For that the power of a writing imagination is required. What happened to the writer is not what matters what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. Truth in memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. Vivian Gornick might agree with this approach in The Situation and the Story:Ī memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. The latter is evidence of an experienced writer, who chooses responsibility to the narrative over the facts. It’s one thing to be subject to memory’s slippery subjectivity, and another to consciously pick and choose where to place scenes. The best journalists can do in such a world is offer multiple frames through which events and issues can be seen.
The postmodernist might think all this irrelevant, arguing that there are no facts, only points of view, only takes on reality influenced by our personal histories, our cultures, our race and gender, our social class. This makes memoir, by definition, a form in which reality and imagination blur into a ‘fourth genre.’ The problems of memory also infect journalism when reporters, in describing the memories of sources and witnesses, wind up lending authority to a kind of fiction.
The way we remember things is not necessarily the way they were. Roy Peter Clark writes of the “essential fictive nature of all memory.” Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, editors of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, write “of the elusive nature of recollection.” Roy Peter Clark‘s essay, “The Line Between Fact and Fiction,” in the Nieman Foundation’s guide, explores this further:
Nonfiction as a genre confronts the discordance between memory-a slippery, subjective entity that can be the antithesis of truth-and actuality.
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