Here's what some terrific writers have to say about the distinction between emotional and factual truth (and that important, yet sometimes fuzzy space in between):
Tobias Wolff (author of This Boy's Life and more): "There’s no question that the operations of memory have a great deal of imagination in them. Otherwise we’d all remember things exactly the same way. We’re bringing our peculiar sense of the past to bear; each of us is a filter. None of us has an objective view of the past. There are historical events that are verifiable, but the things that we like to get into as writers have to do with character and texture and relationship—these are not objective, measurable insights. You can see this in family members discussing events of twenty years ago—they always have different versions, sometimes comically so. For instance, I may be the leading character in all my memories, but I’m not the leading character in my friend’s memories, who may be offended that he wasn’t occupying a more central role in my account of events.
"There’s always that subjective slant to the act of remembering things. I don’t have a problem with that. But when you’re intentionally making things up, you have to acknowledge that, and call it fiction. My last book, for instance, is told in the first person, and draws to some extent on certain experiences of mine, but it’s a novel and it’s called a novel. Anyone who reads it as a memoir does so at his own peril. I made up a lot of what’s in there. This is an ancient and holy tradition in writing. You have to know the difference when you’re writing and you have to be honest about it."
Frank McCourt (author of Angela's Ashes and more): "Most of us have lives filled with interesting things. You don’t need to create fiction. Just tell your story, that’s all. Hemingway just told his story. It’s enough. Everybody’s story is enough. If I lived another hundred years, I could write a hundred books about my family, and they could write a hundred books."
Steve Almond (author of Candyfreak and Not That You Asked and more): "You’re allowed (required, actually) to be radically subjective in memoir. But you have to be radically subjective about experiences that objectively took place. Every narrative is shaped. You don’t just write every single thing that ever happened to yourself, or your characters. You choose the ones that push us into compelling danger. That said, you shouldn’t knowingly lie in a memoir. You should be aiming at the truth of an emotional experience, but not by contriving actual experiences. Embellishing for humorous effect, sure, fine. Condensing time, okay. Reconstructing dialogue. Yes, if need be. But don’t invent, unless you want to write fiction."
Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat,Pray,Love and more):
"You know, I’m surprised by how much un-truth people automatically assume is present in any memoir. I got a letter recently from a woman who’d read Eat, Pray, Love and she had a small favor to ask—she wanted me to write to her and confess all the parts of the book I had made up. There was nothing vindictive about her request, she said; she was simply wondering. She didn’t mind that I had made up so much of my memoir, she assured me; it’s just that she was curious to know which parts. She had some ideas. For instance, she was pretty sure I’d made up the bit at the end about falling in love with the Brazilian guy in Bali—that was obviously too good to be true and clearly I had invented it just to manufacture a happy ending. (Meanwhile, I had just married that actual Brazilian the week earlier, after a three-year courtship.) I don’t even know what to do with letters like this, or questions like this, which come up now all the time. Why do people assume that if a story has adventure, coincidence, amazing characters, snappy dialogue, or a happy ending that it all must have been invented, or at least mightily manipulated? I don’t get this.
"My friend Shea—an artist and traveler—thinks that this new suspicion of true stories speaks to an absence these days of public imagination, or a lack of real-world experience. He told me once, after having traveled around the world for a year and having come back with great stories, which few people believed, “I just say to these people—you go travel around the world for a year. You see what turns up.” My memoir is full of coincidence and crazy characters and episodes of almost unbelievable good fortune and happenstance because that’s what my journey was filled with. The difficult challenge for me, while writing this book, was not trying to figure out how to embellish the truth or invent “interesting” scenes, but how to decide what parts not to tell, because there was so much interesting stuff to choose from.
"I lived that year full-tilt, and I collected enough real material for a lifetime. The truth is wild and amazing enough. I don’t think it needs much embroidery. Stories need to be polished, as I learned growing up in a family of terrific storytellers whose tales got better and better over the years as they figured out how to bring out the best, shiniest, funniest parts of a true anecdote. But they didn’t invent those stories. They just cut out the boring parts and highlighted the wonderful parts and perfected their delivery. I learned from childhood that stories don’t need to be flat-out invented, not when life is generous already with true wonder, and not when you know how to tell it well."
Firoozeh Dumas (author of Funny in Farsi and more): "This is a sensitive topic for me. I am very angry with writers of non-fiction who lie. It casts a shadow of doubt on everyone’s work. A memoir is simply the author’s memory. It is understood that dialogue is not verbatim, but an honest recollection. Nothing should be invented. If a conversation did not happen, do not say it did. It’s okay to combine characters for the sake of story, as long the characters actually existed.
"You can play with the truth, but you can’t invent people and events that did not happen. In Funny in Farsi, I changed the name of two people, one because I shared a very embarrassing story about him, and the other because I knew she had passed away and I could not locate her family to get their permission, or rather, their blessing. (It was a sweet story, but I just wanted to be protective.) Changing their names did not affect the story one bit. The people existed, the events happened. One more detail about memoir writing: I might describe an event as boring but my brother might describe it as thrilling. We’re both telling the truth. That’s the beauty of a memoir. It’s all about one person’s perspective. In that sense, the “truth” can seem flexible, but we all know the difference between telling our truth and completely making things up."
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