Memory and Memoir

Description: Franzen discusses fiction, non-fiction, and the need to draw the distinction.

Transcript:

There were some moments when I was writing this personal history I published when it became clear to me that my memory was very unreliable and I’d always thought it was titanically reliable and it was a ice breaker of a memory compared to the flimsy tenuous memories of other people of my family.  I could be relied on to know the date, know the place, know the circumstance.  But when I was doing this for want of a better word, memoir, I had to fact check it because I could because most of, you know, my friends and family were around and I could fact check this stuff and, you know, it was jaw dropping.  Things that I remembered more vividly than my own, you know, high school graduation or first day of college, you know, the stuff that was just like, I had clear crystal memories of these things, never happened, never happened.  So that was very humbling but it’s much more fun to make fun of other people’s inability to know than one’s own.  So I’ve gone back to doing that.

 If you say this is nonfiction, it matters a lot because that’s what nonfiction is, it’s stuff that is verifiable in some way and if it can’t be verified, if you don’t make an effort to verify it, it shouldn’t be called nonfiction.  It seems pretty straightforward because nonfiction has all of these advantages, you get this _______________ when you read something and you know, oh this really happened, well but if, you know, and then you have been betrayed if it turns out, no it didn’t really happen, it’s just the way that author remembered it happening.  That sense of betrayal comes from the freeloading that one does as a writer when one labels something nonfiction, you’re getting something for free, the reader is giving you a gift of excitement and credulity because it really happened, but you have to hold up your side of the bargain.  So yeah it matters a lot I think, I mean you can’t, nothing’s perfect and good storytellers get away with a lot but the only honest way to do that is by leaving stuff out, not by making stuff up.

 

I think in common parlance when something says memoir on the cover, people assume it’s nonfiction, so if you put a disclaimer up front and say this is just how I remember it, there’s probably a lot here that didn’t happen this way but this is the memories I have, which would be true to the actual word memoir.  I think that would be different; that would be a useful disclaimer to see but no I think now when you see memoir, you assume it’s what happened.

 

Recorded On: 4/1/08