The Scandalous Truth about Memoir

Josh Landy
What can memoir do that other genres can’t?

Ray Briggs
Is it even possible to tell the whole truth about your life?

Josh Landy
And when is it okay to reveal other people’s secrets?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs, we’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area…

Josh Landy
…continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative, which is sponsoring today’s episode.

Ray Briggs
And today, we’ll be thinking about the scandalous truth about memoir.

Josh Landy
You know, Ray, I love reading memoirs, but I could never write one.

Ray Briggs
Come on, Josh. Don’t you want everybody to know the truth about your assorted life?

Josh Landy
If only my life were that interesting. I feel like my memoir will probably be called, “Not Particularly Shocking: The Josh Landy Story.” I mean, given how dull and uneventful my life has been, I feel like I’d be forced to make half of it up.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, what’s the problem with that? I mean, everybody embellishes a little bit when they tell stories, especially when they’re talking about their own lives.

Josh Landy
You can’t just embellish in your memoir. I mean, either you’re there to tell people what actually happened or you’re inventing things, in which case, you know, just write a novel.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, come on. It’s fine to fudge a few details as long as you get at the essential truth of your life.

Josh Landy
But details just can’t be fudged. I mean, think about Herman Rosenblat’s memoir, right? He claimed he met his future wife when he was a child at Buchenwald, right, a prisoner at a concentration camp. He claimed she was feeding him apples through the fence. That turned out to be complete hogwash, right? You can’t lie about stuff like that. It turns out he met her as an adult on a blind date.

Ray Briggs
Aw come on, I’m not saying it’s okay to just like make stuff up wholesale. But if you don’t remember like the exact words of a conversation, it’s fine to just fill them in the best you can, as long as it just captures what happened.

Josh Landy
Well, you can try but you’re never going to be able to remember things accurately enough, plus the very act of trying to turn a memory into a story, that’s going to distort it. It’s like Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, “Nausea.” There’s no such thing as true stories. Events take place one way, and we tell them another.

Ray Briggs
Hey, wait a minute, one minute you’re complaining that somebody is lying in their memoir, now you’re saying there’s no difference between truth and lies?

Josh Landy
Okay, Ray. I mean, not all stories are lies, but memoirs are especially likely to be dodgy. We just don’t know ourselves very well. And it’s incredibly tempting to paint ourselves as great heroes, especially when we’re writing about our own lives.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, okay, it’s tempting, but a good memoirist is gonna resist that temptation. You know, they’re gonna read their old diaries, or check public records and correspondence, or talk to their friends and family.

Josh Landy
Oh friends and family, that’s the biggest reason not to write a memoir. I mean, I don’t have assorted secrets of my own, I hope, but, you know, I’m going to be tempted to reveal someone else’s if I ever write a memoir, and then they’d all hate me even more than they already do.

Ray Briggs
Yeah but Josh, other people’s stories can be part of your story. Like, if you’re in a relationship, the story doesn’t just belong to the other person, it belongs to both of you. So sure, like don’t gossip unnecessarily, but I don’t think you owe it to people never to talk about anything they did.

Josh Landy
Okay, but who gets to decide, you know, what’s just nasty gossip versus what’s a necessary part of your story?

Ray Briggs
Well, just think about what a reasonable person would think if they read your book. Would they pick it up and say, well, that detail really helped me understand the story? Or would they just think, oh, he’s just being salacious and out to sell more books?

Josh Landy
I don’t know. I just don’t care what some abstract, reasonable person would think. I mean, whether or not it’s reasonable, if it’s going to upset my friends and family, I think it’s wrong.

Ray Briggs
No, I think sometimes morality actually requires you to reveal the stuff that people are hiding. Like, what if somebody’s secretly embezzling money? Or what if they’re abusing their partner or children?

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s actually a good point. That does sound like a very real reason for revealing some secrets. The thing I’m still not sure about though, Ray, is whether it’s even possible for a memoirs to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Ray Briggs
Well, I bet our guest will have more to say about that. It’s Helena de Bres, author of “Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir.”

Josh Landy
I can’t wait to talk with her. But first, why are today’s audiences so interested in true stories? Since 2013, nonfiction has actually been outselling fiction.

Ray Briggs
So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Shereen Adel, to look at how recent trends have changed the way we think about truth and memoir. She files this report.

Shereen Adel
Nonfiction was already on the rise when James Frey’s memoir came out in 2003. You may I remember it. It was called “A Million Little Pieces,” and it exploded in popularity when Oprah added it to her book club. It blew up even more when just a few months later, a report came out that showed huge sections of the book were made up.

Oprah Winfrey
I don’t know what is true, and I don’t know what is it. So first of all I wanted to start with the smoking gun report, titled “The Man Who Conned Oprah.”

Shereen Adel
The events that the report looked at were easy to disprove. Frey said he was in jail for months, for example, and it turned out to be just a few hours. The investigation looked at police reports and court records, documents that showed the facts. The publisher clearly hadn’t done much due diligence when it came to fact checking. But what happens when someone is just misremembering, recalling things that happened a long time ago? What if the truth isn’t so easy to prove? In 2010, when author Tom McAllister published his memoir, “Bury Me in My Jersey,” he had to ask himself those questions.

