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.

The Ethics of the Lie in Creative Nonfiction, Part 1

Many years ago, when I first started teaching college writing, I prepared for a conference with a student by reading her narrative essay on a summer experience as a life guard.  The story focused on the narrator’s dreary summer job being a lifeguard at a local public pool.  It was late August, and the newness of the job had faded long ago; now there was just day after day sitting on a high chair beside the pool in the blazing summer sun.  It was hard to stay focused, and one day, at the other end of the pool, a small boy slipped under the water.  The narrator, glazed with boredom, failed to notice that the boy never surfaced.  But someone else did, and he dove into the water and pulled the boy up on the deck, frantically trying to resuscitate him. Waving her off, the narrator’s supervisor took over.  Overwhelmed with guilt and blinded by tears, the young lifeguard staggered into a poolside room, pressed her back against the cold cement wall, sunk to the floor, and held her head between her knees, trying to catch her breath after each wave of sobs.  As some point, she sensed there is someone else in the room, and when she looked up the narrator saw through the blur of tears that it was the boy, and that this was the men’s room, and that the boy was standing in front of a urinal, peeing with apparent satisfaction.

                I was taken with this ending of the narrative, and looked forward to talking with my student about why it seemed powerful—for one thing, the juxtaposition of the mundane (a boy urinating) and the profound (life and death)—and how this implied meaning made her story far more interesting to me.

“You liked that ending, right?” my student said after she sat down in my office.

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“I thought you would,” she said.

                When my student said this I began to wonder about the truth of the ending.  “The boy in the bathroom, it really happened right?” I said.

                “Well, no,” she said.  “But don’t you think it makes the story so much better?”

In the years since then, I’ve thought a lot about why I was so disappointed by the student’s confession.  I’ve also taught a great many of what we’ve come to call creative nonfiction courses, and I often tell the story to my students and ask them if they would have been disappointed if the student had made the same confession to them.  Opinion is divided.  Some say they aren’t disappointed at all, that the student writer was writing “creative” nonfiction, and this must certainly mean taking some imaginative liberties with the material.  Essentially, the argument is this:  If it makes the story better and it feels truthful then it’s okay to go ahead and make things up.  On the other side, of course, are people who are offended by my student’s invention.  They complain that it “ruins” the entire story for them, and makes the narrator seem like someone who can’t be trusted.  This argument rests on the premise that an implicit contract has been violated between reader and writer.  In nonfiction, you simply don’t make things up.

These days one of the hottest topics in creative nonfiction is the ethics of lying.  I probably don’t  need to list too many of these controversies.  They’ve already gotten considerable ink.    Perhaps the most famous was the confrontation between Oprah and James Frey.  In his “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, Frey apparently invented, among other things, how much time he spent in jail after a drug-crazed confrontation with Ohio police.  Frey said he spent 3 months.  The reality, critics charge, was that Frey was in jail about three hours.  Frey’s Oprah moment was similar to a public controversy over another memoir Augusten Burroughs , Running with Scissors.  The eccentric family portrayed in the book said Burroughs made things up about them that simply weren’t true.  Burroughs maintained that he didn’t take liberties with the truth, arguing that the story he told in the book “was not my mother’s story and it’s not the family’s story, and they may remember things differently and they may choose to not remember certain things, but I will never forget what happened to be, ever, and I even have scars from it and I wanted to rip those scars off of me.”

Most recently, we have the case of John D’Agata, an essayist who teaches in Iowa’s writer’s workshop.  D’Agata’s essay on the suicide of a Las Vegas teenager had been rejected by Harper’s, the magazine that commissioned it because of “factual inaccuracies.”  Another magazine, The Believer, agreed to publish it but wanted to do some fact-checking.  Seven years later, after much haggling between a fact checker named Jim Fingal and D’Agata, the piece was finally published.  The recently published Lifespan of a Fact is a book that chronicles their disputes, and the following interchange between Fingal and D’Agata was typical:

In D’Agata’s manuscript, he writes this:

On the day that Levi Presley died, five others died from two types of cancer, four from heart attacks, three because of strokes.  It was a day of two suicides by gunshot as well.  The day of yet another suicide from hanging.

When the fact-checker called the coroner’s office, he discovered that there were actually eight heart attacks in Vegas that day.  The ensuing conversation went like this:

Jim:  John, should we change this “four heart attacks” to “eight?”

John:  I like the effect of these numbers scaling down in the sentence from five to four to three, etc.  So I’d like to leave it as it is.

Jim:  But that would be intentionally inaccurate.

John: Probably, yeah.

Jim: Aren’t you worried about your credibility with the reader?

John: Not really, Jim, no.  I’m not running for public office.  I’m trying to write something interesting to read.

Jim:  But what’s the point if the reader stops trusting you?

John: The readers who care about the difference between “four” and “eight” might stop trusting me.  But the readers who care about interesting sentences and the metaphorical effect that the accumulation of those sentences achieve will probably forgive me.

Jim:  I guess I’m confused: what exactly are the benefits of using “four” versus “eight” in this sentence?

John: I’m done talking about this.

