Michael Steinberg

Blog # 26

The Role(s) of Memory and Imagination in Literary Memoir

My apologies for not posting this sooner. Holiday chaos.

Preface
In response to my last post (#25), “Tracking The Narrator’s Thoughts”, I received a thought-provoking comment from Stuart Rose, a reader. Paraphrased it reads

“… I puzzle over just how we can track our thinking on the page. It's a challenge to artfully insert our explicit thoughts into a narrative…. {but}there are only so many explicit, stand-alone statements we can make without losing the reader. Weaving our thinking into the fabric of concrete and narrative details seems to be vital. Much of the thinking has to be mingled with the story.”

Stuart’s comments eventually became a catalyst for my own thinking. Here’s an excerpt from my reply to him

“…. We’re reactive creatures, it’s true. And so, making our narrator’s thoughts and reactions more transparent (and seamless) is a big challenge… As memoirists we can only speculate. …about what our narrators might think and feel in a given moment or situation; which, in effect, means that crafting the story of a narrator's thinking is an act of imagination.”

Once again, this raises the tired, but still unresolved issue of what's “true” in memoir and what's been fabricated. The insistence that memoirists should stick to the facts and not invent, make things up, or otherwise embellish the narrative, is still something a lot of critics get all bent out of shape about. Those tactics, they claim, are the province of fiction and poetry.

Agree or not, clearly we memoirists need to think more conscientiously about the ways in which we use imagination (and memory) in our own narratives.


The Role(s) of Memory and Imagination in Literary Memoir
1
What distinguishes {literary writing}. …from journalism, is that inherent {in a literary text} is the possibility of a shared act of the imagination between its writer and its reader.
--Eudora Welty

Contrary to what we’ve been taught, imagination is not exclusively about making things up. That’s “invention.” And to my mind, there’s an important distinction to be made between the two. Fiction writer David Malouf makes that case when he says, “Imagination doesn’t simply mean making things up; it means being able to understand things from the inside—emotions, events, and experiences that you haven’t actually been through but that you will have experienced by the time you’ve got them onto the page.”

Malouf is describing the difference between telling or recreating a story the way it happened--if that’s even possible--and transforming that story into (for us nonfiction writers) a fully rendered, fully imagined, memoir. And that transformation is an important part of what writing a literary memoir is all about.

2
I won’t tell you the story the way it happened. I’ll tell it the way I remember it.
--Pam Houstton

In effect, Pam Houston is implying that memory is an unreliable narrator. Hard for any of us to disagree on that one. We also know that imagination alters, even rearranges, the way we remember things. Yet, while being unreliable, I believe that memory is not necessarily untruthful.

Let me explain.  Read More