Tom McAllister
A big part of that memoir revolves around my father’s death. He died when I was 21 in 2003, so a lot of scenes were reconstructed memories of stuff I did with my dad in the 90s, basically, including having to figure out, did he actually say this? Do I remember this correctly? Did we actually go to this game together that I thought we went [to] together?

Shereen Adel
In the years following the Frey scandal, things have changed a bit. McAllister had to work with his publishers lawyers to fact-check his work, though they weren’t concerned about every single detail.

Tom McAllister
I mean, their main charge is to make sure Random House doesn’t get sued. And so it seemed like they were worried especially about libel, like I had an uncle who was described in the draft that they had as a drunk and a loser, and we had to cut “drunk” because I couldn’t document that he- I felt that drunk is a subjective term, but it turns out from the lawyer’s perspective, it was not at all.

Shereen Adel
McAllister is one of three memoirists I talked to who shared their takes on what makes memoir nonfiction.

Kathleen Rooney
I think most savvy readers understand that, you know, there’s this sort of parenthetical after, you know, the statement when a memoir says, this is the truth, parentheses, as it felt to me, close parentheses.

Shereen Adel
Author Kathleen Rooney says she thinks what James Frey did was unethical, blatant lying. But she also likes that memoir leaves room for subjectivity.

Kathleen Rooney
Sometimes, the pretense of objectivity can be pretty damaging, and so I like that the memoir just doesn’t pretend that.

Shereen Adel
Rooney’s memoir, “Live Nude Girl,” blends her experience as an art model with art history.

Kathleen Rooney
Memoir kind of offers this opportunity to think about the difference between big, institutional, collective truth in harmony or in tandem with small, individual subjective truth.

Shereen Adel
For her, memoir is an opportunity to tell a nonfiction story using the techniques of fiction. You can create scenes and imagery; you might even have dialogue.

Kathleen Rooney
And of course, you know, dialogue is a great example of what I’m getting at where, you know, when I was art modeling, I didn’t literally sit there for 10 years, like with a recorder, making sure that I got everything that every artist or student said, but I do- I have dialogue in there. And it is, you know, reported dialogue, recalled dialogue, so I did my best in a good faith way.

Shereen Adel
Author Meredith Clark did record hers in real time as letters to a baby she thought she was going to have. Ultimately, her pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage.

Meredith Clark
I don’t really think that I had a choice in this case.

Shereen Adel
One of her favorite things about memoir is that it has so much flexibility.

Meredith Clark
I think, ultimately, that’s why the material found itself in that garment. It was that memoir just has so much generosity and capacity.

Shereen Adel
The title of Clark’s book, “Lyrebird,” is a metaphor for her memoir. It’s the name of an Australian bird whose mating call is an imitation of whatever it hears in its environment.

Meredith Clark
There are these lyrebirds that live in a forest that play this flute song that somebody used to play back in the Australian forest in the 1940s. Or there are lyrebirds birds in the zoo that will mimic the sound of a zoo enclosure being built, like the hammer on the roof, and it’s just this incredible gift.

Shereen Adel
The lyrebird, she says, is the ultimate memoirist. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Shereen Adel.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Shereen. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about memoir.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Helena de Bres. She is Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College and author of “Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir.” Helena, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Helena de Bres
Hi, thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
So Helena, I gather you’re writing a memoir yourself. What prompted you to go that route?

Helena de Bres
Well, I was inspired to do it by one particular book, actually: Elif Batuman’s “The Possessed,” which is partly set at Stanford, where you two are actually. And it’s a collection of personal essays on her experience of being a grad student in CompLit. And I read it and I just paused and thought, what, you’re allowed to do this, and you can write about your own life, you can be hilarious, you can talk about theory and criticism, weave that in, big human questions, it just blew my mind. I was not a reader of creative nonfiction till then. I wanted to do the same thing, broadly, but with grad school and analytic philosophy, which is maybe harder to make fun, but you know, I tried. I actually went to grad school with Ray. You’re not in it, Ray. I wrote this memoir about my troubled journey to becoming a philosophy professor, mixed in with my tragicomic romantic life, and a lot of theory about what philosophy is, and what it does to you. So it’s about how to balance the head and the heart in a meaningful human life, I would say.

Ray Briggs
So it sounds like there might be something distinctively valuable about writing a memoir or reading a memoir that can’t be gotten from other genres like analytic philosophy. Do you think that’s true? Do you think memoir can do something that other genres can’t?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, I mean, one thing I like to emphasize is that memoir is a literary genre, you know, it’s not just some kind of documentary or therapeutic scholarly exercise. It’s an art form. So it does share lots of value with other forms of literature. It’s beautifully written, it can be intellectually stimulating, you’re resonant emotionally, but I do think it has some virtues on top of those things for readers and writers.

Ray Briggs
What are those?

Helena de Bres
Well, for readers, there’s the fact that as compared to other art forms, you know, you’re directly engaging with the lived experience of another actual human, at least ideally. So you have a much less filtered connection with the writer or the artist than you do in fiction. Maybe I’m just like a nosy and gossipy person, but I really love that feeling. There’s this other live human who’s whispering straight into my ear. So part of it’s just that it’s a really intimate connection with another human.

