BlackHippyChick Day: the Temptation to Write a Memoir

The memoir is probably every new writer’s favourite genre. I’ve met a host of accountants and mathematicians who’ve decided they are writers purely on the basis of their “interesting lives”. The story, after all, has already been “written” and the author knows everything there is to know about it. That’s two shortcuts wrapped up in a single book. Surely that’s a good thing?

Well, no.

Most memoirs operate on the presumption that if it is true, it is also artistically relevant. This is far from the case. I’d even go far enough to say memoirs carry more risks than shortcuts. The temptation is always to write the tale the author considers important, and the writer isn’t always the best judge of that. All objectivity has been obliterated, and all conscious control of your prose has been rendered nonexistent because you’re too close to the story.

And we haven’t even gotten to the part about sharing other people’s secrets. I had to pass my entire debut collection through my mother for permission. She was great about it, but she wasn’t the norm. Memoirs can and will destroy families. This is not a limitation you have to deal with, so is it really worth it?

The mere assumption that truth means art will trip you up. The truth is also a liability. You can’t change it. It’s your life, so if it doesn’t play out in a compelling way, you’re screwed. You must favour truth over art at every turn.

That’s not a benefit. That’s a cage.

At this juncture, I should probably admit I’m a writer of memoirs. My mentor hated memoirs as much as I do, and yet he was a writer of memoirs, too. He had a neat little trick to escape the temptation other memoir writers must wrestle with: He published his two memoirs as fiction. The media hounded him over that for decades, insisting the books were too close to his life to be fiction.

They were right. Of course they were. I got it straight from the source, but Lionel had a good reason to publish his novels as fiction. He didn’t want people to buy them simply because they were true. He wanted his books to be good enough to be accepted on their own merit, so he wasn’t about to slap a “memoir” label on either of them.

I learned from the best. If I ever write a book-length memoir, I will publish it as fiction, too. Hell, I’ll probably even change the storyline because fiction is pliable. You can turn it into anything you like.

I don’t want to discourage you from writing about your lives. I only want to discourage you from thinking it’s easy. It isn’t. For most writers, it’s even more challenging than fiction, even if it does earn you a certain amount of credibility.

So it’s true? So what? Does it connect? Does it touch? Does it evoke?