Novels, Memoirs -- And the Territory In Between

Some years back, a friend of mine complained that publishers didn’t want to publish her memoir.  They wanted her to rearrange some of the actions, and invent dialogue to make the scenes more exciting.  “But that isn’t the way things actually happened,” she told the publishers.  Eventually she started her own publishing business to facilitate publishing her book in the form she wanted.

More recently, another friend of mine was telling me how she had written a novel based on her own life and a publisher had told her that the story of the novel “obviously had actually happened,” so she should consider writing a memoir instead.

Now, I don’t think it’s that simple; not as simple as “did this story actually happen or not?”

In my mind, novels and memoirs have different feels.

People say nowadays that you should write memoirs as if they were novels; this makes them more “readable.”  Using fiction techniques in memoirs blurs the truth of the memoir though—and we’ve certainly had several spectacular cases over the past few years where it turned out that not only the writing but the actual facts of the story got embellished along the way.  Indeed, certain aspects of the stories turned out to be complete fiction.

Conversely, think of the novels, particularly first-person novels, that might, with a little encouragement, be mistaken as true-life accounts.  How do we know that books like Huckleberry Finn, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Moby Dick, David Copperfield, and The Catcher in the Rye aren’t true life accounts?   We might know that Twain wasn’t Finn, that Salinger wasn’t Caulfield.  We do know that Dickens incorporated his own childhood experiences into several of his novels.  We may know that Melville didn’t live through an experience like Ishmael’s.  But do we know about Joyce’s experiences enough to know how much of himself is in Stephen Daedalus?

Indeed, the 20^th century has given us many novels that are autobiographical or semi-autobiographical.  For starts, we have the novels of Jack Kerouac (notice I called them novels), all based on his own life.  Then the novels of Christopher Isherwood (built around his experiences, even when the plots are not strictly autobiographical).  Then a whole series of novels by Edmund White (chronicling his youth and adolescence and young adulthood and adulthood), Andrew Holleran’s Grief , and Felice Picano’s Men Who Loved Me (subtitled, interestingly enough, A Memoir in the Form of a Novel).  It has been argued that one of the great contributions of GLBT writers to American literature is this genre of autobiographical- or semi-autobiographical novel.

Considering that Picano calls his book a “memoir in the form of a novel,” do we need to differentiate any longer between novel and memoir?  I’d say that we usually do, for two reasons:  First we need to know whether or not to take the substance of the work literally.  Second, I at least still think of novels and memoir/non-fiction in different ways.  More about that to come.

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (2 of 2)

But—I lose my way in this section.  In the first part of the book, I could barely keep straight the film director, his household, and the expatriate Americans Phil hung around with in Italy.  In the last part, I’m completely lost.  Boyfriends, potential boyfriends, work associates—all these people weaving in and out of focus during parties and other social engagements…I can’t track them all.  Maybe I could, with another reading.  I’ve read this book twice now, and I’ve enjoyed it twice; but something bothers me about it; I can’t quite put my finger on it.

It seems I lose the forest for the trees.  I remember individual trees from the first reading.  I remember, for example, some of the more spectacular events from Phil’s magazine job.  I remember some of Phil’s more spectacular romantic episodes.  Last night, soaking in a hot tub and expecting to read five or ten pages before going to bed, I sailed right on through to the ending, though it was after midnight.  I remembered reading the book the first time—and being confused then; not at the actual ending, but at the events leading up to it, a series of romantic disappointments and blunders.

The book itself ends on a memorable note.  First, like Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty, this story ends with a more or less first-hand account of the Stonewall Riots (“Insurrection?”)  in 1969—the birth of the modern American Gay Rights Movement.  Phil is there, walking through Greenwich Village with a friend—but high on LSD and both of them feeling that they must be hallucinating the police and the riot vans.  The next morning, they realize it was no hallucination.  And out they go, to participate in history.

But in a coda to the main narrative, the book jumps forward over a decade to the disappearance of a man once interested in Phil, the death of another friend due to AIDS—and the general bitter melancholy of those times.  What else has happened to Phil over this decade?  We don’t know.

I understand that Men Who Loved Me is actually the middle book of a trilogy.  By chance it is the book available at my local library.  It would be interesting to read the entire set and see how it compares to Edmund White’s autobiographical novels.  Both Picano and White were members of the Violet Quill gay writing group of the early 1980s.  They’re both well-educated and cultured; they’re about the same age and both grew up in the conservative times when it wasn’t safe to be open about being gay; when you could be imprisoned or committed for it, in fact.