Josh Landy
And there’s also the fact right, I mean, it’s because many memoirs, hopefully not yours, right, I hope yours doesn’t involve too much suffering on your part, but because lots of memoirs are about, for example, surviving a serious illness or Holocaust memoirs, other memoirs of survival and trauma. And those, I take it, offer us something like bearing witness, right, to oppression, and in some cases, they can offer us a sense of sort of fellow feeling, companionship, solidarity in one’s suffering, maybe bereavement, something like that. What are your views about all of those things as values, virtues of the memoir form?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, I think all of those are really important. I think there’s so many good reasons to write a memoir, but those are central to me. So there is the sense of connecting with another person. It’s this quote that Karl Knausgaard says, what is a work of art, if not the gaze of another person, not directly above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. And I think generally, that’s why we go to art, but I think if the memoir is about a member of a marginalized group, or someone who’s suffered trauma, it can be especially helpful to have that kind of direct connection with someone else who’s experienced that kind of thing. So a source of solidarity and comfort, and maybe you know, a way to advance social change too if you can transmit that experience to other people.

Ray Briggs
Do you think that there are experiences that ought to be better represented in memoir in particular? Or is it just like, everybody’s got a story to share, and like anybody could potentially write a memoir, and there’s no judging between them?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, I mean, I know Josh was saying earlier on that he thinks he’s not an interesting person. Or maybe you think you’re an interesting person, but you’ve had a boring life, I’m not sure what it was. A lot of people are like, I haven’t had an interesting life, I have got nothing to write about, but I think that’s a bad way of thinking about life. You know, I guess I think- maybe I’m gonna sound a little bit sappy now, but I think that every human life is precious and has the materials for, you know, an insightful, beautiful, engaging exploration on what it is to be a human. So you don’t have to have had like a super interesting action packed past to engage with readers in a way that they value and you value. So, you can go ahead and do it, Josh, I’m not worried about that.

Josh Landy
Thank you very much for that permission. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about memoir and truth with Helena de Bres from Wellesley College.

Ray Briggs
When you’re telling your story, do you have to tell the truth? What does truth even mean when it comes to memoir? And is it okay to reveal other people’s secrets?

Josh Landy
Truth, lies, and memoirs, along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

If autobiography’s worth singing about, isn’t it worth thinking about? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the scandalous truth about memoir. Our guest is Helena de Bres from Wellesley College, author of “Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir.”

Josh Landy
We’re pre-recording this episode, and unfortunately, we can’t take your phone calls. But, you can always email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or you can comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Helena, Josh and I were arguing earlier about memoir and truth. I want to know what you think: do memoirs have to be completely true?

Helena de Bres
I think to answer that question, you’ve got to step back a little bit and ask yourself first, what kind of truth memoirs should be aiming for? And the way I think about it is that what memoirists are trying to do is get at the experiential truth, I call it, of their past. They’re trying to understand or transmit what it was like to go through a certain kind of experience or what it’s like to hold a certain set of values or a worldview. So that’s what they’re trying to get on the page. And it’s different from trying to capture every single historically accurate fact about their life. And I do think if that’s what the point of memoir is, to express that kind of truth, yeah, you should be trying to do that. I don’t think it makes sense to fudge it and fiddle around with it.

Josh Landy
So it sounds like you’re agreeing with Kathleen Rooney, who we just heard from on the roving philosophical report, like capturing the subjective truth or reality as it felt to me, and so it’s okay, for example, to make up some dialogue.

Helena de Bres
Well yeah, make up some dialogue, sure. If you’re trying to express what happened, you can’t remember every single word, you know, from back in 1986 or whatever, that’s fine. But I do think that yeah, you should definitely not be making up bigger things than that, so introducing events that didn’t happen, or characters who didn’t actually appear.

Ray Briggs
So where’s the line between the stuff you’re allowed to make up and the stuff you’re not allowed to make up?

Helena de Bres
I mean, there’s that sort of spectrum, I guess, here. One thing that you should definitely not be doing — this is probably obvious — is impersonating someone else. There are these cases, a guy in the 1970s wrote a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. So you don’t want to totally impersonate someone else. You don’t want to claim that you were a Holocaust survivor, when actually you grew up a Christian in Switzerland. So that was another case. So there are always some big, large scale lies you should avoid. I tend to think you should be trying to tell the truth as you remember it pretty much all the time unless you have a really good reason for not doing it.

Ray Briggs
I’m kind of wondering about the impersonating somebody else bit. So I’m thinking about Gertrude Stein’s, I guess, memoir, which is called “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” where it’s clear that Gertrude Stein is not Alice B. Toklas, but she kind of writes the whole thing as though she were, like, is that not bad because she’s not trying to deceive, is it like weird cuz she’s ventriloquizing her partner? I never know what to think about that case.

