My Issues With "Truth" (Most of Them Largely Semantic)

Okay, so in my previous post about the differences between Nonfiction and Creative Nonfiction, I suggested that what makes creative nonfiction unique is its use of fictive devices. I also suggested that the way those devices are employed is more important in some respects than supposed “truth.”  (Disclaimer: I write fiction almost exclusively, so I am probably biased.) 

I can imagine a statement like that ruffling some people’s feathers (assuming anyone is out there reading), so let’s talk about that position a little.

It might be good to start out with a definition: When I say truth, I mean accordance to “the way things really happened” in one’s personal history. I don’t mean, matters of public record that we might look up on in a textbook or almanac (such as, is the Sears Tower 1,729 feet high or 1,279 feet high?). I think, when it comes to factual details like that, it’s our obligation to make every effort to get our “moons in the right skies” (to steal a quote from Eudora Welty), if we expect to be taken seriously as people with something intelligent to say.

But what about those personal histories? What are our obligations? It’s a tricky question, one that rolls back on itself the more you try to talk about it, I think.

I’ll be clear here in stating my bias: I start getting twitchy whenever I hear writers talk about “truth.” You hear it all the time—that nonfiction may not tell the objective Truth (capital “T”) but that it tells a truth (lowercased “t”). Truth is truth, I say. There are no variations. The moment you qualify it, it’s no longer truth by definition. It’s subjective interpretation. I hear fiction writers claim that they “lie to tell the truth” or that they are striving to convey an “emotional truth.” I don’t buy any of that. Lying to tell the truth? Give me a break. To do that, you’d have to know what the truth is. And when people claim to know the truth, my bullshit detector starts beeping. Maybe some other writers—writers far better than I am—feel confident that they have discovered truths, and maybe they feel obligated to share them with the world. Who am I to say?

All I can say with any certainty is that I have no such truths to tell. And I’m not particularly interested in acquiring any. When I sit down to write a personal essay--which, admittedly, I don't do often--I only have two motivations for sharing my story:

          1. I think it's interesting enough to put out there. I live under the assumption that, if it interests me, it might also interest 
              someone else.

          2. I hope my story makes someone else feel less alone, even if only for a few minutes.

If you're looking for company, I might be able to help. But if you want universal truth, moral lessons, someone to pass judgment on himself or others, I'm the wrong writer for you.

But let me step off my soapbox here for a second because the point I'm making is probably more semantic than anything else, and what I would advocate for is probably not that new or controversial. Besides, I suspect the only reason writers spend so much time going on about truth is that we are self-conscious--we're afraid that if we don’t have a good answer to the question “Why Do You Write?” then we’ll be seen as frauds, hucksters.  And I have an answer to that question already (fodder for another post, perhaps?).

Where am I going with all this?

Though I bristle at the word “truth,” I don’t advocate for fraudulence in Creative Nonfiction. We all remember the not-so-distant scandal surrounding the author James Frey and his book A Million Little Pieces, which was marketed (by Oprah among others) as a memoir of Frey’s struggles with drug abuse in a twelve-step rehabilitation program. When it was discovered that Frey had made up or embellished large parts of the story, readers were furious.

Now, one might be inclined to say, who cares if it’s made-up as long as it’s a good story? Well, for one thing, Oprah cared because she endorsed the book (though we could have a field day talking about “truth” there). More importantly, all those readers who felt duped by the author’s lies, well, it turns out they cared, too. The publishers cared. And, I’m guessing plenty of people who'd overcome alcoholism and/or drug abuse felt a bit exploited, as well. Had Frey been up front about the fact that he was taking “creative license” with the material, he might have avoided some of the criticism, but presumably he knew that nonfiction memoir sells better than fiction because contemporary readers seem to be increasingly interested in reading stories based on real-life events, so he manipulated that market. Whether or not he did it to make a buck or because his personal philosophy about nonfiction writing allows for such liberties is not something I’m interested in weighing in on. I don’t know the man, and so I have no idea what his motivations were. What matters is, he wrote the book that way and it ticked plenty of people off.

I think one thing we can all agree on is that it wasn’t an accident.

My memory is quite faulty, and I don’t feel much need or obligation to fact check it or apologize on its behalf. Such is the way I live most of my life. If a reader wants to tell me that the way I remember something is wrong, I’ll be the first to admit that he/she is probably right. If he/she wants to get hung up on that, fine, but that kind of quibbling is uninteresting to me. That said, I'm fairly positive that I would remember something like hitting a cop and spending 87 days in jail. I wouldn’t just imagine something like that. And, if there were any doubt about an incident of that magnitude--one that comprises the bulk of the story I am planning on telling--I would confirm it before committing it to paper. Or else I wouldn't tell it.

Why?

Because for me it’s a matter of craft. If, as a creative nonfiction writer, you are not confident in the story you have to tell—if you cannot make it interesting enough to share with an audience without inventing incidents that never happened—you either aren’t telling the right story, or you aren’t skilled enough to be practicing the craft. I think of what Richard Russo says in his essay, “Location, Location, Location: Depicting Character Through Place”: “the simple truth [there’s that word again!] may be that there’s no place in the world, and no object either, that can’t be brought dancing to life when seen by the right eyes.” As you can guess, Russo is talking about fiction here (specifically, the settings we choose to portray), but in my opinion his words might as well apply to our personal histories. So often I hear students say, “I live a boring life; I have nothing to write about.” Most of the time, there is nothing wrong with their subject matter. The issue they are facing is that they do not know how to unlock what is interesting, poignant, heartbreaking about the story they’ve chosen to tell. In those cases, the answer is to keep pondering it, keep writing, keep revising, keep studying your craft. Not spice it up by throwing in a car crash, some explosions, a one-legged prostitute.

I’m not someone who believes in the claim that writers (nonfiction or otherwise) have a contract with their readers to tell the truth. I’d be dumb to make promises I can’t possibly keep with people I've never met. And, anyway, I don’t remember signing on any dotted lines (though we’ve already established that my memory is lousy, so the joke may be on me). That said, I am also not interested in pretending to be someone who I am not. My own self-image is subjective enough as it is; I don't feel the need to go out of my way to inject my life with fraudulence in the hopes that someone else might find it titillating. My hope is that a reader might like what I've written for the way it is written, not because I've managed to market myself as heroic, tragic, sorry, naughty, debauched, pathetic, and so on. To me, such attempts to make the writer into "celebrity" only draw attention away from the writing itself. Instead, I try to convey the pictures in my head as accurately as they appear (without omission or hyperbole) because I can’t write productively if I don’t.

I also have strong feelings that we lose a little of what makes us idiosyncratic (our essential self) whenever we decide to co-opt or exploit someone else's suffering, but that’s not strictly a point of craft.

In the end, every writer of Creative Nonfiction has to decide where to draw the line for him- or herself when it comes to truth. But perhaps the most important thing to remember is that readers of creative nonfiction understand and accept a writer’s limitations. No one expects creative nonfiction to be unfiltered, objective, irrefutable, or absolute. They only expect writers to tell their stories and to do it with so much skill and beauty that the need to embellish becomes moot.

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Note: In my next entry, I’ll try to identify a few of those “fictive devices” I’ve been mentioning and how they might come into play in our essays and memoirs.