Balancing Act

Over the summer, I went to Barnes and Noble.  After searching for memoirs and/or collections of personal essays in the ‘Essay’ section (logical, right?) and came up with nothing, I decided to look elsewhere.  Maybe, I was thinking, the world finally woke up and decided to give Creative Nonfiction its own section in the bookstore. I wandered downstairs, hoping it would be somewhere close to the Biography section.  In fact, the only memoirs Barnes and Noble carried – only twenty or so – were scattered sparsely across a shelf labeled “New Biography.”  New Biography? And I thought this genre had come so far.

Lee Gutkind, editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction, suggests that much of the ‘controversy’ behind creative nonfiction as a genre stems from a scandal with which we’re all familiar: James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, and the questions it raised about what constitutes the truth.  Obviously, a fictional narrative marketed as a memoir is going too far, but what is the other extreme?  A writer who refuses to craft dialogue out of distant memories because he feels this is too much invention?  What would we have then?  An essay that is not creative.  An essay that bows to the truth rather than works around it.

In my Memoir class last spring, I had an instructor who was very clear on his beliefs about truth in creative nonfiction: you follow it, but not to the point of stifling your writing.  It seemed like a very fine line.  For example, Dr. Fincke would tell us that ‘telescoping’ is allowed – the compressing of multiple events into one scene – but only if the happenings on each occasion result in the same thing.  The idea is to be efficient, but not at the cost of suggesting that something resulted from a particular event that did not result from this event.  In addition, it was acceptable to combine two ‘characters’ into one person if these characters had the same impact on the narrative.  Techniques such as these are meant to eliminate confusion in memoir: it’s difficult for the reader to extract deep insights if she is preoccupied with trying to make sense of your family history.  However, once a writer is armed with these techniques,  he will interpret them how he likes, leaving us with no sense of consistency, no clear guideline, as to how to proceed with the idea of truth in creative nonfiction.

It’s one thing to hear from an instructor that it’s acceptable to telescope your scenes and characters, but it’s another thing entirely to sit down to write and realize that, according to your instructor’s guidelines, your friend Lulu and your friend Fred can become one character.  Every time I have deliberately tried to use one of the tricks Dr. Fincke outlined, I have felt guilty about it.  Unclean, almost.  Though in the long run, combining two characters in the interest of saving valuable space (and therefore reader attention span) is not hurting anyone, it’s the principle of it: if this is okay, what else becomes okay?  If someone has no qualms about combining two characters, who’s to say he won’t later decide that eliminating a character entirely is along the same lines?  Because it is – in a logical sense – but it all depends upon this character’s effect on the narrative.  Will eliminating this character change the writer’s narrative – perhaps make it more compelling, more likely to sell at Barnes and Noble?  Suddenly, with the knowledge of one simple writing technique, questions spring up in every direction.

I have, on occasion, caught myself stretching the truth in my creative nonfiction.  Not outright lying, but I have found that when I am embarrassed to write about something, I tend to gloss over the situation, altering the dialogue that actually transpired into dialogue that is less embarrassing.  It’s very self-serving – I don’t want my readers to think certain things about me.  But every time I do that in a first draft, I find that, nine times out of ten, I revise later drafts to more accurately reflect the truth.  For example, in one memoir, I changed a scene of dialogue so that I wouldn’t have to talk about menstruation.  I never stopped feeling funny about it, though.  Every time I looked at that scene my stomach would twist, and I’d think, Yeah, okay, I get it – I have more of a conscience than James Frey.  But what am I supposed to do about it?

Another one of my creative nonfiction instructors is more liberal about the concept of truth.  His philosophy is that as long as the feeling of a particular moment is echoed in the writing – as long as the events described result in a truthful reflection – then the memoir is successful, and completely ethical.  This is such a broad belief, though – there is so much room for loopholes.  So much room for stubborn justification (yeah, it happened!), for untruthful pieces that slip through because the writer insisted that the emotion behind it was accurate.