Helena de Bres
Yeah, no, it’s a good- I love that book, I would not want to rule out Gertrude Stein and say she shouldn’t have written that thing. It’s an amazing book. I think it’s so obvious in that case, what’s going on, it’s very clear that Alice B. Toklas did not write that thing. And there’s this heavy layer of irony, right the way through. It’s very funny. I think the reader is adequately keyed in, that each sentence is not aiming, you know, at truth there. And the overall effect of the work is to produce something that’s genuine and true. So I wouldn’t want to say every single sentence needs to be true. So yeah, it’s tricky to pin down the details. I think if the reader knows what’s going on, if they’re adequately alerted to what you might call the truth contract, that’s what we should be aiming for.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and it sets it off from a couple of cases we’ve mentioned like the James Frey case, where it really does seem as though he was pulling the wool over people’s eyes in at least a couple of things. The same with Herman Rosenblat, and you know, his story about being fed apples through the fence. But, you know, some people, of course, go to the other extreme and say, well, you know, so, Mike Daisey had a podcast called “All Stories Are Fiction.” And David Shields said, everyone who writes about himself is a liar, and Vivian Gornick said, yeah, of course, I lie in my memoir. So there seem to be a host of folks who seem to go to the extreme of saying, it is not possible to tell the truth about yourself in memoirs. I mean, what is the self anyway? And can we know it, and there’s all that self deception and our memory’s unreliable, and, you know, and then all the fancy existentialist stuff about how as soon as you put something into a narrative, it falsifies it. But I know you and I don’t buy any of this. So why don’t you? Like, why are you so confident that in fact, you can get it more or less right, at least about the way it was for you?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, well, I mean, I think there’s three different broad types of worries people have about whether memoir can really attain the truth. So one is this worry about whether there’s even a stable self to write about, you know, there’s this kind of general postmodern idea that everyone’s self is constantly in flux and fluid and changing. There’s nothing really there, there’s no “there” there to write about, truthfully, it’s kind of metaphysical wiring. And then there’s a worry about even if there was a “there” there, there is a stable self. We’re so self deceiving, and we’re so subject to cognitive biases, and our memory’s so bad, you know, we couldn’t get it, even if it was there, we can’t transmit it. And then of those worries, you’re just mentioning about stories, about the kind of essential distortions of narrative. And I just don’t think any of those are enough by themselves. I’m not convinced they really discredit the whole genre.

Ray Briggs
So wait, wait, wait, I want to start at step one. Why think there’s a “there” there in the first place?

Helena de Bres
I mean, I think we can all agree that we are fluid to some extent, I just think that it’s a massive exaggeration to say that there’s nothing there at all to write about, and we change over time, sure. But I think if you just- maybe this is a flat footed answer, but if you just look around your social circle, you know, you see your friend fall in love with the same type of loser over and over for 20 years, I just don’t think that we’re that fluid, I think, especially if you’re just writing about a short-ish chunk of your life, for a short-ish period of time, you can probably capture enough of a stable self for it to make sense, to call it a memoir.

Ray Briggs
So suppose I like undergo a religious conversion or something. And who I am really changes before and after the conversion, so that there’s no one stable person or, less likely, that there’s one stable person across the conversion, does that actually mean that I can’t write the memoir, or like is a stable self really required for a memoir? That’s

Helena de Bres
That’s a good question. Yeah, so you would think at that point, you change into a completely different person. Yeah, I guess in that case, you’re writing a memoir about two people that still want to say that at each point, part one and part two, is enough to track, is enough reality to track for it to be nonfictional account of you at the time.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I mean, so some people think that the modern day memoir has its roots in confessional narratives, right? So think about Augustine’s confessions. And then much later, of course, John Jacques Rousseau’s confessions, which are very often a story of conversion. Right? So presumably, if that’s the case, right, if the origin of all of these personal writings is ultimately this religious genre of a confession that’s often combined with a conversion, then presumably, why not, right? We, we think of them as Augustine’s confessions, even though he was a Manichaean for a while, and then he was a Christian.

Helena de Bres
Right, yeah. I mean, you certainly want there to be some development in the character, you know, it’s not very interesting if the person at the beginning of book is exactly the same person at the end. I guess I just don’t think that changes their very metaphysical identity in such a way that there’s no continuity to point to. I mean, people say to even narratives that aren’t religious or spiritual explicitly, have that same kind of, they often have that same structure. Someone who goes through some kind of, you know, existential experience and comes out a changed person, that’s almost like the standard convention for a traditional memoir.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about memoir and truth, with Helena de Bres, from Wellesley College. Helena, I’m convinced that like, whether or not there’s a stable self, people can write a memoir. But we had other worries too. So you voiced a worry about whether people can actually accurately remember anything that happened to them well enough to report it. And like, I think that might be a real concern. So why think that we are able to accurately recall stuff that’s no longer happening to us, like, when a bunch of intervening things have happened? Like how do I, how do I get back to that original experience?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, it’s actually even worse than that, because there’s some evidence that suggests that the more you think about an experience, and presumably the more you write about it, and revise your draft of your memoir, the further you get from the truth of that experience, memoir writing is a risky epistemic enterprise in that way.

