Literati Work Out Their Memoir Issues

By Ron Hogan on March 7, 2006 11:55 AM

I’m not much of a morning person, so things were well underway at last Friday’s National Book Critics Circle-sponsored panel discussion on truth and memoir writing when I stumbled into the New School, just in time to hear Vivian Gornick elaborating her long-held position that the only thing that really needs to be true in a memoir is the concept of a “reliable narrator” that readers will identify as the author recounting his or her personal experience. After that, “the experience and the facts are not by any means the same,” she insisted. “It’s not a police blotter, it’s not a therapy session.” Furthermore, people who insist that memoirs adhere to historical truth “aren’t readers,” at least not readers “sophisticated and informed” enough to understand the principles of literary invention. (I’d said my piece three years ago, when she first floated this idea, and I stand by what I said then: “Maybe some readers do cling too tenaciously to the idea that you can’t make stuff up about your life unless you’re fairly obvious about it, like Chuck Barris; it seems to me just as likely that Gornick might need to let go of the idea that the stories she tells about herself are ‘true’ just because she believes in their aesthetic merit.”)

Well, eventually Betsy Lerner got fed up with Gornick’s dismissive attitude towards the unsophisticated masses, and spoke up in their defense, finding her attitude typical of the backlash against writers who achieve widespread success and citing the critical shift against The Lovely Bones as a result. To which Gornick replied that wasn’t a backlash, that was a case of early, creduluous reviewers calling the book brilliant followed by “more sophisticated” reviewers saying it wasn’t. So when we got to the Q&A period, I asked Gornick what made her “reliable narrator” any different from Bret Easton Ellis in Lunar Park or Philip Roth in any number of his novels…and, damn, I’m kicking myself now for not invoking Chuck Barris, I can assure you. She wasn’t familiar with Ellis, but she did said that often, novelists like Roth were so hung up on the idea that memoirs had to be “real” that it crippled their writing: “When Roth wrote The Facts,” she declared, “he wrote the only dull sentences he ever wrote.” But wait, there’s more…so follow along with the jump!

Meanwhile, there was another thread running through the conversation, centered around what NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus called “the tyranny of the fact checker,” which he felt hampered writers who wanted to make more sweeping, intuitive statements about society. (As one audience member pointed out to me after the event broke up, though, Frank Rich doesn’t seem to be hurting any.) Kathryn Harrison also registered a complaint about being pestered over minor factual points that didn’t matter to her main themes, and then at one point managed to break free to discuss the psychological differences between writing about her personal experience. as fiction in Thicker than Water and then as a memoir in The Kiss. “As long as I novelized the story,” she recalled her feelings after the first book came out, “I was conspiring with the society around me to perpetuate the lie that incest didn’t happen.” At that point, she realized, what she thought would be a cathartic experience turned out to be only the first step.

Tanenhaus had been pretty dismissive of James Frey and A Million Little Pieces throughout the discussion, so an audience member asked him how he would have covered the story differently if he’d been in charge of the daily arts coverage at the Times. “It’s not the sort of story I would have reported,” Tanenhaus said. “I barely read our own coverage, I didn’t watch Oprah…I found it profoundly uninteresting.” Am I the only one wondering if he was willing to say that up on 43rd St, too, and who wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall if he did?