THE REAL STORY

IN 1996, I CAME ACROSS an article in The New York Times Magazine about the explosion of personal memoirs in the publishing business and read the following: “If Proust were writing today about his penchant for observing handsome young men stick hatpins in live rats, he wouldn’t hide behind the narrator of his novel. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu would be a memoir.”1 I found the comment highly irritating and have never forgotten it. The implication is that while fiction once served as a convenient screen for taboo personal material, it has now outlived its usefulness in a confessional culture that permits, even welcomes, every revelation, no matter how sordid. It is doubtful that the author, James Atlas, was serious about his claim; the sentences have the ironic, condescending tone we have come to expect from a good deal of cultural journalism, but it is interesting, nevertheless, to entertain how the memoir is different from the novel and see what comes of these musings. It is indisputable that Proust and many other novelists have borrowed events, feelings, thoughts, and people from life, and, in one way or another, transported them into their works. Scholars have diligently picked over Proust’s biography for every morsel of his “real” experience, just as they have analyzed and reanalyzed the seven volumes of his masterwork. But the two Marcels, the one in life and the one in fiction, are not identical. Even when there is a close familial resemblance between an author and his fictional character, the two remain distinct. What about an author and her persona in an autobiographical work? The question touches on the puzzling boundary between what we regard as the real and the imaginary.

Writing fiction takes place in a mental zone of free invention that memoir does not (or should not), for the simple reason that when a person picks up a book labeled “memoir,” she expects that the writer of the volume has told the truth. The implied contract between writer and reader is simple: the author is not prevaricating. The contract holds even though the explicit, conscious memories we retain are only a fraction of what we remember implicitly, unconsciously, and the autobiographical memories we keep are not stable but subject to change, as Freud repeatedly observed. Memories are revised over time, and their meanings change as we age, something now recognized by neuroscience and referred to as the reconsolidation of memory. The act of remembering is not retrieving some original fact stored in the brain’s “hard drive.” What we recall is the last version of a given memory. The writer of a memoir is not asked to occupy a third-person perspective, but rather to inhabit his or her first-person position fully and write what he or she remembers. That said, my husband and I, who have now been living together for almost thirty years, often recall the same event differently. He argues that the moment our daughter declared she wanted to be a performer the three of us were in the subway; I say it happened in a cab. Sophie, the object of the dispute, does not remember where it occurred or exactly what she said. Even more dramatically, a memory I am convinced belongs to me alone, is, according to my husband, his private mental property. He remembers it perfectly and is sure I must be mistaken. One of us is in error. What this anecdote clarifies about memory is that when we listen to a person tell a story, perhaps especially a person with whom we are intimate, that tale can spawn a mental image so vivid, it enters the mind as a subjective experience that originated outside the mind, not within it. The I adopts the recollection of the you. Memory, like perception, is not passive retrieval but an active and creative process that involves the imagination. We are all always reinventing our pasts, but we are not doing it on purpose. Delusion, however great, is not the same as mendacity. We know when we are lying. Lying is a form of double consciousness. There are two utterances: the one spoken or written and the unsaid, unrecorded one. The public outrage over memoirs that are actually fictions suggests that the contract implied by a work of nonfiction is still in effect, despite the fact that many memoirists seem to be equipped with supernatural abilities for recalling the past.

