Today on Fresh Air, a past teacher of mine, Vivian Gornick, defended herself against a recent report from book critic, Maureen Corrigan. Salon published a report of Gornick discussing her memoir Fierce Attachments with a group of writing students. In the discussion she disclosed how she conflated two characters into one and "stretched the truth a bit" in the book. Corrigan eviscerated Gornick, comparing her to plagiarists and, in Gornick's words, "psychopaths."
Corrigan in her rebuttal did make good points, but as a writer who studied with Gornick and other memoirists, I find this debate puzzling. Who expects a memoir to be 100% accurate? It's literature; of course you have to "compose" (as Gornick states) to make an effective work of art. It's not journalism, it's not biography. It's literature. It should give Vivian's career a boost, even though I'm sure she'd rather it never happened.
I found this quote on topic from another teacher of mine, Robert Olmstead, in an interview about his own memoir.
'"I tried to make fiction out of it, but there was a lot more true than not," he said. That mix of memories forms a "slippery slope" of what's true and what isn't. And he won't fess up to which is fiction.
"Oh, it's all true," he said later. "It's in the facts where the devil comes in."
Time in the book is not linear, the chronology of events is not exact, but in a way, everything he writes comes out of what is real.
"Memory is always more true to the present mind than to the past, always more true to itself than to anything else," he writes in the memoir. "This is a story from when I was a kid and worked on the farm for my grandfather and how I see now what I saw then."'