Whatever we think of their writing style or the characters they describe, we still owe them.  They had the courage and persistence to figure out how to write positively about being gay when there were precious few models for that sort of thing.  They forged the path out of necessity.

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (1 of 2)

This is the large concluding section of Felice Picano’s “Memoir in the Form of a Novel,” Men Who Loved Me.  It describes the life of the narrator “Phil” in the New York of the 1960s, when gays were building their own community in Greenwich Village but weren’t necessarily aware of what they were doing.  In the first large section of the book (“The Most Golden Bulgari”), the narrator described his decision to go to Italy and “become homosexual,” his affair with a Yugoslavian film director in Rome, and his abrupt return to the United States.  A brief interlude links these two main sections of the book.

Returning now to New York, Phil manages to find, within just a few days, both a new job and a new boyfriend, both quite substantial.  The boyfriend lasts for something beyond eight months; the job makes Phil into a highly paid and respected magazine editor.

I continually wonder, reading this section, to what extent Picano is slumming, to what extent he has been pampered.  He’s gotten a good college education, he somehow (though he’s been working as a social worker) got himself off to Italy, he immediately lands a good job almost immediately upon returning to the States.  From whence comes this stunning luck?

At the same time, like the Beat writers, he seems to spend a surprising amount of time socializing and partying.  He takes a fair quantity of drugs (to be fair, I wouldn’t call it “excessive;” if he does it often, and gets considerably “buzzed,” he almost never suffers physically from it; and it those days hallucinogens like LSD were still legal).  And—is he gay?  As before, he begs the question with remarks like “since I seemed destined to become gay”…

In addition to his playwright boyfriend, he assembles a large number of gay Greenwich Village friends.  It’s difficult to tell exactly how “swishy” these acquaintances were; they were not, it appears, queens in anything but behavior.  They don’t seem to have gone in for cross-dressing; they simply went in, some of them, for rather hefty camp.  In these days “before Stonewall,” one definitely watched one’s step amongst the public at large; but these folks were definitely at ease with one another.  The Bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village is well-described; we’re treated to not one but two “lease-break parties” (parties featuring behavior guaranteed to get you thrown out of the apartment you desperately wanted to leave but couldn’t because of the lease provisions).

“Find the Significant!”

When South Bay Writers was planning its last writing conference (which was put off because the economy wouldn’t support it, back in 2010) we thought we would build the conference around the theme “Why Do You Write?”  Not a bad idea—and I’ve been asking myself ever since, “Why do you write?”  I suppose different writers would give different answers to that question.

  

Some people might write to share ideas and experiences.  We’ve had some peak experience; or we’ve had an idea that seems to be important and possibly even original.  No one else seems to have noticed it, so we’d like to spread it around.

Or something has happened to us, and we think a friend or a relative might be interested in it.  Or we think it’s something important that other people ought to know.  We want to tell them; we try to explain.

Maybe we hope to improve the world—society, the nation—again, we try to explain.

Or, more mundanely, we want to become rich, we want to become famous.  We think we can cook up something entertaining, something enjoyable—and lure people into paying to enjoy it.  We’re hoping to make money.

We may write to give ourselves excitement; or we may chase adventure in hopes of writing about it and capturing the excitement for people who, for whatever reason, prefer to remain at home reading rather than first-hand-experiencing.

Maybe our writing is therapeutic, cathartic.  Somehow, it helps us get something unhealthy out of our system.  Perhaps after we’re done, we’ll arrive at a sense of feeling healed and whole; and never feel the need to write again.

Maybe we want to leave our family and friends with something to remember us by, after we’re gone; a consolation, after our death.

Maybe we simply want to understand ourselves better, or life better, or people better.

So many possibilities!  Lately I look at possible projects and wonder:  Which one do I choose? 

In spite of propensity to fictionalize, I dwell on past and possible future experiences:  For example, the holidays coming up.  I think of how I will interact with friends and family during the coming holiday season.  I think of places I’ve lived or visited; my experiences there; how to describes these things to other people I know.  I think of movies or books or music that mean something to me, and wonder whether it is possible to convey the significance these things hold for me.  I think of traumas I’ve suffered, and I think “What is significant?  Find the Significant—in the Past, in Art, wherever.  Find the Significant and convey it.  Do it—somehow! Do it!”