Memoir and the Truth, or is it "Truth"?
In which I mix a metaphor - toss around ideas to see which stick or which sink.
In chapter 8 “Hucksters, the Deluded, and Big Fat Liars” of Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, she discusses some famous memoirs and memoirists who lied to hell and back in telling their stories and simply shrugged.
On page 88, Karr writes:
Disgraced con men have helped to author the dominant notion that a thiking person can’t possibly discern between a probably truth and a hyperembellished swindle. Based on their antics, we’ve begun to abandon all judgment, thinking instead, Oh, who knows, anything’s possible, everybody lies anyway.
What’s most remarkable about this is that the copyright date in my book is 2015 BTE - Before the Trump Era. Sure, that most famous of liars had laid waste to the truth all his life, so the table had already been set for his arrival.
Further on, Karr writes, “I still think a screw has come loose in our culture around notions of truth, a word you almost can’t set down without quotes around it anymore” (see the title of this newsletter entry).
And finally, “The American religion—so far as there is one anymore—seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he’ll never be found wrong.”
My own relationship with the truth has strained my relationships because of my good memory and good record keeping. I keep all my emails, dating back now to the 1990s. As I get older and recognize the fallibility of my memory, I rely more and more on records to verify the outlines of fact and truth.
(As a teenager, I told a few whoppers, but I learned hard lessons about them when I got caught in lies by my parents. That changed my relationship to the truth and I became a truth-sayer and not a truth-nayer. When I became a stepfather to a step-daughter for whom truth was non-existent, I struggled with her lies. Inside I kept saying it was payback and just desserts. C’est la vie.)
What’s your own relationship with the truth? Go on, you can tell me.
But truth isn’t so much about the wheres and whens and hows of an event or interaction. It’s more about that internal emotional truth one experiences that is different from everyone else’s experience.
The events I experienced are “true” to me, even though I’ve had a lifetime of people trying to tell me they weren’t so.
I’m always concerned about getting the moment right, getting to the truth of the situation. And it’s cost me dearly, my family, friends. Most situations don’t boil down to right vs. wrong, and I’ve had to let a lot of other people’s shit go, but there is still truth to be had in telling one’s story.
Two troubling incidents came across my reading this past weekend regarding truth.
On LinkedIn, I saw a posting by a “professor” who had claimed to help write 1200 dissertations - “everyone does it. You can’t possible meet the standards of writing a dissertation without professional help. I’ll help you write your dissertation and no one will be the wiser.” As an academic, I was deeply appalled. I know many people who have written dissertations without “help.” I know many others whose first language was not English who received institutional help with their English, but they still did their own research and did the best they could in putting together the draft of their dissertation.
In this morning’s news, the report is that Marjorie Taylor Greene is front and center in the Republican party because of her steadfast support of QAnon. She doesn’t quibble about the truth - she just discards it. But because she holds to what she believes (total bunk) so strongly, she has attracted admirers and followers and voters. She’s a blonde Trump in northwest Georgian clothing, another danger to our republic.
For a memoirist, mining the truth is more than just getting the facts right. It’s about the deeper emotional truths that experience hath wrought. The liars Karr writes about lie about the surface facts of things, and people/readers/publishers just let it go.
But the age of memoir is just getting started. This past week I read that memoir is the genre of our age. Every week, some celebrity or other has a memoir that comes out. Everyone has a story to tell. And now that Annie Ernaux, noted French memoirist has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the floodgates for memoir will open.
I sometimes ask myself if people will be interested in my story. When I tell even a portion of it, people stand rapt and I see their jaws slacken and their eyes grow wide. My story tells a painful truth that others understand.
My book will sell. It’s time to find the right agent.
Fall is here this week in Seattle, after a record-breaking 88 degrees yesterday, the latest 80+ degree day in October in Seattle history. Now we’re heading for highs in the 60s and lower for the foreseeable future. Bundle up everyone and grab a good book.
For me, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!
Yes, we're definitely in a "post-truth" era these days. It is incredible to me how many people remain convinced that widespread voter fraud happened in 2020 and is the reason Trump lost. More than 60 courts, some of them with Trump-appointed judges, threw out the frivilous lawsuits claiming that, and some of the lawyers were fined for bringing them. Multiple investigations and vote recounts, often overseen by Trump supporters looking for evidence of widespread fraud failed to uncover it. Bill Barr, until recently a Trump supporter, testified under oath that those claims were "bullshit" and that Trump knew that but didn't care what the "actual facts" were. Yet the Big Lie continues to spread, and politicians who embrace it get elected.