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.