Week 5: Nothing but the Truth (and a few creative liberties)

They say the human mind will be the last frontier. Not space, not the ocean, but our very own brains.

One of the many remarkable things about our minds is their memory. Not necessarily how exceptional it is, but rather how fallible it can be. Perhaps you’ve looked at a picture of yourself from many years ago, an event at which you could have sworn you had been wearing your favorite pink blouse, not that summer dress. Or perhaps you’ve reminisced with a friend about your 7^th birthday party, and he claimed there had been vanilla cake when you know very well it had been chocolate, only for your mother to walk in and tell you there was no cake because you had asked for sugar cookies that year instead.

Sound familiar? No? Well, case in point.

Such blips in our memory are often harmless— hilarious anecdotes we’ll tell our kids about one day. But when it comes to writing these potentially false memories down, and especially when publishing them as a memoir, we may run into some issues.

In her article “Nothing but the Truth?: On Lying and MemoirWriting” Maddie Crum writes, “There is, after all, a fluidity between who we were to other people, who we thought we were, who we think we were, and who we think we are now.”

Our thoughts and perspectives change gradually over time. This is not an overnight process, hence the “fluidity” that Crum speaks of. But because of this fluidity, we often look at the past through the biased lens of the present. This makes human memory fallible and malleable, which will always inevitably affect nonfiction writing.

However, I would argue that this is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, as Crum states, “The desired effect [of nonfiction] is to allow listeners, and readers, to feel how we felt, not to merely be aware of the literal circumstances lending to the feeling.”

Of course, completely making up things that never even happened in the first place would defeat the purpose of nonfiction entirely, but considering memoirs, and nonfiction in general, as an art form should, in my mind, allow for some creative liberties. Twisting the details of your story or slightly changing the chronology of events to a certain extent shouldn’t be cause for alarm as long as these alterations serve a stylistic or thematical purpose in the work.

My absolutely all-time favorite memoir (and book for that matter) is Educated by Tara Westover. In this memoir, Tara tells her story starting in her childhood when she grew up in the mountains of Idaho in an isolated Mormon community. She had several siblings, and her parents never let any of them see a doctor, even for severe injuries, or go to school because they distrusted the government. Tara and her family would also store canned peaches in their basement and always have a “head for the hills” bag ready to go in case the Second Coming of Christ should surprise them. Eventually, however, she manages to escape her sheltered home and abusive family and goes to college, where she struggles to adapt to a world she never knew. Later, she attends Cambridge and Harvard University and earns a doctorate degree. By the end of her story, she has decided to live estranged from her parents and some of her siblings.

There is some controversy around this book, specifically about the truthfulness of the narrative since Tara’s parents claim the story did not happen the way it was written. However, given the extreme isolation and distrust Tara describes in relation to her parents, it does not surprise me that they would make such a claim. Additionally, in the first line of the first chapter, Tara acknowledges the malleability and unreliability of memory discussed above: “My strongest memory is not a memory. It’s something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened.”

One of the biggest reasons why I love this book so much is because of what it teaches the reader about education. By reading this, I learned the value and privilege of an education and that education does not always need to be linked with school. School is merely a system through which education is provided but becoming educated can also manifest itself as a new perspective and the willingness to change old ways of thinking. The last line of the book really drives this concept home:

“You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.”

This memoir teaches its readers to separate school and education and what an education can encompass outside of the system it’s associated with, such as the development of a new selfhood.

I strongly believe that Educated works best and is most powerful in its complete novel form and therefore likely would not function well if transferred to a blog format. In order to split it into blog posts, it would likely have to be shortened and the scenes condensed, which I fear may take something away from the story.

As for how my reading experience would change if I were to learn that Tara blurred the lines between fact and fiction, I’m honestly not sure. I think much of the story’s power lies in its presentation as a memoir, but given the traumatic nature of Tara’s childhood, it wouldn’t necessarily shock me if some of the events were not entirely accurate. Again, given the fluidity of human memory, it seems unlikely that any memoir is 100% truthful. But like Crum says, the goal is to get the reader to feel what the author felt, not necessarily know exactly what happened to them.

And that is something Tara does exceptionally well.