As a fiction writer who understands the necessity of plot, did you manipulate truth into a plot when you wrote your memoir?
A memoir is plotted, yes. You sift through life to find the story-shape. Events in life are often foreshadowed, but the foreshadowing gets obscured by random facts. Life has recurring motifs, but they too get buried. And sometimes life serves up a central conflict, a crisis, and, afterward, the opportunity to draw conclusions about that crisis. My point is that you don’t make a plot in nonfiction as much as you find plot. That’s mostly a matter of elision: leaving out the irrelevant. And sometimes it means emphasizing something that wishful thinking or self-protective evasion will make you hurry past. So a memoir is never the whole truth. It’s the distilled, arranged truth. I write about this overtly in the memoir—my need to find a story-shape in the randomness of life. Finding a story-shape is an act of faith, hanging onto that unproven but irresistible conviction that our mistakes and troubles matter.
Is that the hardest part of nonfiction, wrestling it into a story-shape?
It is trickier than writing fiction. Writing a memoir is like cooking for someone on a restricted diet. You use a recipe, but now you can’t use every ingredient. You have to make a story, but the ingredients are from a short list: things that really happened.
The other hard part is finding the right perspective, or tone. A memoir requires you to be unflinchingly candid but also measured, restrained. I tended to emphasize what I did wrong, how I’d contributed to my bad luck. I thought that was honest self-scrutiny. I didn’t describe things I’d done well. A few of my first readers and my editor forced me emphasize some of my better moments. In fact, my editor told me I needed to depict a few good moments from my daughter’s childhood, and I told her they’re weren’t any. At the time, I remembered those years as sheer work, serial crises, as a steep learning curve. Then I interviewed my daughter. I didn’t ask her if she had “good memories.” I said: “Do you remember when we lived in the yellow house? What things do you remember?” And she had all of these wonderful memories I’d forgotten. She returned my attention to them, and I am still grateful. I put them in the book. After all, they’re part of the story too.