Josh Landy
But we were not completely at sea without any resources. And one of my favorite memoirs is a book called “W” by Georges Perec, which is a memoir of, you know, his childhood as a Jew in Nazi-occupied France, and seeing his mother leaving, as it turned out, forever on a train, and he has endnotes that correct his version, right, so he basically writes the way he remembers it, but then he’s gone out and he’s asked family members what happened and, we have letters, we have diaries. Now we have emails, we have text, you know, I don’t think we’re completely at the mercy of our fallible memories. But I wanted to ask you a different kind of question, we’ve been talking about whether it’s possible at all to get it right. I wanted to switch to why it matters, right. So you know, this is something that again, I know, you and I agree very strongly, it really matters. And we shouldn’t succumb to the people who say, just make it up, who cares? But why should we care? Why should people try as hard as possible to tell the truth?

Helena de Bres
I guess there are moral reasons to aim at the truth, and there’s also aesthetic reasons. So maybe I’ll start with the second. I think it’s really valuable to have a literary world where you have books that are aiming to do a kind of speculative thing, the way fiction does, to imagine the world could be like, and who experimented with it, had some fun with it in that way. And also books that aren’t trying to do that, but are trying to track the world in a more direct way. And when people are lying and not messing with the truth consistently, it’s hard to have both of those two genres stay out there, they become confused with each other. So I think that if you want to maintain memoir as the genre, if you think it’s valuable, you should try and stick to one of its constitutive aims, which is to try and get it the actual true.

Ray Briggs
So I have questions about that aesthetic reason, but first, I want to hear the moral reason.

Helena de Bres
Well, there’s a general moral presumption against lying, so we don’t want to lie to people in our everyday lives.

Ray Briggs
Literature. I mean, if you write a novel-

Josh Landy
It’s not lying. It’s not lying if everybody knows it isn’t true.

Helena de Bres
Yeah. I think some of the same reasons for not wanting to lie to your friends and family also apply to not wanting to lie to your readers. It’s a manipulative thing to do. It’s coercive, I guess, Kant would say you’re messing with their rational faculties. You’re getting them to believe things, you’re kind of messing with their minds in that way, and on top of that, kind of more of a consequentialist reason, you could do some real harm. You know, you’re lying about people that you know, people come to believe untrue things about them. And you can also be harming your readers more indirectly. So I’m thinking about James Frey’s book again. That was presented as a recovery from addiction story. And there were people out there who took real hope from it, that I too can recover from addiction like James did. And they find out that actually, he was lying, right the way through and contributing to this general view of, you know, people who are addicted to drugs as liars. Yeah, there’s just a, you don’t want to be messing with vulnerable people in that way.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I’m kind of curious about this concept of of lying, particularly, and it relying on your audience assuming that you would be telling them the truth rather than like a fanciful tale. And you mentioned something earlier called the truth contract, which sounded like it might be relevant to that. Can you tell us more about that?

Helena de Bres
Yeah. I mean, it’s not- one thing that’s tricky, and I think interesting about memoir, is there’s an assumption there’s a truth contract out there. There’s a general sense that there’s some kind of commitment on behalf of the author to be telling something like the truth, but the terms of the contract are really fuzzy. So different memoirists have different views about just how much it’s permissible or okay to mess with the truth. So it’s kind of vague, I think it’s kind of an ongoing, social approach and to work out what their contract involves. But I do think that, yeah, you want to be in your own work, you want to be explicit about what you take it to be. So at the beginning of the book, you know, you can have some kind of preface, you know, David Sedaris starts at least one of his books with the claim that what’s inside is real-ish. You want to be a little more lax about and let the reader know, and they’re not going to be deceived. You can’t be deceived, if you don’t have expectations that can be messed with.

Ray Briggs
This makes sense and also makes me wonder a little bit also about sort of adjacent genres where it’s not as clear what the expectation is. So I’m thinking about like autobiographical novels, where they’re presented as novels, and then readers often assume that they’re trying to capture an experiential truth about the author’s life, or poetry, and I have like a little bit of a bee in my bonnet about this one, because I was once accused of reading confessional poetry, when one of the poems was about like, a love affair between a woman and a giant monstrous fish, which has never happened to anybody I know. I was very annoyed.

Helena de Bres
That’s kind of out there.

Ray Briggs
I thought so.

Helena de Bres
Yeah, I mean, Philippe Lejuene is this great theorist of autobiography and he says that, you know, that a memoir involves an autobiographical pact, where the author is claiming that the protagonist and narrator in the story is the same as the writer, and so that’s what it is to write a memoir. If you’re writing an autobiographical novel, you present it as such, you state that it’s a novel, then you’re no longer claiming that connection. But you could have two books that were identical in text — the content is the same, that particular claim isn’t made, and they’re different genres. It’s interesting.

Josh Landy
It is, and there’s a fascinating series of studies, where they give people exactly the same text. And in one condition, they say, this is a work of- this is a fragment of somebody’s memoir, and then another, they say, this is made up. And there’s all kinds of differences, right. And this is something actually David Hume was onto already in the 18th century that, you know, the very same text is going to be received very differently, depending on whether you take it to be fiction or nonfiction, and that’s panned out in all these these studies. So I think it’s really crucial for people in the, you know, if you’re writing a memoir, and you call it a memoir, and you’re, as it were, assigning that pact, don’t lie. Why lie? Why, you know, why, pollute the discourse?

