I’ve been working with a client on an extraordinary memoir that starts in an idyllic Mennonite farm family in Kentucky and tunnels into a violent marriage that engenders her rage with God. As we were talking over the first draft, I suggested altering some scenes. “But that’s not what happened!”
“But making these changes will make it more coherent and dramatic. What about calling it a novel?” I asked.
Since then I’ve asked that question a number of times of other clients.
The issue that the writer needs to address is: What are you trying to accomplish, and which is the best genre for doing that?
A memoir is not an autobiography. Autobiography is clearly non-fiction (though undoubtedly open to distortion and prejudice, including crimes of omission).
Memoirs often entail musing from the current time back on earlier experience. Is that being untrue to the experience enough to call it a novel?
If a memoir is structured thematically rather than chronologically, does the distortion away from the experience and into a perspective on the experience warrant changing the genre?
It is a small stretch from there to combining a number of similar experiences into a single descriptive adventure. For example, every morning the family goes out to the barn after a bowl of reheated soup. One day my older sister discovers that skunks have broken into the chicken coop and killed my favorite rooster whom I had carried next to my body as an egg. That morning I was milking the cows, so I didn’t find out until lunchtime. Are you really distorting the story by having me discover the damage and describe my reaction right in the chicken coop, instead of abandoning my lunch to see what happened? Does a change like that warrant calling your piece a novel?
I’d likely do that in a memoir for efficiency – unless his remnants are in the chicken salad, which would give the story a very effective gut-wrenching flavor. For a memoir, I wouldn’t include that if it hadn’t happened, unless it happened to my cousin and might well have happened to me, given the insensitivity of my parents. But in a novel, I’d pull out all the stops, right down to Mama commenting that curry seems to bring out the best in cold chicken.
Tim O’Brien calls his Vietnam piece, The Things They Carried, a novel, though it is definitely stories of his experiences and observations during the war. In fact, I find it a musing on the nature of memory, for he reiterates some stories, but each time it looks slightly different, or is carried to a different conclusion.
How does memory express? Does it depend on the circumstances of the moment in which it arises – for we are different from moment to moment, so our memories will be different in different moments – or in the telling to different listeners? I would not call it a novel, but rather a poetic inquiry into memoir.
The issue of novel-or-memoir comes down to flexibility and imagination versus loss of credibility. Does the fact that this happened to you or someone else in the text (who might stand up in public and say Just a minute, that’s not how it happened) require you to tell the story accurately? The writer needs to make that decision.
What does the writer want the reader to gain from the book? What is the most effective way to elicit that response? Sometimes stunning writing that veers from or reconstructs the experience will have the most impact. Then best to call it a novel – perhaps “a novel I survived.”
Eve Ensler’s recent memoir In the Body of the World is a stunning kaleidoscope of experiences of incest, treatment of women in The Congo, her cancer diagnosis, her writing life, and her international good works – even in one short chapter. Yes, I’m having a powerful empathic response and I’m being inspired to undertake all her causes – she was clear about her intention, and succeeded – though it is only over many chapters that the reader acquires a clear picture of how her life unfolded through time. This is pure memoir. It leaves me with no doubt of the facts. She does not need the latitude of a novel to move me.
Download PDF: Should You Call Your Opus a Memoir or a Novel_ August 5, 2013