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Memoirs allow speculation and imagination, not invention: author
Author Robin Hemley speaks at De La Salle University.
Readers should not approach a memoir as if they were sifting through a news article, according to an award-winning author of ten fiction and non-fiction books.
“We should not go into reading a memoir and expect it to be like a journalism piece. We just should not. We will be disappointed,” said Robin Hemley, who was also director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program from 2004 to 2013.
Hemley is currently writing a novel set in the Philippines. A previous book, “Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday” (Anvil Publishing, 2004) is being made into a feature film by the BBC. He is currently writer in residence at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and is also director of its writing program.
He also recently conducted back-to-back lectures hosted by the De La Salle University’s College of Liberal Arts' Department of Literature and the DLSU Library's American Corner Manila. The first lecture was called “Memoir or Fiction? The tough choices and responsibilities when writing from life” and the second was “Painful Howls From Places That Undoubtedly Exist: A brief history of the fake memoir, and a discussion of authenticity and artifice.”
Speculate, but not invent
In comparing memoir writing to journalism, Hemley said that there is a vital difference between the two.
“In a book memoir, you can speculate. You cannot do that in journalism: speculate a lot,” he said.
“On the other hand, it does not give the latitude for a memoir writer to just invent, invent, invent. However, we should allow some amount of fantasizing or imagination in a book memoir.”
Hemley has written two: “Do-Over!: In which a forty-eight-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom, and other embarrassments” (2009) and “Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness” (1998).
“If you read the two books side by side, you may think they were not written by the same person,” he acknowledged. But, he said, they are “two different books, two different [sides of] me. I have a serious side, I have a funny side.”
Hemley said that the memoirs were "fictionalized," but explained: “We all are fairly complex people. We put out different faces for people at different times. This is true for writing. Any time you commit anything to paper, you are making choices that essentially fictionalize. That is not a bad thing. That is inevitable.”
At one point in the lectures, he took to task the readers of memoirs: “I blame the literalness of a culture that diminishes the role of the imagination in literature and demands that our authors should be their stories. Of course, we’re going to be shafted time and again when we demand literalness of literature.”
However, Hemley said, readers should also assess the credibility of a memoir's author, and cast a critical eye over the book's accuracy and embellishment of details.
“But even the most sincere writer can deceive us…We cannot stop writers from fooling us, nor can we stop being fooled. We don’t live in an age of ‘truthiness’ or deception any more than or less any other age, the past gives up only some of its deceptions. The rest are glossed as conventional wisdom and accepted fact,” he added.
Fiction and non-fiction
Hemley said that readers “spend a lot of [their] time in real life, day-dreaming, engaged in the past and thinking, and speculating about the future.”
He also likened characters in many works of fiction to ordinary people. "People are full of contradictions. They say one thing, but do another."
The difference between fiction and non-fiction is not only the difference between truth and lies, Hemley said. “There is also the difference in form. With fiction, it is always character-driven. The revelation about the character is about musings or meditations.”
Memoirs are for everyone
Things have changed from the days when only the famous and the world's movers and shakers could write memoirs, Hemley said.
“Thirty years ago, most memoirs were written by people of some fame or unusual accomplishment, but in the early to mid-80s, memoirs such as ‘This Boy’s Life’ by Tobias Wolff and ‘Blue Highways’ by William Least Heat-Moon showed that anyone could write a memoir, that life itself was a kind of accomplishment,” he said. “And this self-evident fact invited everyone to a kind of literary potluck that has not finished, since you no longer had to be Anne Morrow Lindbergh or George Burns or Dwight Eisenhower to tell a story about your life, undisguised as fiction, that might captivate readers.” — BM, GMA News
“We should not go into reading a memoir and expect it to be like a journalism piece. We just should not. We will be disappointed,” said Robin Hemley, who was also director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program from 2004 to 2013.
Hemley is currently writing a novel set in the Philippines. A previous book, “Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday” (Anvil Publishing, 2004) is being made into a feature film by the BBC. He is currently writer in residence at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and is also director of its writing program.
He also recently conducted back-to-back lectures hosted by the De La Salle University’s College of Liberal Arts' Department of Literature and the DLSU Library's American Corner Manila. The first lecture was called “Memoir or Fiction? The tough choices and responsibilities when writing from life” and the second was “Painful Howls From Places That Undoubtedly Exist: A brief history of the fake memoir, and a discussion of authenticity and artifice.”
Speculate, but not invent
In comparing memoir writing to journalism, Hemley said that there is a vital difference between the two.
“In a book memoir, you can speculate. You cannot do that in journalism: speculate a lot,” he said.
“On the other hand, it does not give the latitude for a memoir writer to just invent, invent, invent. However, we should allow some amount of fantasizing or imagination in a book memoir.”
Hemley has written two: “Do-Over!: In which a forty-eight-year-old father of three returns to kindergarten, summer camp, the prom, and other embarrassments” (2009) and “Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness” (1998).
“If you read the two books side by side, you may think they were not written by the same person,” he acknowledged. But, he said, they are “two different books, two different [sides of] me. I have a serious side, I have a funny side.”
Hemley said that the memoirs were "fictionalized," but explained: “We all are fairly complex people. We put out different faces for people at different times. This is true for writing. Any time you commit anything to paper, you are making choices that essentially fictionalize. That is not a bad thing. That is inevitable.”
At one point in the lectures, he took to task the readers of memoirs: “I blame the literalness of a culture that diminishes the role of the imagination in literature and demands that our authors should be their stories. Of course, we’re going to be shafted time and again when we demand literalness of literature.”
However, Hemley said, readers should also assess the credibility of a memoir's author, and cast a critical eye over the book's accuracy and embellishment of details.
“But even the most sincere writer can deceive us…We cannot stop writers from fooling us, nor can we stop being fooled. We don’t live in an age of ‘truthiness’ or deception any more than or less any other age, the past gives up only some of its deceptions. The rest are glossed as conventional wisdom and accepted fact,” he added.
Fiction and non-fiction
Hemley said that readers “spend a lot of [their] time in real life, day-dreaming, engaged in the past and thinking, and speculating about the future.”
He also likened characters in many works of fiction to ordinary people. "People are full of contradictions. They say one thing, but do another."
The difference between fiction and non-fiction is not only the difference between truth and lies, Hemley said. “There is also the difference in form. With fiction, it is always character-driven. The revelation about the character is about musings or meditations.”
Memoirs are for everyone
Things have changed from the days when only the famous and the world's movers and shakers could write memoirs, Hemley said.
“Thirty years ago, most memoirs were written by people of some fame or unusual accomplishment, but in the early to mid-80s, memoirs such as ‘This Boy’s Life’ by Tobias Wolff and ‘Blue Highways’ by William Least Heat-Moon showed that anyone could write a memoir, that life itself was a kind of accomplishment,” he said. “And this self-evident fact invited everyone to a kind of literary potluck that has not finished, since you no longer had to be Anne Morrow Lindbergh or George Burns or Dwight Eisenhower to tell a story about your life, undisguised as fiction, that might captivate readers.” — BM, GMA News