Ray Briggs
So I still have more concerns about experiential truth and the possibility of creating it. I’m just imagining the case of something that people actually do a lot when they’re writing memoirs, of somebody looking over their diary, and writing a memoir based on their diary. The steps from diary to memoir involve a lot of editing that make the thing more readable and more narratively cohesive. But shouldn’t I expect that editing to make it farther from the experiential truth, which is not inherently cohesive or a good narrative?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, I mean, there’s certainly a lot of shaping and, you know, formatting that gets done when you’re writing a memoir. So you have these sort of various memories, data about your life, maybe as some sort of archive, so that kind of diaries to look through, to make it an actual story, you know, something that someone can understand and want to read, rather than just a very boring list, you do have to do that creative, imaginative work, like a work of art. It’s not going to count as a memoir if you don’t do that. And some people are very suspicious of that. I think as soon as you’re shaping and forming parts of your life, then you’re moving in the direction of fiction. And I just think that’s a bad inference. I don’t think that’s true. I mean, what, so a story and narrative is a representation of a series of events from a certain perspective, designed to elicit understanding and an audience. It’s kind of a general definition. I, you know, I don’t think that putting something in story form like that means that you’re fictionalizing. You’re just presenting your experience in a way that is actually intelligible as opposed to just a random list of things that happen to you.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about memoir and truth with Helena de Bres, author of “Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir.”

Ray Briggs
Would you ever write a memoir? What would you like readers to get out of it? And how do you decide what to include and what to leave out?

Josh Landy
How to write the story of you, plus commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

It’s your life. So can you tell it any way you want? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Helena de Bres from Wellesley College, and we’re discussing the scandalous truth about memoir.

Josh Landy
So Helena, we have a comment from Mark on our website, Mark has been reading the “The Art of Memoir” by Mary Karr and he wants to know, how does your view about memoir compare to hers?

Helena de Bres
I love that book. I suggest everyone interested in writing a memoir should read it. It’s just a- it’s a wonderful book, very funny. She’s, you know, she’s writing a collection of shorter pieces that are aiming to talk about other aspects of memoir, writing more from a craft perspective, like how to do it well. So my book is more about the philosophical, metaphysical, conceptual questions to do with writing a memoir. So our subject matter is different. I think our take on it is pretty similar. She’s very invested, like I am, in truth and memoir, she thinks it’s really important to retain that as part of the goal. So she’s not a postmodernist who thinks we’re all post-truth in that way, so I think sort of in terms of content, we’re kind of on the same page, but we’re focusing on different things.

Josh Landy
Do you have any advice for people who want to write that true story of their own life?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, one thing I say is, it’s gonna take a long time. I think sometimes are people like, oh, I could whip this thing up in three weeks. If you’re writing a short, you know, personal essay, you could manage to do it a few days, if you want to do something book length, it’s going to take you a long time to do, what, you have to go through multiple drafts, it’s going to be emotionally taxing, it’s a hard thing to do. So one thing, you know, you got to invest some time in it, and just expect that- it’s also, it can be kind of distressing, it’s a little triggering to go back into your past, try and sort out what happened, get clear on the truth about it. And it can be socially risky too, you can upset a lot of people that you care about or don’t care about. So it’s going to take a long time, it’s going to be kind of triggering, it’s going to be socially risky. I guess the big piece of advice that I will give though, is it’s totally worth it. I think for many people, most people, it’s worth it. There’s a lot of evidence out there that writing about your life is healing in certain ways, that it’s really satisfying, you know, increases your sense of the meaningfulness of your life often. So it’s totally worth doing. But if you’re going to do it, you got to go in knowing it’s gonna be tough. Get yourself a writing community to accompany you on the journey, get some pals, and just read a lot of memoirs to remind yourself of why it is that you’re doing it and the different ways you can do it.

Ray Briggs
I want to ask more about this thing of people in your life getting upset that you’ve written about them. Is that a moral problem? Like normally, I shouldn’t gossip about people because it’ll hurt their feelings. Are the rules different from memoir?

Helena de Bres
You know, it’s tricky. I think there are three different types of broad goals memoirists are aiming at, one is this golden talking about capturing the experiential truth of your past, another is producing a work of art, right, you’ve got a set of goals. And another one is acting ethically, we sure hope that’s a goal, being decent towards those you write about and towards your readers. So you’ve got, you know, truth, beauty, and ethics, you might say, and sometimes those things are going to come into conflict. I think it’s really important, though, to take the ethical aspect seriously. I don’t think it’s a good thing to do to be reckless about the impact of what you write on those you’re writing about.

Ray Briggs
So should I always resolve conflicts in favor of ethics? Or like, is sometimes the truthful and beautiful thing so good that I can hurt somebody’s feelings a bit?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, I mean, I think in principle, you could, but it’s not going to be very often that the three come into conflict, I think. You can usually find a way to write the truth of your life in a way that doesn’t needlessly injure innocent people, I think there are ways to do that. And similarly, I think it’d be an insult to life to say that truth and art, you know, are incompatible, that you can only make something beautiful if you fictionalize it. So I think, again, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to get all three goals going at once, it’s sometimes only a possibility that you may need to do some mutual adjustments.

