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Articles Essay Writing Lie to Me: Getting at the Truth in Personal Essay
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| Articles - Essay Writing | |
| Written by Susan Bono | |
| 1998-12-31 | |
Lie to Me: Getting at the Truth in Personal Essayby Susan Bono Editor's Note:
I edit and publish a journal of personal essay. It has become my habit, when at literary functions, to hover near the refreshment table, keeping my strength up until a hungry writer with suitable material happens by. There are plenty of writers who make dinner out of raw vegetables and dip, so I'm rarely without company for long. They are also hungry for publication, so we talk. <>After four years, I've noticed a recurrent theme in these conversations around the canapés. Between bites of cracker and Brie, writers ask me to define personal essay. For this task, I currently use a phrase from Tristine Rainer's book, Your Life as Story."A personal essay," I tell them, "is a piece of writing that follows 'a progression towards personal truth.' " At the mention of truth, these writers nod sagely. Then their faces take on a crafty look. "But how do you know if what I've written really happened?" they ask. "I don't," I reply. I wait, prepared now by a sense of deja vu, for their impending expressions of horror. The realization that editors aren't all-knowing isn't the only thing I'm asking these scribes to swallow. They have to digest the notion that in a work of nonfiction it is permissible, sometimes desirable, to lie. I see it as my duty to bring them around to this way of thinking. Like a mother dosing her children with cod-liver oil, I believe that what's on the end of my spoon is good for them. So I tell them we writers of personal essay have many reasons to make things up. For starters, we simply can't rely on the accuracy of our memories. Which of those Wilson boys actually threw the dead cat onto Mrs. Hickman's porch? Were you five or six the night your brother convinced you that the kneeling Jesus from the painting in your grandfather's study got up and walked around? None of us take notes during the battles that end friendships and love affairs. Does that mean we have no business writing about them? Just the other day, my friend Tony was telling me that when he records even his most vivid dreams, they are changed by the act of writing them down, and like multiplying reflections in a hall of mirrors, he himself is changed, and so on and on. So what is the real dream? How can we ever know, then, what really happened? Tony's observation reminds me of what Nancy Mairs, in her collection of essays, Remembering the Bone House, says about memory. She writes that there's no real way to relive the past, even in our imaginations, because we can only return to it transformed by who we are in the present moment. "The past exiles you from itself," she writes. "Each time you enter it, you build it anew." Recently I received an essay in which the writer recounted one of those brushes with destiny so appealing to the memoirist. She was trying to describe a man who, in the course of one evening, became The One Who Got Away. But she confused me by the amount of time she spent confessing that she couldn't quite remember his height, the color of his eyes, what he said, or what they had in common. I could sympathize with her lack of recall, my own memory being more like a sieve than a reservoir. On the other hand, she was neglecting one of the basic rules of essay writing: a premise without supporting detail is no essay at all. Every writer needs to remember that elements such as characterization, description, and dramatic tension are not confined to fiction. If this woman couldn't remember the warmth of his hand on her hip as they danced, or that his mouth tasted of limes, she needed to ask herself why this seemingly forgettable man had such power over her. If that didn't lead her to explore a more compelling theme, she should have made something up. She needed to make better use of what Alice Walker calls language's ability to "arc towards the place where meaning may lie." hen there's the problem of repercussions. A few weeks ago, I heard Professor Maxine Hong Kingston discuss her book, The Woman Warrior. It is a widely studied account of her Chinese- American girlhood, which she labels "creative nonfiction" rather than "autobiography." She asked her audience to regard the first line of the book: " 'You must not tell anyone,' my mother said." What I am about to tell you is every writer's most important and continuing challenge. It is our job to break taboos of family and society, to risk the consequences of talking about what's secret or forbidden. "We've all had the experience of having our writing spring to life as soon as we wander into material that would make certain people want to die if they read it. When Charles McGrath was an editor at The New Yorker, he said, 'If you want to be a writer, somewhere along the line you're going to have to hurt somebody. And when that time comes, you go ahead and do it. If you can't or don't want to tell that truth, you may as well stop now and save yourself a lot of hardship and pain.' " There are, however, degrees of hurt; and the penalties for honesty are sometimes severe. If we are unwilling to conceal our identities or keep quiet about what's going on, fudging a few facts sometimes makes the greater truth possible to tell. We want to use the power of the forbidden in our work, but face it, we often have to live with the very people we are trying so hard to understand by writing about them. When you are exploring some of the complexities of your childhood, weigh the benefits of attributing your cousin's sadistic tendencies to a schoolmate's brother. Your Aunt Mary will still speak to you at Thanksgiving, and you won't have to worry so much if Bernard is still into knives and guns. In an interview in the March/April 1998 issue of the AWP Chronicle, memoirist Patricia Hampl presents another argument for the well-chosen lie. She suggests that poetry, not fiction or journalism, is the closest relative to memoir and personal essay. We aren't necessarily concerned with accurate reporting in a poem written in the first person, she says. Instead, "We accept the honest and probably inevitable mixture of mind and spirit." She goes on to point out, "The reason we don't interrogate poetry as we do memoir is that we have a long and pretty sophisticated history of how to read the poetic voice. We accept that its task is to find a kind of emotional truth within experience." Just because we don't have a similar tradition with the memoir, we needn't define the word "nonfiction" so narrowly. Lest we turn into literary Pinocchios, our noses growing longer with each passing prevarication, let me include here Ms. Hampl's caution about the dangers of crossing over from "memory to invention." Hampl says, "What you should feel in a memoir is the search of the writer's memory for the past." Superficial observations and lies for the sake of convenience won't do. We are trying to give readers our experiences as we remember them. We should succumb to poetic license only when the need for discretion or plausible detail interferes with our ability to communicate the truth. Back at the refreshment table, I attempt to placate those writers to whom I've given indigestion by relating what Professor Gerald Haslam, prize-winning essayist, tells his students: "Creative nonfiction forces you to walk as close as you can to the edge of fiction without falling in." Those are words any writer serious about personal essay would do well to live by. There's just something to be said for an "honest lie" as we pick our way along those paths to personal truth. --SB copyright 1998 Susan Bono Contact information:
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