Hey Booksoupers,
I'm Julia and I'm the new blog mistress. This week I'm here to talk to you about fact v. fiction. Now here at Booksoup, we do love a blurred line between fact and fiction. I'm sure by now you've all heard of Margaret B. Jones' book "Love and Consequences" and the fact that she made it all up. I get that some people might be mad because she tried to pass it off as a memoir, but if it's truly a good story then what does it matter? Does it really matter if what we read, when it comes to memoir, is fact or fiction?
And isn't the very nature of memoir that it is of the fickle mistress known as memory? How do we know what happened, what has been exaggerated, what is misremembered as something bigger or different than what actually happened? The truth is, we don't. It is my proposal that we, as a book reading group, should start to view memoir with a bit less emphasis on what actually happened, and start to view it as a journey, as you would view any work of fiction. Let's stop judging it for it's reality and start judging the storytelling ability. Let's embrace "A Million Little Pieces" and "Love and Consequences" for what they are and may very well hold up as being, good stories.
Peace and Love,
Julia
4 comments:
I don't know about all that. I would be pretty upset if I was a gangbanger who wanted to see if my hood was represented in the right way and then found out it was all BS.
Or maybe, more importantly, if I was reading, say, Maus and wanted to see what it was like and get an understanding of what it was really like for people who went through that and then found out he exaggerated a little bit here and a little bit there. Just for a better story.
I agree that a good story is just that, a good story. Sometimes there is a little bit more at stake.
I agree that sometimes there is more at stake. But take a book like The Jungle; it's a work of fiction, that may or may not have been exaggerated and it changed how we process and package meat. Does that mean that it is any more or less important? I think the problem is that fiction is hard to get published and these authors take a pragmatic approach to getting themselves published. I'd like to think that I wouldn't do the same, but I don't know if that is true, and maybe that makes me a terrible person, but I'd be a terrible person that is a published writer. It's an interesting line and I think that it's even more interesting when people cross it.
Maus is my favorite graphic novel, but do we know that parts are embellished or not. It's Art's fathers memory, and memory is not necessarily a reliable resource.
Memory is always skewed by context and is altered as the person changes. As a person gains insight, experience and a sees things with greater perspective they can remember different aspects of their past or emphasize different things. Memoir is essentially someone's thoughts on their life, incorporating all experiences up to that point. The memoir might be totally different as soon as they have more information. I think the problem comes when we try to make the distinction between FACT and fiction - creating a false dichotomy. Is it real because it is in a history text book? Or is it real because it's what I know? If I put what I know in a memoir, isn't that my personal reality? Take it with a grain of salt.
I agree that one should take memory with a grain of salt. I also agree that there is a problem with publishing a memoir and having it not be true. I just think in these cases we should look at them as a different sort of genre. The fictional memory genre. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford is a great example of fictional memoir. I understand the need to falsify the nature of a story in order to have a better chance of it reaching a wider audience, and I don't judge for that. It's just my opinion on the matter.
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