How True Does Memoir Have to Be?

How true does memoir have to be? It’s a fine question and one I get a lot as a memoir coach and writing teacher. And it’s one I’ve asked myself many times, of course, particularly when wrestling with differing versions of my own tale. How true does memoir have to be? And how true can memoir be, after all, when all of memory is such a mystery and subjectivity is such a force?

How true does memoir need to be? When asked that question, I always answer with a story about my own family. It goes like this.

I tell stories. That would be my sister’s version of our tale, the suggestion being that she writes the truth. We’re both writers, after all, but for me, even that distinction between stories and the truth is a story. What to do when you have different versions of a family tale? Well, years ago, and on the couch of a good psychiatrist, a question arose about my childhood that made me realize I was in the right hands, professionally speaking.

The doctor was not one of those who wanted me to relive everything, instead wanting me to move on with some alacrity. I liked that, especially when he summed up his outlook for his clients this way: What he apparently said was, “You must get a version of your childhood you can live with and live with it.”

But I thought he said something else altogether, and said to him, “An aversion to my childhood. Nice. Somebody pays you for this advice? My sister has an aversion to our childhood. I don’t need one too.”

“A version,” he repeated, laughing.

Got Differing Versions of the Same Family Tale? Who Doesn’t?

My sister and I live by different rules; we give different gifts, and even have different random facts we share. Two sides of the same coin, or potato/Po-tah-toe, and all that, we are not bookends. We are sisters: Different because we grew up in the same household, not in spite of that fact. Do we have different versions of a family tale? Every single time.

Does this make a memoir impossible? Does the sheer knowledge that someone else can readily disagree with your version diminish your tale, or make it less true?

Not a bit—and quite the opposite. None of us grows up utterly without the influence of others. The key in successfully writing about your life is to stay in the voice of how it occurred to you and how it looks from your point of view, staking out the territory of how you remember it and making no claims to this being the only possible or true version.

What to do when you have different versions of a family tale? What to say when everyone tells you that it didn’t happen that way? Now,  you can agree. It didn’t happen that way to them.

But can there be two sides to the same story? Of course. Here’s my version of a totemic moment in my family’s story, after which you will find my sister’s quite different view.

My Version

A young woman is breezing through the kitchen on the way to the refrigerator. Wearing tennis shorts, a T-shirt, her long red hair in a ponytail, she’s bare-foot, 22 years old, and the phone rings. I can do this with this scene—make it third-person—the way we can at any of those moments just before life takes a tilt; that old where were you when thing.

And just like anyone else, I can make two lists: On one side, what I knew before the tilt and, on the other side, what spills into those things I thought were true and changes them forever. At this age, the sum total of what I knew about my mother could be pretty much tallied up on two hands: She had been my best friend, my sailing crew, my tennis partner; she was unhappily married to my father, who I also adored. That my sister hated her was something I had known when Margaret moved out the first chance she got and had never looked back.

I had a lot to learn.

And the phone rings.

A friend of my mother’s simply said, “You should know that,” and then she said a name I knew well, “has just been killed. Call your mother.”

A dutiful young woman, I called my mother at work and had to wait a long time while they found her, got her off the playground at the preschool where she taught, and nowhere in that time did I think about what I was doing, or that it was anything more than what it appeared: that this young man, brother of my oldest friend, middle son of our family’s closest couple-friends, had just been killed. I stood there in my bare feet with not very much on my mind.

My mother came to the phone and I told her the news.

“How long have you known?” was her reply.

“About two minutes,” I said, thinking her question odd.

“No.” She said. “How long have you known.”

“Oh,” I said, as the facts of twenty-two years recombined into a new narrative.

“About thirty seconds,” I said as I hung up and dialed Margaret.

“I think Mommy’s having an affair.”

“How long have you known?” The question of the day.

“How long have you known?” I asked my sister.

“Since I was nine,” said Margaret.

That was my side of the story. Now, it’s my sister’s turn. It’s what I call the “She Said, She Said” of all sisters. If you have a sister, you know. If not, believe me when I tell you that no two sisters see any family event the same way. We have different versions of the same story. That happens in memoir. Why? Well, it’s not that we’re different in spite of being raised in the same household. We’re different because we were raised in the same household. What does that look like? Read on.