Several times over the years, I have heard one novelist or another refer to him or herself as “a professional liar.” The words signal the fact that fiction writers can make up anything, that they, unlike their comrades writing nonfiction, are not tied to describing what actually happened. This is indubitably true, and yet I have always balked at the idea of the novel as a form of falsehood, which is to say, I believe that some novels do lie, but the good ones do not. How can a novel be fallacious? It cannot be held to any absolute standard. If I want my novel’s narrator to have been born underwater from the eye of a giant octopus, who is going to stand in my way? If I begin my autobiography in this manner, however, there are those who will object. A birth certificate is on record that states otherwise. I might begin a memoir with an eight-legged aquatic mother had she been an early fantasy of mine, however. When my niece Ava was three, she repeatedly told her parents she had been born from a Chinese egg. Neither her mother nor her father is able to trace the origin of this personal myth. And no ambitious journalist can document the veracity of my inner imaginative life. The lies that have gotten memoirists into trouble are inevitably whoppers that can easily be identified by searching public records. The controversy over James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces centered on the fact that the author had exaggerated or fabricated his crimes and arrests, had made them worse than they actually were. Like a novelist, he created a storytelling persona, one he apparently preferred to his own more benign and possibly more bathetic self. Frey hid behind the narrator of his memoir, who served as a novelistic vehicle of disguise, but the deeper issues of masks and revelations in nonfiction and fiction are multiple and go far beyond an addict rewriting his own pathology for more dramatic reading.

Many successful memoirs read like novels. They borrow the established conventions, indeed clichés, of the form to use for autobiographical writing. I have read elaborate descriptions of people’s physiognomies, their clothing, of rooms and landscapes, and page after page of continuous dialogue in “memoirs.” Frankly, I regard most of these passages as improbable, if not impossible. Although I remember the rooms, for example, in the house where I grew up in some detail, the particularity of the interiors I occupied only briefly—a hostel in London, say, when I was seventeen—have nearly vanished from my mind or have been supplanted by some vague but workable fictionalized space. I remember a single sentence or two uttered by people important to me over the years and the gist of significant conversations, but I could never reproduce them verbatim, nor would I attempt to. Even the face of my mother as she was in my childhood cannot be reproduced in my mind’s eye, and that is why I sometimes take out photographs to remind myself of her youthful image. And I have a fairly good visual memory. The popular memoir has little to do with the peculiar realities of human memory. It has become a successful literary form, often fashioned on the journeyman novel, and, as with every hardened genre, it arrives with a set of expectations. A number of the memoirs exposed as frauds (to greater and lesser degrees) in recent years share a single quality: they are all stories of inspired survival: Frey’s book, Herman Rosenblat’s death camp love story, Angel at the Fence, and Margaret P. Jones’s story of growing up among violent gangs, Love and Consequences, follow the same essential narrative line. Against all odds, the hero or heroine of the tale triumphs in the end. In each there is an obstacle—drug addiction, Nazi horror, and the Bloods. Although these three can hardly be called parallel afflictions, the broader narrative in which they find themselves is the same, and it exploits a deep human wish: to conquer (whatever it is) and stay alive, not as a broken, traumatized, weak bit of human wreckage, but as a strong, reborn noble figure.

The narrative machinery of such tales is as old as literature itself. The trickster who outwits death is a figure in many tribal and folk cultures. Odysseus finally comes home. The seven voyages of that inimitable sailor, Sinbad, are survival tales par excellence. Over and over again he is saved by chance or by his own wiles, often literally from the jaws of death—snakes, sea monsters, gigantic birds, cannibals. The fairy-tale child of multiple traditions suffers adversity but overcomes evil in the end. Moll Flanders, Defoe’s resilient heroine, endures multiple assaults and the startling twists and turns of fortune to die of old age, and a penitent at that. These are characters of irresistible Darwinian appeal. Like Wile E. Coyote from the Looney Tunes of my girlhood, they have the wonderful gift of popping back into shape. There are true stories, as well, of people who defy the odds, people who despite grotesque experiences do not end up in hospitals, who, with far more than Beckettian resignation, go on.

