James Frey invented experiences. Günter Grass hid his early life. And the rest of us deal in polite fictions every day.
By Catherine Rankovic
I once took a self-guided walking tour of literary St. Louis and was amazed to see, in the Central West End, a building called the Glass Menagerie Apartments. I shouldn’t have been amazed; anyone who has seen the play, and felt its power, can tell that Tennessee Williams based it on his life.
The family house Sally Benson immortalized in Meet Me in St. Louis no longer stands, but nobody doubts that what she published as fiction are really her personal memories. In the same neighborhood lived novelist Kate Chopin, who suffered for writing too honestly—and perhaps autobiographically—about a fictional wife who was happy to be widowed. And from the same city came Maya Angelou, William Burroughs, A.E. Hotchner and Ntozake Shange, all of whom became famous—and were criticized—for the piercing honesty of their work.
Honesty is power. We know this because half our upbringing is learning how and when to put a lid on it. Our culture idealizes honesty, but most of our institutions and social customs are not built on it; instead, they are built to withstand its force. In place of speaking honestly, we are taught to use honesty’s back roads: gossip, kidding, sarcasm, exposé. “Tell us what you really think” is usually only said, these days, as a way to shut you up.
Your favorite place to nurture your honesty is probably intensely private and apart: your best friend’s kitchen, a therapist’s office, your journal—or it may be an internal, invisible space, where you tell your higher power(s) what’s on your mind.
Fortunately, the literary tradition of honesty is very much alive; at Washington University, any course in memoir writing or first-person essay writing fills up with eager students right away.
Some people enjoy reading intimate essays and memoirs and poems—or enjoy writing them—because they serve as antidotes to daily low-grade mandatory dishonesty. My motives for writing intimately, besides the pleasure of telling my version of events, include exploring what happened and why, finding excuses for myself, getting even and nailing hypocrisy—and I consider myself as honor-bound to nail my own as I am to nail someone else’s. It’s not just a matter of honor, either. If I know I did wrong and in my writing I don’t admit to it, my writing will lack the voltage of honesty.
The personal essay or the memoir, like a close friend, provides a portal through which the reader may pay a visit to himself, his real self, the one who doesn’t have to dissemble or lie. Just as an athlete has a moral obligation to not use performance enhancers because his job is to show us the wonderful things a body can do, the writer of first-person nonfiction is obliged to present readers with an honest record of human experience, not only because it is human but also because honesty itself needs preserving.
On my computer I have stuck a little note: “I have a doctor’s excuse to tell the truth.”
Hidden in that note is a piece of folk wisdom: that the truth is medicinal, that it cures. We believe this so fervently that when we hear a memoirist has lied, we feel outraged, as if we had been given poison instead of medicine.
Embellishments, exaggerations and fibs may improve a memoir’s marketability, but facts never need alteration to be shocking and stirring—as Joan Didion has proved again and again. The glory of the truth is that it makes its own sense and has its own drama. The truth needs only to be told in all its fullness.
I tell my students, when they ask about how honest their writing should be, that the writer who knows what he is doing, and cares, juices up his memoir not with falsehoods but with greater truth: more details, more context, more honesty. This takes time to learn, and the most experienced are generally the best at it, but some places invite more honesty than others do, and I’ve come to realize—and to hope—that St. Louis is one of them.
An acclaimed poet and nonfiction writer, Catherine Rankovic teaches writing at Washington University.
