Unraveling Memories: Shaping Truth in Creative Nonfiction
How accurate does a historical account need to be, if a writer is presenting it as a narrative? For that matter, how accurate does a writer’s account of their own life need to be before they are criticized for exaggeration?
How we portray ourselves and others, is something memoirists grapple with.
We call it “Creative Nonfiction” when a writer presents truth in a creative format that can take the form of anything from a lyrical essay to a crossword puzzle. A selection of word artifacts can weave an interesting narrative inviting the reader to fill in the blanks, anything from a grouping of letters, the transcription of a phone call, or a photograph with a caption.
In fiction, the writer shapes the story to create pacing and tension. In nonfiction, the writer selects and amplifies truth to produce a compelling piece they hope others will want to read.
The nonfiction writer often relies on memory. Memory and research. The research often draws on the memories and writings of others.
How accurate are those memories? According to the work of late 19 thcentury German scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus’s research, graphed as a forgetting curve, much of what people experience each day is quickly forgotten. In the May 20 th2024 issue of The New Yorker, writer Jerome Groopman, discusses in a book review the recently released book Why We Remember by Charan Ranganath.
Ranganath is a neuropsychologist at U.C. Davis and in his book, he discusses memory and how we may be looking at memory the wrong way. Memory, he conjectures, more likely functions as an adaptive trait to keep humans alive. Selectively we remember some things and forget others. Perhaps the forgetting is as important as the remembering.
From a writer’s point of view, I find it fascinating to hear how people’s memories of the same event can be slightly different. What do those differences reveal about each person?
Folk tales and fairy tales clearly demonstrate how the same story can be adjusted to reflect the story teller’s preferences. In some versions of little Red Riding Hood, grandmother is locked in a closet in another she is swallowed by the wolf. In a family, one sister may remember beloved pet that was hit by a car and another may forget the pet because the memory is too painful.
Prior to my trip to Ireland last month, I started reading the book, The Irish Assassins; Conspiracy, Revenge and the Phoenix Park Murders that Stunned England by Julie Kavanagh, to gain some understanding of Irish history. The three hundred plus page nonfiction narrative reads like a novel, but dialogue and descriptions are all based on meticulous research. The book has sixty pages of end notes and footnotes.
But the sources themselves: diaries, letters, newspaper articles, trial transcriptions all have their bias-according to who wrote them. And Kavanagh reveals in many instances, the ulterior motives and prejudices some of the parties may have possessed in how they reacted to the events that took place.
If we acknowledge our memories are always shapeshifting, I think it can give us a certain amount of freedom to experiment. Playing with episodic memory, using a trigger such as music, smell or taste, can provide a means to travel back to a previous episode in your life and re-examine it.
WRITING PROMPT: A smell you love or a smell you hate. If you have the item around, use it as a trigger, if not try to remember it. What comes to mind. A person you were fond of? A party you attended?
On a recent walk through a New England woods I encountered lilies of the valley. Immediately I remembered my attempts at establishing a bed of them around a pear tree and how many of them were smashed when an elderly neighbor crashed into the small tree. Then I remembered my grandmother who wore Muguet perfume, the scent of lilies of the valley, the pink polish on her nails and her wispy white hair set in curls.
A piece of music might just return you to the year of your high school graduation or the day you celebrated a job promotion. Experiment writing different scenes.
Once you’ve captured a memory, think about it again from the perspective of someone else who may have been “in the room.” Would they have seen things differently? What kinds of short essays can you develop from this prompt? Challenge yourself to learn something new about yourself, by re-visiting a episode from your past. Write it down. Maybe you’ll pen something you’d like to share and publish, or maybe not. The writing is first and foremost for you.
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Originally published at http://nadjamaril.com on May 28, 2024.