Thesis Tyranny

Just the other day our university Writing Center sponsored a "thesis workshop" for students.  This is, of course, a laudable move especially since a thesis is a feature in much assigned writing.  Organizing a piece of writing around some dominant idea makes a lot of sense.  What I find interesting, though, is that we never sponsor student workshops on how to come up with a good question.  After all, where do theses come from?  The answer, I'm afraid, is that they mostly come out of thin air.  A thesis is invented not because it answers an interesting question but because the writer needs a thesis, and needs one now.  This state of affairs  leads to a finding like the one reported by Project Information Literacy:  that nearly 60% of students in their large survey of student researchers try to come up with a thesis statement "early on."  I found a similar result in a survey I did of first-year writing students some years ago.  Cooking up a thesis is an easy way to solve the problem of having a thesis.

I worry that the relentless focus on the thesis in academic writing is one reason for this.  We should, of course, expect a thesis, or controlling idea, or whatever you want to call it but wouldn't it be useful to focus on where the thesis comes from?  In academic inquiry, a thesis emerges from discoveries that are seeded by questions.  But not just any questions.  We craft questions that will ultimately lead us towards judgments.  Knowing what kinds of questions do this--and will sustain the process of research--is at least as difficult as knowing what a good thesis statement looks like, and I'd argue that learning how to ask good questions is even more important.

Ten "Truths" about a Writing Life?

1. It’s best, at least in the beginning, not to think about what you’re writing—a poem, a story, an essay, an article—but to let the material tell you what it wants to be.
2. The worst problem writers face? The tendency to judge too soon, and too harshly.
3. The writing life, like any other “career” in the arts, involves sleeping with the enemy: rejection.
4. Joan Didion says, “Writers are always selling somebody out.” Janet Malcolm wrote in The New Yorker that writers are “con men,” “preying on people’s vanity” and “betraying their confidences.” When you write about other people, especially in nonfiction, your characters are (or were) real people. They live both inside and outside the story. Yet your obligation is to the telling the truth even at the risk of betraying a subject.
5. You want to say, “I am a writer.” But when you do you feel like a fake. It seems presumptuous, even ridiculous. Publishing is the only cure for this.
6. Maybe some of the shame we feel has to do with what we imagine “being a writer” is. Perhaps we all need to ask ourselves another question: “Why do I want to do this, especially when it doesn’t seem to matter to anyone else?”
7. Dancers who love performance but dislike the endless rehearsals that lead up to it will never be very good dancers. Writers who dislike the messy process of making things with words will eventually give up. And they should.
8. Terrible career advice: “Be a poet. Be a novelist. Be an essayist.” What currency do such dreams have in an age of high unemployment? Put more bluntly: “Are you hopelessly naïve, or what?”
9. When we’re beginning as writers, we’re drunk with admiration for successful writers, in many ways embodied by our favorite writing instructors. We take their classes, as many as we can. We are thrilled when they say nice things about our work. Devastated when they don’t. More than anything, we want to write like them. You’ll never get anywhere until you get over this.
10. To borrow a metaphor from E. B. White: Writing is like a frog. It can be dissected but it always dies in the process. This is a lie. While writing is a very individual process—what works for you may not work for me—it is no mystery. Believing this puts your work in peril.

Why Teach the Profile?

For many years, I've taught the profile as a writing genre in my composition classes, and I include it as well in Curious Writer. I like it for several reasons. It is much like the more academic "case study," a methodology that is used in a number of disciplines, but aside from its academic relevance, I'm drawn to how it fits into the kind of sequence that Moffett talks about--writing from the self outward. And yet, I often find that I don't really like what students do with it. Because they don't spend sufficient time collecting information from their interview subjects, the pieces are often unfocused and uninteresting. They frequently don't choose subjects well, either--a friend, a parent, or perhaps a teacher--and the essays are written from memory rather than listening. They become just another version of the personal essay.

This semester, I'm trying something different. The Library of Congress' "Veteran's History Project" provides a wealth of online material about men and women who served in the major conflicts of the last half century or more--WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. This material includes audio and sometimes video interviews with each vet (and there are thousands of them), transcripts, letters, and photographs. Lurking there are stories, and really compelling ones, about an individual's participation in some of the most dramatic public events of our time. This is exactly the kind of information that will challenge student researchers to shape a narrative from the relatively raw materials.

Teaching Abstraction

One of the most useful metaphors I've encountered about helping students understand the difference between what happened and what happens--a distinction that James Moffett suggests reflects two different levels of abstraction--is the 1980s television program "The Wonder Years." This program, about an 8th grader named Kevin growing up in suburban California during the turbulent sixties, uses a narrative technique that is now fairly commonplace on TV: the superimposition of two stories, one that captures what happened to Kevin as he experienced it, and the other a narrator who is the voice of the adult Kevin, reflecting on what happened. Each of these represent the two modes of abstraction--what happened and what happens--and it's clear that without the latter, the program wouldn't be nearly as poignant. We hear the adult narrator--or the "now narrator"--throughout the program, not just at the end, reinforcing the idea that such reflection isn't reserved for some final eureka paragraph. To show a clip to your students go on YouTube. Then talk about how it models a good personal essay, and a method of thinking that applies to everything they write.