In his book Abnormalities of Personality, Michael H. Stone, a professor of clinical psychiatry, presents the reader with two briefly summarized cases of men who had what appear to be equally horrible childhoods. Both men were extremely introverted when they were young. Both had parents who mistreated them, and both were the victims of violence and sexual molestation. One man was Stone’s patient, “a person of a decidedly paranoid caste” who after years of inertia and therapy was able to resume his graduate studies. The other was Jeffrey Dahmer, the notorious mass murderer. “The point of these stories,” writes Dr. Stone, “is that if either one had been identified in advance as the serial killer of young men, most people would have said, ‘Well, with a background like that!’”2 But true stories cannot be told “in advance,” only on hindsight. Whether Stone’s patient or others like him have a particularly robust genetic temperament or whether there is some person in his story, a teacher or aunt, a grandmother or sibling, who helped to keep him from disintegration, I do not know. But Stone’s comment is relevant to memoir: there is no formula for predicting the evolution of a particular human story. And yet, we cling to our standard narratives, although they change over time. Think of all the stories of seduced and fallen women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. Child sexual abuse and subsequent ruination is a more contemporary narrative, but even this explosive category, which includes everything from a grope in the locker room to brutal rape, cannot stand in as an explanation for an entire life. While it is certainly true that years of research on attachment phenomena—the psychobiological dynamics of emotional bonds between infant and caretaker—have shown how vital early interactions are to a person’s development and that many people who suffer neglect and/or violence as children grow up to have psychiatric problems, we must be careful about making simple equations. Fraudulent or otherwise, many memoir narratives partake of the broader culture’s need for crude reductions of complex human realities into a salable package of victimology. In this, they are no different from many popular novels that employ precisely the same formula but lack the stamp of reality.

Fake or partly faked autobiographical works would not exist if they were not valued more highly than fiction in the contemporary American marketplace. When Frey’s book was first submitted as a novel, it met with rejection. Were publishers equally attracted to fiction, we might be flooded with countless versions of the roman à clef. True crime, true sex, true abjection, reality TV, movie stars who debase themselves in private or public are daily media fare. Our many technologies give us access to high doses of Schadenfreude or inspiration, depending on one’s point of view. But this, too, is nothing new. Since the expansion of literacy, people have greedily consumed stories, both fictional and nonfictional, that titillate and shock them. As the reading public grew in England in the late seventeenth and through the eighteenth century, so did the materials to satisfy their needs. Accounts of the lives of criminals were especially popular and were often published as inexpensive chapbooks or broadsides. A typical title: News from Newgate: or an exact and true account of the most remarkable tryals of several notorious malefactors. The words true and authentic recur continually in this literature. There was also a hankering for “Last Dying Speeches” and verbatim reports from the trials at Old Bailey, all written with an eye to entertainment. Newspapers competed as well with their accounts of crimes, arrests, and trials:

17 September 1734. Yesterday Mary Freeman, alias Frisky Nan, but commonly called by the Name of Diving Moll, was committed to the Gatehouse, Westminster, by Justice Cotton, for picking a gentleman’s pocket of 15 guineas, a silver snuff box, and two gold rings of considerable value. (Daily Journal)

The same “notorious Moll,” with another alias, Talboy, gets much fuller treatment in the Grub Street Journal the same day. The reader is told that this “creature,” declared an “idle and disorderly person” by the justices, was supported by “several noted gamesters and sharpers about Covent Garden” and was wont to “draw in young cullies in order to make a prey of them.” The writer of the account indulges in a bit of pathos as well: “… and poor Moll, to her great mortification, was remanded back again to perform her task of beating hemp till the next Quarter session.” The fledgling novel soon got into the act, and fictional accounts of crime, debauchery, and seduction competed with “true” stories for the attention of readers.

The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances that it will be hard for a private history to be taken for genuine where the names and other circumstances of the person are concealed; and on this account we must be content to leave the reader to pass his own opinion upon the ensuing sheets and take it just as he pleases.3

So reads the ambiguous first sentence of the preface to another Moll story, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. The fictitious editor informs the reader that an original manuscript exists, but he has rewritten it to cleanse it of what might be morally contaminating. What the reader has in his hands is a “new dressing up of the story.” Moll, whose first-person saga relates her adventures of extreme poverty; thievery; prostitution; five marriages, including bigamy; multiple children, all, except one, dead or cast off; imprisonment; deportation; and eventual reformation, is a creature born of the popular genre of criminal biography mingled with another form ascendant in the seventeenth century: the Protestant spiritual autobiography in which the sinner finds his way to God and redemption. Many recent memoirs partake of this very same movement from a state of damnation—abuse, addiction, handicap, or potentially fatal illness—which is then overcome by an act of will or some form of personal enlightenment. The conventional forms for relating true-life stories—memoirs, letters, trial reports, rogue and whore biographies—infected eighteenth-century fictions because they were deeply concerned with the idea that they depicted ordinary human beings as they really were.