Josh Landy
But it’s a difficult area, is that because it’s a little awkward or an uncomfortable spot where, you know, Knausgaard, for example, writing at great length about his wife’s nervous breakdown, and you have these cases where you feel like, well, he’s legally entitled, I guess, but it feels a little invasive, she might well not have when, in fact, we know that many members of the family were irritated by that. They didn’t want these things to be made public. And so that’s a kind of a, you know, a violation of privacy, I guess. And then there’s the issue of distortion, right? You have one version, you know, my memoir isn’t just about me. It’s about various people in my life, and I have some version of them, but they have a different version of them. So is it okay for me just to sort of narrate you and narrate you anyway I see fit? I mean, don’t you have any say in that? Aren’t there moral questions around that?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, it’s really tricky. I think that memoirists have been in a bit of a double bind here in terms of, you know, their reputation, because on the one hand, people are always saying to memoirists, oh they’re such narcissists. They’re just writing about themselves all the time. So then it’s like, oh, okay, well, I write about some other people too. And as soon as you do that, oh, they’re throwing them, you know, their friends and family under the bus. You know, they’re violating privacy, harming people. They’re [unintelligible]. It’s like, oh, you can win. Really. It’s another piece of advice to memoirists: you can’t win. You’re always going to be criticized. But, I think it’s not enough just to not break the laws. There’s two laws that govern memoir in the United States, you know, you’re not supposed to defame people, say false things that will harm their reputation, and you’re not supposed to violate their privacy, but that’s very narrowly understood. And I don’t think that takes you off the hook. If you get those two things right, you can still harm people, you can exploit them, you can betray them. You can appropriate parts of the lives in problematic ways. It’s a lot more complicated than what the law says. And I think it’s very important that people take that seriously. I don’t think we can take the view that oh, you know, it’s my story, or art is the most important value, I’m not going to worry about the effects of my work on others. I just think you’re being a jerk. You’re being a jerk.

Ray Briggs
I feel like if I think about ways that I don’t want to be written about by others, and ways that others probably don’t want to be written about by me, so one of one of the things that seems like, most unappealing, is neither being completely lied about nor, like having my secrets told, but just being portrayed in a way that’s at odds with how I see myself. So if somebody I knew wrote about me, and like made a big deal about how pompous my lectures are, like, that would really hurt my feelings; I’m not sure, like, maybe it’s not even like truth evaluable whether my lectures are pompous, and it doesn’t seem like something I own, but it also seems like the most hurtful possible way to describe somebody is to pick a description that fits but then a lens that is like unflattering somehow.

Helena de Bres
Yeah, there’s someone I forget who, claimed it every act of description is an act of theft, because it involves stealing something of the other person’s sense of themselves. You’re always going to run that risk, I guess. I think what the writer needs to do is think about- it’s not enough to have good intentions, but maybe a good rule of thumb is to think, why am I doing this? Am I doing this just because I want to, you know, make Ray feel bad about themself and their lecture, you know? Or is it serving some kind of broader purpose in the, in the story as a whole, is it part of a more complex, balanced depiction of that character? You know, I don’t think we can get around describing other people in, you know, maybe hurtful ways when writing memoir because you don’t want to read a memoir that’s totally sanitized, and has just presented everyone in a wonderful light, no one’s going to want to read that thing.Cheryl Strayed says you’ve got to be ruthless with yourself if you’re going to be critical of others too. So if the memoirist is just as vicious about their own lectures, and maybe the overall picture of humanity in the book is gonna be balanced enough that it’s not going to hurt your feelings so much.

Josh Landy
I think that’s a great tip. And I think it- maybe it goes along with another one, which is don’t necessarily trust your initial instinct, right, which is similar to the question about facts, right? Did it actually happen? I don’t know, that, you know, Perec’s example, he had his arm in a sling that day, well, I can ask my family, maybe it’s the same thing for people around you. Like your first instinct is to say, that person lectured in a pompous way. Well, you know, you could go and ask people who were taking the class, like, get some other opinions, are there strategies like that, Helena, to offset our potential tendency to get it wrong about people and over-rely on our own instincts?

Helena de Bres
Yeah, I do think it’s really great to have other people read it. So people who were there at the time, I’ve got a twin sister who was there at the time of everything, more or less, until I was 20, so I’m always checking in with her, she has a much better memory than I do. But you also want to check in with strangers who don’t know what happened so they can help you see what the tone is, you know, you may not realize that you’re presenting someone in a kind of needlessly unflattering light. So yeah, it’s really helpful to solicit feedback from other people. And also give it some time. You know, if you’re still super angry about a situation, you’re feeling a lot of emotion while writing about the thing, truly sit back and let that settle before you launch on in there.

Josh Landy
Well, our time is alas at an end, but this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much, Helena, for joining us today.

