precisely what was said, but you do need to capture the essence of it. And, even more important, you also need to capture how what was said made you feel. That is essential.
• We see the characters as they were (through the lens of who we were at the time). In this scenario, let’s say you are writing about an incident that occurred at your elementary school. Maybe you were insecure, and a special teacher made you see yourself differently. You don’t need a photograph or a video to describe your teacher. You describe them how your memory remembers them (and that may be very different from the reality of what you would think if you saw the same teacher today as an adult).
• It’s all subjective. We remember stories as they emotionally register with us. We could all go to a party and have a completely different emotional experience there. Perhaps one of us is outgoing, and another is an introvert. The description of the party varies with each one of us. Does that mean all of our experiences aren’t true?
• We are all influenced by our own experience in the world. We often see this in family stories. An event may have been significant to you, and your mother doesn’t even remember it. Or a sibling remembers the same event but has different details about it. All of these memories are influenced by the factors at which we come to the experience—our age at the time, our placement in the family (child vs. adult, favorite child vs. problem child, oldest child vs. baby of the family), etc.
Each person is remembering their own truth, and that is what memoir writing is—yours. If someone disagrees, there is a very easy solution … tell them to write their own.
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