The Ethics of the Lie in Creative Nonfiction, Part 2

Does it really make a difference that D’Agata intentionally traded accuracy for art?  Put another way, what is the nonfiction writer’s higher obligation:  To the story or to reality?  Before discussing this question, let’s see if we can agree on two things:

1.     Memory is fallible and deeply subjective.  My memory of an event will be different then your memory of an event, and it may be inaccurate.  Was the bike really red?   Since it’s hard to remember—or to check—the important principle is not accuracy but simply that the writer remembers it as a red bike.

2.     Creative nonfiction writers should not be held to journalistic standards.  This is especially important in the matter of dialogue.  While a reporter needs to quote accurately, it’s impossible to remember with any accuracy a conversation that took place some time ago in the absence of notes.   (On the other hand, should the creation of composite characters—which is verboten in journalism—be avoided as well in creative nonfiction?)

With these principles, creative nonfiction writers have considerable latitude to tell their own stories, to not get stymied by worrying about the accuracy of hard-to-remember details, and to create scenes with dialogue that carry the spirit of the conversation not the exact quotations.  But we’re still left with this question:  Is it okay to knowingly make things up?  I think it’s possible to summarize the major schools of thought on this question, drawing on the comments of two accomplished nonfiction writers.

The Joan Didion school would argue for emotional truth.  The point of keeping a notebook, she once wrote, is not to keep a “factual record.”  The story-telling impulse is not to get it right but to discover “how it felt to be me.”  This might mean compromising the reality of what actually happened if the writing speaks to emotional truth.

The Tracy Kidder school, on the other hand, takes a very different position, one more closely aligned with those who feel a stronger obligation to reality and to what actually happened, to the extent it’s possible to know.  He sees lying in nonfiction as poisonous, and the victim is the writer not the reader.  Kidder writes, “I’m afraid that if I started making up things in a story that purported to be about real events and people, I’d stop believing it myself.  And I imagine that such a loss of conviction would infect every sentence and make each one unbelievable.”

                  It’s not that easy for me to see the middle ground between these two positions because each works from such different premises about the obligations of the nonfiction writer.  But at the heart of both Didion and Kidder’s comments is not a concern about the reader’s reaction to invention or accuracy but what it means to the writer.  For both, Oprah is beside the point.  When we’re telling a true story does it matter that we get it right?  Kidder says, yes, absolutely.  Didion says, no, not really.  But both are concerned with truth, with trying to get it right in the larger sense.

                  As a practical question, in my own work I’ve struggled with whether I should check the accuracy of a remembered event.  Was it really the summer of 1963?  Was there really a total solar eclipse that day in July in northern Wisconsin?  In one ear, Didion whispers, “It felt like it, that’s what matters.”  In the other ear, Kidder whispers, “You really should check.”   And so I do check.  I quickly discover online that there was, indeed, a total solar eclipse that in 1963, and that it occurred on July 20 and in northern Wisconsin it lasted 31.5 seconds.  I’m moved by this, and not because it confirmed my memory of the event, but because in memory the blackness seemed to last so much longer.  Why, I wonder, did it seem that way?  The writer in me wonders, too, and this opens an unexpected window on the material and especially on “how it felt to be me.”  In this case, trying to get it right, as Kidder advises, helps me to stumble towards Didion’s emotional truth.  So perhaps they aren’t so different after all.

                  There is no way to finally resolve these questions about the ethics of lying in creative nonfiction.  There can be no rules for this sort of thing.  But it seems to me the most productive discussions of these questions might start from confronting this question: Which is the creative nonfiction writer’s higher obligation, to the story or to the reality of what actually happened?  Those in favor of taking imaginative liberties with nonfiction narratives almost always do so for the sake of telling a good story.  Those who guard against inventing things that didn’t happen feel responsible for reality, however imperfectly it is remembered.  Reality is where the story must be found if it’s to be found at all.