Helena de Bres
Thank you. It was really fun to talk with you today.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Helena de Bres, Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College and author of “Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I’m feeling really excited to go out and read more memoirs, and I’m also thinking about a couple of memoirs that are kind of genre bending that I’ve read recently. So one is Carmen Maria Machado’s “In the Dream House,” which Helena actually talks about a little bit in her book. But “In the Dream House” is basically every chapter is a take on a different genre, and there’s like a choose your own adventure story in the middle, like it’s really creative. And then also I’m thinking about Akwaeke Emezi’s “Dear Senthuran,” which is an epistolary autobiography, where each chapter is like a letter to a different person, or sorry, they repeat some people, but switch between chapters, and both of these memoirs are kind of interesting, because I feel like both of these memoirs are truthful, but they’re not literal, and you know they’re not literal.

Josh Landy
Yeah. I love those genre-bending memoirs. I, you know, Primo Levi’s “The Periodic Table,” which is based around chemistry. Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” a graphic novel memoir, fantastic stuff. We’re gonna put links everything we’ve mentioned today on our website philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now, faster than the speed of life, it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. Everything about nostalgia lately, whimsically of course, how everything’s a story anymore, and whose story? Who does it belong to? Also, stories need a takeaway and authenticity, not only from the teller but the told. Do you deserve to hear what the story is telling you? And we can’t trust journalists anymore? They’re all globalist pawns unless they’re on substack, and any given issue has sides which harness the power of anecdote to bolster their cases. Right and left are now caught on video, pranked on video, captured maskless on airplanes, in cop pullovers, walks in the park. Sad snippets like snapshots on video, snip shots, supplanting candid tell-alls, except by former Trump staffers. Memoir devolved into weaponized Candid Camera moments, at least for now. Personally when it came to other people’s life stories as a kid, I was all about Audie Murphy calling in airstrikes, my burning halftrack, old machine gunning advancing Nazis, they can’t see there are many lessons here to apply to my own life, aside from Nazis should be stopped, a good thing to remember, kids. When they attempt to read, my folks read magazines, mainly, and every time I went to library I would check out magazines too: the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post because they had cartoons. I just bought a collection of both Saturday Evening Post cartoons at an estate sale. I also got an old mystery by post contributor Leslie Ford. The murder actually happens in the Curtis Building where The Post was published in Philadelphia. The Post had a handle on everything middlebrow in spades and raked in the dough, it was home to Norman Rockwell for crying out loud. Near as I can tell, that Sat Evening Post represents the America today’s right wing would like us to get back to, only with [unintelligible] fellows and feed caps to make sure we tow the line: stormtroopers lite, you might say. So The Post back in the day was flying high. After the war, however, came television. Magazine started bleeding readers. One of the post editors, Pete Martin, pitched the idea of going door to door so to speak, interviewing movie stars just dropping by for copy. That was the conceit billed as “I Call On.” He called on Lucille Ball, chatting about her early days as a New York dancer, Debbie Reynolds about deciding to divorce Eddie Fisher, Bing Crosby revealing nothing, that genial sociopath, and readers loved it. Pete Martin had invented the celebrity profile, paving the way for People Magazine, Entertainment Tonight, reality television, podcasts. He became so famous The Post actually did a piece, “Bing Crosby calls on Pete Martin.” I couldn’t track it down. But I was hoping I call on Pete Martin would be a memoir about the time Pete Martin called on Bing Crosby, that would have been so meta! But actually it did become meta in that Pete Martin’s pieces were so popular, stars turned to him to write their biographies. He was the ghost writer of choice. His byline was everywhere. I remember this vividly when I was a kid, all those paperbacks in the drugstore rack or by my buddy’s mom’s big ashtray in the front room. The last Christmas show by Bob Hope, as told to Pete Martin. Who could ask for anything more by Ethel Merman, as told to Pete Merton. Marilyn Monroe, Walt Disney, Walt Disney’s daughter, Hollywood lawyer, I was a communist for the FBI as told to Pete Martin. In the meantime, the Saturday Evening Post ceased to be, oh, it’s still around. But now it’s one of those old timey nostalgia magazines with feel good stories interspersed with reprints of stories from back in the day. The kind of thing that shows up at gas station convenience store, just to [unintelligible] in the right. I found a book of Pete Martins’ I call on pieces, long out of print, but I could order it used on Amazon. So I left a comment and the customer reviews, just one person three stars. And it turned out it was from Pete Martin’s nephew. Sad story. Can we make it more about me? Well, I just saw a story about Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala wearing the actual Marilyn Monroe dress she wore when she sang happy birthday to President Kennedy. That would have been a great feature for the Saturday Evening Post, except they’d have no idea who Kim Kardashian is. Come to think about it, I still don’t. Oh Pete Martin, thou shouldst be living at this hour. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2022.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Ben Tiffany. The senior producer is Devon Strolvitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from subscribers to our online community of thinkers. Support for this episode comes from the Stanford philosophy and literature initiative.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or mis-expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or other funders…

Ray Briggs
…not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and get access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy…

Ray Briggs
…and I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Lou Grant
Vern, just tell us who’s writing the cheesy sexy memoirs. Don’t want to hear how I figured it out? No.