view from my porch at the Collegeville Institute
We talked some about an issue I’ve taken up several times recently: veracity in memoir writing. How true does the account need to be? Hampl herself, who wrote the essay “Memory and Imagination,” said she is somewhat disappointed that the essay is still so widely read and taught. She hoped, she said, that we would be beyond this subject by now. What I found most interesting in what she said ont he topic is that it is not so important that you get everything accurately on the page, but that the audience knows that she is being invited with you to imagine.
No one, for example, gave Michael Ondaatje a hard time when, at the end of his memoir Running in the Family, he presents an account of his grandmother’s death in a flood. Everyone knew where they were in the experience of that story, and it was appropriate for the narrator telling that story to imagine his grandmother’s death, and imagine it as he does in the book. It’s not at all a believable account, but that isn’t what is important or, in fact, required.
All of us are excavating shards of our experience, she said, as in an archaeological dig. The important thing is that we invite the reader into the process of reconstructing those shards. What we do, to create a satisfying experience for the reader, is engage the reader with our attempt to understand what these pieces make.
She made another interesting point, relating something a friend said to her. They were discussing the oddness of classifying memoir as “non-fiction.” First, it is as though fiction were the norm, and also it suggests that everything that is “not fiction” is fact, or true, or the same. They agreed that memoir is really more like “non-poetry.”
As a poet, I of course love this idea. But it also makes sense for us to approach a memoir, or most creative non-fiction, as being about the same task that poetry is about, digging and creating, making sense of the shards of experience through language and what we can bring to bear on it.