The ideas of authenticity and realism were essential to the raison d’être of early novels, even when they didn’t include prefaces by editors claiming to have cleaned up a genuine confession for polite consumption. In Tom Jones, Fielding’s narrator regularly justifies his story as truthful to nature, albeit with heavy doses of irony: “… it is our business to relate the facts as they are; which when we have done it, it is the part of the learned sagacious reader to consult that original book of nature; whence every passage in our work is transcribed, though we quote not always the particular page for its authority.”4 In John Cleland’s famous and infamous Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure or Fanny Hill, the narrator tells her correspondent on the very first page that hers will be a true story: “Truth! stark naked truth, is the word, and I will not so much as take pains to bestow the strip of a gauze-wrapper on it, but paint situations as they actually rose to me in nature…”5 Part of the author’s seduction of the reader is the promise of unvarnished realism, in this case, undressing rather than “dressing up” the story.

Novels were regularly decried as a cause of mental pollution during the eighteenth century. In his 1778 essay “On Novel Reading,” Vicessimus Knox articulated a commonly held view that resonates nicely with more recent anxieties about, for example, the dangers of violent computer games: “If it be true, that the present age is more corrupt than the preceding, the great multiplication of Novels has probably contributed to its degeneracy.” Reading novels weakened the mind and made it vulnerable to “the slightest impulse of libidinous passion.” Knox preferred romances because “their pictures of human nature were not exact.”6 Of course, what an exact picture of human nature might look like is a bewildering question. For Knox, novelistic exactitude seems to have meant the exposure of the seamier side of human beings—their appetites and frailties—an image of life that was more “real” than in earlier literary forms.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau promises to “tell all” or rather “tell everything” in his Confessions. He begins with this declaration to the reader: “I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature and this man shall be myself.”7 Of course there were many memoirs before Rousseau’s, and there were many memoir novels. Among other fictional autobiographies, the philosopher from Geneva especially loved Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and this invented narrative influenced the telling of his own life. Both St. Augustine and Michel de Montaigne famously preceded Rousseau as writers who unveiled their personal lives. The difference was that for both of them self-revelation came in service of ideas beyond themselves. Rousseau believed in the validity of telling for the sake of telling. He believed in a transparency that would allow the reader to peer into his very soul. In this, he was modern. He is not confessing to God. He is unburdening himself in the sight of all humanity, warts and all.

I have to admit that when I first read Rousseau’s life history at twenty, I felt variously amazed, delighted, appalled, and embarrassed. I had not expected him to reveal the sexual pleasure he had taken in being spanked as a boy, one he claims shaped his lifelong “affection for acts of submission.”8 I was horrified by the fact that he had abandoned his children, something which he attempts to justify, and amazed by his candor about any number of other shameful acts—both petty and more serious—of disloyalty, self-deception, and meanness. Writing about his own life, Rousseau is intent on not prettifying himself. The appetites and frailties depicted in the novels that so worried Knox are on full display in Rousseau’s autobiography. At the same time, the narrator of The Confessions echoes the English critic across the channel. The philosopher admits that his imagination has a quixotic side and claims that reading novels as a child has addled him permanently. These fictions are responsible for “bizarre and romantic notions of human life, which experience and reflection have never really been able to cure me.”9 Or, to put it another way: the novels he read became part of who he was.

