Truth AND beauty.
08 July 2008
Last week I read what was, hands down, the best paragraph I've ever read about memoirs (as a genre). I wish I had enough brains to memorize it, so that I could rattle it off when people denigrate memoirs for not being "the truth." This is the paragraph:
"Once we hold memoirists to the standards of journalism and privilege agreed-upon truths to emotional interpretation, the whole genre falls apart--it loses its reason for being. I'm not at all speaking for best-selling memoirists who pass off wholly invented episodes as experience. That's an entirely different matter. But let's save our righteous indignation for the conscious manipulators of facts in our times. (Do you hear that, Oprah?) And we know exactly who they are."
How AWESOME is that? Okay, I'll admit, the fact that this paragraph stopped me in my tracks is nerdy. I give entirely too much thought to memoirs and engage in too much anger about uninformed readers who are shocked that they don't always contain "bible truth." (I have always maintained that any semi-rational person who has tried to remember, verbatim, conversations they had yesterday, would clearly realize that some things in memoirs have to be made up, but that's not really what makes them "true" or not.)
The paragraph was by a writer named Paul Lisicky, who has written his own novels and memoirs (Lawnboy and Beautiful Builder--the latter of which I tried and was unable to finish) and is in a book of essays called Truth in Nonfiction, edited by David Lazar. Most of the essays are a bit too intellectual for me, but the Lisicky essay and the Vivian Gornick one that follows it ("Truth in Personal Narrative") are well worth checking the book out for.
"Save our righteous indignation for the conscious manipulators of facts in our time..." Awesome. Just awesome.