Imagine you are a writer, and at the very beginning of starting a creative nonfiction story. You’re sitting at a desk. Only a desk-lamp illuminates the desktop, and you are surrounded by darkness. All that matters is your clear mind, the pad of lined notebook paper on the desk and the #2 pencil sitting beside it. Before any graphite touches the paper, you think to yourself, “Why am I going to write this? “What is the main theme of the story?” Once writers find those answers, it is in their best interest to tell the story with the best accuracy they can, while most importantly making the story as intriguing as possible. Many times in creative nonfiction, writers will alter the truth, in order to make the story flow better and keep the reader engaged, which will help better project the main theme. When writers do this, are they straying from the truthful nature of nonfiction? Or are the white lies and alterations of the truth only included to help the author establish and clearly project their main theme? Continue reading →

John D’Agata’s book About  A Mountain is a wide-ranging book that delves into the culture of Las Vegas during the time he helps his mother move there. At the same time, tons of controversy had been building up around Yucca Mountain potentially being used as a nuclear waste storage site. D’Agata weaves in vast amounts of research with a meandering narrative, covering topics such as the experiences of him and his mother during her move, the life of a boy who committed suicide in Las Vegas, and a school field trip to Yucca Mountain. But, in the end, D’Agata includes in his notes that he had “conflated time in this way for dramatic effect only” and “also changed subjects’ names or combined a number of subjects into a single ‘composite’ character.”

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At the very end of John D’Agata’s About a Mountain, he reveals a small fact about the story: that some of the things within the story that he passed off as being completely accurate were purposefully altered, whether for dramatic effect, or to protect the identities of those he speaks about. In other words, the non-fiction story is not entirely non-fictional.

Who cares?

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To be honest, after reading Lauren Slater’s Lying, I don’t think there will be another piece of self-called creative nonfiction work that I will consider fiction just because the author adjusts the way he/she presents his/her information to convey a truth they believe in. I mean, if Slater got away with what she did and still have Lying be considered a memoir, then why can’t D’Agata’s work be considered nonfiction? Moreover, unlike Slater, D’Agata points out most, if not all, pieces of reality that he adjusted––that in itself is nonfiction, isn’t it? If Slater got away with leaving the line between metaphors and reality blurry, then how is it fair that we call D’Agata’s piece of work fiction when he reveals what we call “factual truth” after telling us his story?

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The elasticity of storytelling, the ambiguity inherent to the reader-writer relationship, the lies that tell the truth: these are but a few of the many phenomena that underscore the chaos and depth of creative nonfiction. As a result, when we pursue literary order—a complex nonfictional typology in this case, if you will—we meet a certain arbitrariness in our classification of what may or may not preclude texts from the genre of nonfiction to begin with. Continue reading →

At the closing section of About a Mountain we are informed by D’Agata himself that some of the details of the narrative were compressed “for dramatic effect only.” This can seem jarring to readers who have placed their utmost trust in the narrative. We knew from the start that Slater’s metaphorical memoir was blurring the lines between fact and fiction, but D’Agata’s confession comes as a surprise after we have already made the journey through his recounted experience. So the question is, Is it still nonfiction or has it become something else entirely? Continue reading →

Have you ever wondered who it is that decides what genre to call a certain piece of writing? Is it the author? Is it a group of snobby intellectuals sitting around a table that “know best”? Or is it the audience that it caters to? And further, what sort of criteria could even be used to define each and every work into a specific genre? Lauren Slater’s “memoir,” Lying, is a perfect example of this.

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Even before the smells and sights and, later, the terrible slamming seizures, even before all this, my mother thought I was doomed, which, in her scheme of things, was much better than being mediocre. (Slater 10)

Lauren Slaters question mark shaped memoir, Lying, is anything but untruthful. Instead of traditional/physical truths, however, we the readers are given emotional truths. These truths come in many forms and play off of the themes of the book (Mental illness, coming of age, the parent-child relationship, and sexuality to name a few).

It seems as though Slater could fill a library with literature on the subject of mental illness. First off, Lauren was definitely a victim of Münchausen syndrome by proxy and writes about it heavily in her memoir. Its not a traditional MSbP, her mother doesn’t seem to be causing her epilepsy directly (how could she), but Slater knows her mother wants her to be an epileptic. She references these frail memories with moments like, “I woke up from a long seizure on the floor. Every muscle ached. There was blood in my mouth. I opened my eyes and saw her standing above me, staring at me, probably, for a long long time…When a seizure rolled through me, it didn’t feel like mine; it felt like hers…This, the gift I gave you.” and on the previous page, “She seemed to almost like the illness”. These moments tell us that Slater may not have ever feigned epilepsy but for her mothers thirst for attention and novelty.

All in all, it is important to remember that a memoir doesn’t have to be 100% historically accurate. The word memoir comes from the French “mémoire” meaning memory. And as we learned from Sarah Koenigs podcast Serial, memories are not always as reliable as we want them to be. The point is, Lying is an account of Slaters young life as she sees it while looking back which allows it to be classified as nonfiction. Slater uses her Münchausen spawned epilepsy as a literary device to draw attention to the matrix of truth in memoir. Memoir shaped, if it could be, like a question mark.

Memory is complex.  Just like there are many different sub-genres of nonfiction, there are also many different types of memory.  We make an association between memory and fact.  We often expect that when we ask a person to recall a situation they are giving us an accurate account of what happened.  If their story does not match up with what we can prove to be factual, we deem them a liar and thus forth tend to discredit most of everything they say.

But consider the fact that there are many different types of memory.  Specifically, there is a very relevant difference between episodic memory and semantic memory that we must consider when discussing the genre and truth behind Lauren Slater’s memoir, Lying.

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