Was Rousseau truthful? A number of details and dates he cites have been proven wrong. Moreover, he has been accused of fabricating or softening some scenes in the book. The busy scholar, like the journalist sniffing out memoir fraud, can cite inaccuracies and obfuscations in Rousseau’s account of himself, a narrative that also periodically falls into the trap I mentioned earlier of including dialogue and speeches too long for any normal human being to remember, which undermine the urgent, autobiographical tone of the book. At the same time, when I read him I never feel that Rousseau is an out-and-out liar. He is at junctures brilliant, wise, tender, hyperbolic, paranoid, totally convincing, and less so because I feel he is working so hard to justify himself that he moves into the terrain of self-deception. Then again, he openly declares that while he may stumble over facts, what he cannot be mistaken about are his own feelings. His appeal is to the truth of sentiment, to emotional truth. Although it is doubtful that any one of us can fully recover feelings and sensations from the past any more than we can perfectly reproduce events, it is clear that memory is consolidated by emotion, that the fragments of the past we recall best are those colored by feeling, whether it is joy or grief or guilt. Also, it is fair to allow that the writing self looking back on a former self can at least be acutely aware of feelings in the present about that earlier incarnation.

The art of autobiography, as much as the art of fiction, calls on the writer to shape himself as a character in a story, and that shaping requires a form mediated by language. What scientists call episodic or autobiographical memory is essential for creating a coherent narrative sense of a self over time. It is part of our consciousness, but that consciousness is also shaped by unconsciousness. What it means to be a thinking subject is an enormously complex philosophical and neurobiological issue, which remains unsolved. But if you ask yourself how you would tell the story of your life or tell a particularly dramatic part of your life, you will soon discover the quandaries involved. My own memories can only be called hodgepodge. The images and words retained in my brain-mind are not sequential; they come and go in my reveries. They are triggered by the words of others, by my own associative thoughts, by smells and sounds and sights. As William James stated in The Principles of Psychology (1890): “There is no such thing as mental retention, the persistence of an idea from month to month or year to year in some mental pigeon-hole from which it can be drawn when wanted. What persists is a tendency to connection.”10 Memory is flux.

Moreover, the first two years of my life are lost to amnesia. In order to report on them, I would have to rely on the stories my mother and father told me, not my own memory. I know half a dozen people who grew up deceived about their parentage. We are not truly present at our own births and, although learning and development are rapid and crucial during those initial months of our lives, the self-reflective recollections of the autobiographical “I” have not yet begun. In human beings, that “I” has tremendous flexibility. It is dependent on the fact that we recognize ourselves in a mirror, and so begin to imagine ourselves through the eyes of another person. A human being can become a character to herself, if you will, a being seen from the outside, a personage we can place in the past and imagine in the future.

After about the age of six, I begin to have what some have called a continuous autobiographical memory, but what does this mean? It does not mean that I can recall every day of my life and its incidents. As David Hume writes in A Treatise of Human Nature: “For how few of our past actions are there, of which we have any memory? Who can tell me, for instance, what were his thoughts and actions on the first of January 1715, the eleventh of March 1719, and the third of August 1733?”11 A continuous memory means only that I can locate the memories I do have in places I have known: my family house; Longfellow School; Way Park; an apartment in Bergen, Norway; Butler Library at Columbia University. By summoning these mentally familiar spaces, I put my young self within them and construct a rhythmic formula of a routine reality, punctuated by events significant to me. Between those important events are fogs and lapses. I forget. I forget. I forget. And I sometimes displace, condense, project, and generally get things wrong about my life as well. I have stolen “memories” from photographs, unwittingly, it is true, but when confronted with snapshots of my early childhood, I have been forced to accept that what I imagined was a mental picture of my own is, in fact, an image borrowed from an album. My errors are hardly unique. No doubt there are innumerable others I will never discover, but I accept the imaginative dimension of my remembering. The writing of memoir, then, is not about my “real” life in some documentary sense. Rousseau’s optimism about recovering the past, even its feelings, is unwarranted. Writing a memoir is a question of organizing remembrances I believe to be true and not invented into a verbal narrative. And that belief is a matter of inner conviction; what feels true now.