Her Version

ICE CREAM

By Margaret Roach 

I just wanted ice cream, a Good Humor bar to be precise, either Toasted Almond with its crunchy, pebbled exterior, or perhaps a smooth, slippery Creamsicle to gradually whittle down with the warmth of my tongue:  licking, licking, trying to stay one lick ahead of meltdown. 

Buying ice cream from the hulking white cube of a truck was one ritual of long summer days in my 1960s suburbia, as much as playing outside until supper, or the volatile smell of charcoal-lighter fluid splashing in an arc onto the nightly pyramid of black briquettes.  The adults had their happy hour; we had our Good Humor. 

Where Mommy was at this moment on this particular evening I do not recall, but no matter. Her long red clutch purse was on the Victorian chaise in the master bedroom, the room she shared with my father. It was furnished with the suite of his-and-hers dressers and twin beds pushed together into one faux expanse, but with that tricky, insistent abyss down the middle where they joined, the one you could fall into.  Sometimes we rough-housed in there, my younger sister and I, two giggling, squealing girls in pigtails, and down the crack between Mommy’s side of things and Daddy’s, one or the other of us would go, disappearing. 

But this early summer evening I am on my own in the ballroom-sized space with its crystal chandelier and matching sconces, the floor-length draperies and upholstery all in pale green raw silk.  The way I remember it, I am nine, and I want ice cream, and I can hear the bells of the ice-cream truck growing louder so there is no time to find anyone grown up and ask for the money I need. 

I am on what to a nine-year-old is a mission: seeking the shortest route to getting my immediate needs met. Give me ice cream now. 

I race upstairs, two steps at a time, to that familiar room where the people whose job it is to protect me start and end their day under matching nubby, dark green bedspreads.  I go and reach my small hand into that big red wallet to find the dollar, as I have in my nine-year-old innocence so many times before. Give me ice cream now. 

The bells ring again, and I dig deeper into the clutch – Why is there no single?-and then my hungry rummaging goes really wrong. 

I do not find the currency to end my craving, but instead an end to untroubled summer evenings where scoring a dollar bill in Mommy’s wallet was my most urgent desire. In my hand is a small black and white photo of the man who is perhaps my father’s closest friend, the father of my sister’s closest friend, the man with whose wife and family we go to dinner routinely and even travel with sometimes. 

I don’t, and I do, understand. 

What follows is not the treat I seek, but (to state the obvious, and say it tritely) an end of innocence.  I have not even had a boyfriend yet; I don’t wear (or need) a bra – and won’t for years to come. I am a child, with a girl’s white cotton undershirt and Carter’s Spanky Pants beneath the pedal pushers and striped top Mommy bought me; my white mercerized cotton socks are folded over carefully at the ankles. I am a child, but at this instant I am a child who is forced to become the Confronter, a place in the family achieved when hand touched photo. Tag: You’re it. No longer someone searching for a dollar, I began my life’s search for an honest answer, no matter how ugly. And I begin a lifetime habit of asking questions, endless questions, the first of them spoken silently to myself there in that bedroom. 

“Why is there a picture of Jack in Mommy’s wallet?”I was not silent for long. 

The answers – from Mommy, from Daddy, and even from Marion – were always the same, no matter how I phrased my question: Be quiet, they’d say, in one form or another. Don’t talk that way. Be quiet. 

How to Resolve Differing Versions of the Same Story?

Does Margaret’s version of the same family experience temper mine? No. Does hers differ wildly from my version? Yes. She found out about our mother’s affair when she was nine, after all. Does this make for a very different narrative sister-to-sister? Oh baby, does it ever. Is one of us wrong? Ah, no.

Should a different version of the same family moment leave you blocked? Never.

How true does memoir have to be?

Doubtless you have heard that expression everyone uses – to write what you know. This is where it comes into play. Write what you know and then practice what you’ll say to your brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, parents and whomever. But live by this dictum: When writing memoir, write your truth.

Interested in learning more? Come take an online memoir class with me. For instance, join me for my entry-level, 90-minute Memoirama class and get your memoir writing kick-started. I teach two sections each month. Or take my class in How To Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Public Radio Essays and Digital Commentary. Come along to any of my many online classes. Your life’s best work awaits you.

Photo credit: Jeremy Brooks on flickr