I recall once in a memoir workshop, a woman posed the question: “What’s the difference between memoir and fiction?” The Prof’s answer was long-winded and a bit convoluted and I don’t actually remember what she said to the woman, only that the woman wasn’t terribly satisfied with the answer.
I’ve always thought of memoir as an essentially true story rendered like a novel. I say, “essentially true” because memory is such an elusive and unreliable mechanism for telling the truth. When we tell our truth, it’s our truth, not the truth.
We are all unreliable narrators of our own story. I’ll give you an example: My parents used to work at a glass factory in town (now closed and long abandoned). The company my parents worked for had this social hall where they held annual parties for its employees and their families. The hall was a two-story building. The first floor had a bowling alley, a kitchen, several offices and meeting rooms and restrooms. There was a banquet hall on the second floor. I recall attending three events there every year. Two of the events happened in December — visiting “Santa,” and the company Christmas Party. The other event was the Easter party. Unlike the Christmas Party, which was more for the adults, the Easter party was strictly for the kids. It consisted of playing kiddie games, some guy dressed in a bunny suit passing out candy, a movie matinee, and an Easter egg hunt. Since the glass factory employed a little more than a third of the people in my hometown, a lot of the children were kids I went to school with. I’m sure if I asked those people to recall any or all of those Easter parties, I’d get a different version of what took place. We’d all remember watching different movies, we’d all recall the outcome of the Easter egg hunt differently and it would all seem true from our own perspective. I’ve attempted to write about those parties on several occasions, but my memory of the event keeps changing. Even my little sister’s version of the story keeps changing. For instance, I recall a boy breezing past my sister and beating her to an egg, but to hear her tell it, the boy shoved her to the ground and stole the egg from her. I don’t remember it that way. Doesn’t mean her version is inaccurate or that mine is more accurate. We’ll never know for sure. We also disagree on whether the eggs were plastic eggs or real eggs. I remember that they used plastic eggs and that some of the eggs had quarters or candy hidden inside (the eggs my mom used to hide in the back yard were real most of the time, but I remember at least one occasion where she used the plastic eggs and hid stuff inside, so I’m could be mixing up the two events).
The point is, all memory is, to some degree, a fiction. Because your memory gets away from you over time kind of like chasing behind a man in a bunny suit hunting for the eggs he’s hidden. It’s not absolute truth, but reality as edited by the human brain. It takes some sorting and some pasting together and so it never entirely resembles the original event. Let’s say I had an idea to host a party reuniting people who attended those childhood Easter parties at the old social hall (I’m not even sure the building is still standing or that it would even be available to rent, but let’s assume it is) and attempt to recreate that event based on memory and it wouldn’t be the same. I could hire a guy to dress in a bunny suit. I could rent some of the actual films we used to watch and get a projector and screen and everything. It might be fun. It might be entertaining in a silly, stupid way, but it wouldn’t be an accurate recreation and it wouldn’t feel the same. It would be a new event seen through new eyes. And that’s what it’s like to write memoir. It’s not exactly fiction. In the sense that you are earnestly trying to tell the truth as you understand it and that you are using real memories to tell the story you are not making it up entirely from whole cloth, but you are not being factual in a conventional, journalistic sense either.
