The other day at work, I wrote about how I've never had a Big Mac. The post came out of an editorial meeting discussion about who knows what when I mentioned I'd never had one, or a Whopper, either. That's interesting. What, seriously? Some more stuff was said, la dee da, and I wrote the post and sent it around to Julie and Denise. Normally I wouldn't have sent around a Big Mac post, but I was quoting them and wanted to be sure I got them right, as I don't believe I've actually quoted either of them directly on BlogHer before.
What you see here is not the original. Because in the original, I remembered what Julie said differently than she remembered it. She granted me poetic license to use whatever I wanted, but I changed it to accurately reflect the conversation as she remembered it. I remembered her saying I was weird, and she said she hadn't said that all (see how we insert our own paranoia into conversations). I believe her. I wasn't actually paying all that much attention at the time, because I didn't know I was going to write about it until later. I'm accustomed to remembering the main points of conversations and recreating them as dialogue as closely as possible, but you know, Beloved has gotten used to me changing a word here or there if my total recall got filed somewhere with the PIN for the bank account I had in Chicago ten years ago.
We don't always remember everything perfectly. And you have to be paying attention to remember stuff in the first place. Anyone who knows me well knows I live in my head a lot and float through huge swaths of my day walking into walls and snapping in and out of conversations because I'm thinking about this blog post or that section of my novel. I don't mean to do it, it's not personal, but the older I get the more aware I am of this behavior in myself. I'm capable of extreme focus when I'm writing, but talking, driving ... not so much. It is actually exhausting for me to focus on the world around me for too long when I want to be thinking about something I want to write and trying not to forget it instead. Especially when I'm trying to prevent a six-year-old from killing herself in 34 different ways in public.
I digress. But maybe I don't, because what good am I as a narrative nonfiction writer if I can't remember shit half the time?
This morning I read an article in Writer's Digest by Jenny Rough about truth in memoirs. She was surprised James Frey had been so castigated for A Million Little Pieces.
Jenny wrote:
Memoirists play with time and fudge facts to protect others' privacy. Omissions can be hugely deceptive, yet all memoirists forgo some details. I once read a memoir by a writer who led readers to believe she had a terrific relationship with her husband; I later learned she had been having an affair. "There's truth," said my writing teacher, "and there's as much truth as a writer is willing to tell."
Heaven knows I should never write a memoir, because I actually don't remember most of my senior year of high school. I had anorexia then, and I lived so much in my head that I'm actually shocked when my sister or my mom tells me a story about 1992. I'm all "no shit?" as though it weren't my actual life. Call it blocking it out, call it self absorption, call it mental illness, but you know, it happens. I can't remember much of anything except the lists I made every day of how many calories I'd eaten, and those I can see in my mind with photographic clarity.
But there are a lot of other parts of my life that I remember only in scenes or I think I remember because I've seen photos of those times. I certainly can't remember exact conversations I had with people ten or fifteen years ago, let alone thirty. I'm pretty sure every memoirist has to fudge the order of events or the dialogue, because who the hell remembers everything that's ever happened to them?
But what about blogging? Usually not so much time has passed before a conversation or a scene is captured on a blog. Yet most bloggers I know have admitted to adding a detail or changing the chronological order of a scene or conversation or embellishing for the sake of humor. Many bloggers have also gone on record saying what they write on their blogs is only the tiniest cross-section of their lives, and the readers who think they know everything about them actually know only the portions they choose to present to the world.
Where's the truth? Does it matter? Does it matter if truth creeps into fiction or fiction creeps into truth? Do bloggers owe their readers exact recall of events in their lives? Do you think everything you read on someone's blog actually happened exactly that way with those exact words?
If you comment, please also indicate whether or not you have a blog -- I suspect bloggers and nonbloggers will have differing opinions.