What am I supposed to do? It’s not an easily answered question.  After all, if we’re given no techniques, no “Go ahead and build that scene, add some dialogue; it’s fine that you don’t really remember it – you remember enough,” then we’d end up with stiff essays, essays without impact, without staying power.  But these go-aheads sometimes register in writer’s heads as a free pass: No, it’s fine, you don’t have to be honest here; nobody else is, after all.  How honest can you be? But it’s not a free pass.  It’s a ticket one must pay for, a coupon, maybe, but an expensive buy nonetheless.  Because it’s a balancing act.  It’s a question the writer must ask himself over and over again, finding new ways to answer it with each scene he completes.

My Confession

I have never been someone who reads classic novels. I’ve always pretended. My ever-pretentious grandma would tell my ever-naive great-grandma about how “literary” I am, how “well-read” and “cultured,” while I sat between the two of them, nodding, thinking, If only you knew. It became an awful cycle: my great-grandma writes a monthly newsletter, which is then sent out to the entire extended family, and my name will often be attached to assertions such as, “Lauren has read all the classics; she makes such intelligent conversation, always impressing Glenna [my grandma] with her knowledge.” Then, of course, my great aunts and uncles, when they see me every two to three years, say things like, “How are your English courses going?” And I respond with, “Oh, you know, really great.” And they ask, “What have you read lately?” And then I have to think of some smart title – Moby Dick, maybe, or Flannery O’Connor’s entire collection of short stories (neither of which I have read) – to pretend to be reading, all the while feeling ashamed of the fact that what I’m actually reading is a Chick-Lit novel called How to Meet Cute Boys. (This book actually exists.)

This problem has only worsened with time. I have dug a hole for myself. The older I get, the more embarrassing it becomes for me to never have read certain titles. For example, I have never read Lord of the Flies. I don’t know what to tell you; it just never happened for me. But I can’t read it now. Logistically, I cannot carry a copy of Lord of the Flies around campus, read it during my spare time, let my peers see that thin volume in my bag. I mean, I could. But how embarrassing! The shame I would feel over people finding out that I have never read a novel that most eighth graders have under their belts far overshadows my desire to actually read it. And the longer I wait, the less likely I am to suck it up – to face my fear and just buy the damn book. At this point in my life, I have admitted defeat: I will never read Lord of the Flies. I’m sorry, William Golding.

For quite some time, my secret – not just that I have never read Lord of the Flies, but that the only classics I have read and remembered were written by William Shakespeare (and that was only because I had a crush on my high school English teacher) – remained safe. I nodded and smiled during those dreaded family discussions, happy to pretend I was every bit as literary as my grandma boasted, just as long as no one asked any questions (which they never did, as I don’t believe they ever read the classics either). I really thought I would get through my whole life this way – skating by, avoiding classics out of fear of anyone finding out I hadn’t read them yet, acting much smarter than I actually am. I really did. But over the summer, I made the mistake of dating someone who, though not an English or Writing major, was fairly intelligent. And because he was fairly intelligent, he assumed that I – being someone he was interested in – was also fairly intelligent. And because I am a Writing major and he is not, he assumed that I knew a great deal more than he did about books and writing, and that I had read – yes – the classics.

I instantly went through my entire book collection. I managed to find, scattered among piles of titles like The Thirty-Day Seduction and Boy Meets Girl, about fifteen classics, including Lolita, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Frankenstein, and Anna Karenina. I made a checklist and taped it to my wall, resolving to read them all by the end of the summer. I don’t think I need to tell you how that went. Suffice it to say that I read twenty-six pages of Nabokov – making sure to name-drop it in conversation with my ex-boyfriend’s mom, of course, before running, terrified, back into the open arms of How to Meet Cute Boys.

I am trying to reform, however. I signed up for a Novel course this semester, a course in which I am required to read seven classics. I have already failed to read Robinson Crusoe (please don’t tell Dr. Robertson). But I have high hopes for Gulliver’s Travels. You see, this class levels the playing field. In this class, no one has to know that these are perhaps the first classics I will ever read from beginning to end. No one has to know that, despite two years of Advanced Placement English, my literary repertoire consists of Chick-Lit and the Harry Potter series, not The Great Gatsby and The Old Man and the Sea. Maybe I can be a new person now. Maybe the next time my grandma asks me what I have read lately, I can say something along the lines of, “I read Paradise Lost recently, and you know what? It draws heavily upon its predecessors, Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe.” And I won’t be lying. I’ll actually know.