When I’m writing a novel, it is very much like dredging up a memory, trying hard to find the “real” story that is buried somewhere in my being, and when I find it, it feels true. But I have also written passages that are wrong, that feel like lies, and then I must get rid of them and start again. I am measuring the truth of my fictional story against some inner emotional reality that is connected to my memories. That is why I rebel against the idea of novelists as “professional liars.”12 It demeans an enterprise that for me is exactly the opposite. The link between recollection and creativity has long been acknowledged in philosophy, as well as disavowed. In The New Science (1725), Giambattista Vico equated the two. “Hence memory is the same as imagination … Memory has three aspects: memory when it remembers things, memory when it alters or imitates them, and invention when it gives them a new turn and puts them in a proper arrangement and relationship.”13 Wilhelm Wundt, the German researcher who is credited with establishing psychology as a distinct field of study, blurs the two entirely in his Outlines of Psychology (1897). “It is obvious that practically no clear demarcation can be drawn between images of imagination and those of memory … All our memories are therefore made up of ‘fancy and truth’ (Wahrheit und Dichtung). Memory changes under the influence of our feelings and volition to images of imagination and we generally deceive ourselves with their resemblance to real experiences.”14 Invention is part of human experience, whether voluntary or involuntary, and everyone has fantasies and daydreams made possible by the projected “I.” We can move ourselves mentally into real and unreal spaces:

I can see myself as a famous singer performing in Yankee Stadium.

What if my beloved died, and I were left alone?

I have sprouted wings and am soaring happily over New York City.

Young people are particularly prone to spending hours inside their private fantasies. In “Imagination and Creativity of the Adolescent” (1931), the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky beautifully articulates the double experience of fiction:

When with the help of fantasy, we construct some sorts of unreal images, the latter are not real, but the feeling which they evoke is experienced as being real. When a poet says: “I will dissolve in tears over this fiction,” he realizes that this figment is something unreal, but his tears belong to the realm of reality. In this way an adolescent finds a means of expressing his rich inner emotional life and his impulses in fantasy.15

There is mounting neurobiological evidence that the same regions or systems of the brain are at work in both episodic memory and the imaginative act of projecting oneself into the future. The neuroscientists Randy Buckner and Daniel Carroll put it this way in their paper “Self-Projection and the Brain,” published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences:

Accumulating data suggest that envisioning the future (prospection), remembering the past, conceiving the viewpoint of others (theory of mind), and possibly some forms of navigation reflect the workings of the same brain network. These abilities emerge at a similar age and share a common functional anatomy that includes frontal and medial temporal systems that are traditionally associated with planning, episodic memory, and default (passive) cognitive abilities.16

The “default system” is the rather ugly name scientists have given to what happens in our brains when we are not busy with some specific task, when we are at rest and not concentrating on stimuli outside ourselves—reverie mode, fantasy mode. It turns out that the brain is very active when we are doing nothing but hanging out inside ourselves. Note the scientists’ list of connected activities. Envisioning the future is an out-and-out fictional act, a projection of the present self elsewhere into a time that has not yet arrived, but then so is autobiographical memory to an important degree. We must reimagine a former self and move it backward in time. All animals remember. Eric Kandel’s groundbreaking work on the snail, aplysia, has shown that even that simple animal learns and remembers what it has learned. Living creatures all have motor-sensory memories that are implicit, and these mostly unconscious learned abilities underscore much of our habitual movement in the world. But a sea snail does not have episodic autobiographical memories, nor does it fantasize or imagine itself as another aplysia. Without the ability to conceive the viewpoint of others—to imagine being that other person—we would not be self-conscious, and without self-consciousness we could not construct the labile self we all have, the one that can be cut off from the present and navigate in other realms, both real and unreal. The authors of the paper do not mention philosophy or psychology, nor do they note that the increasing mobility of this projected self is connected to mirror recognition and our later acquisition of language and abstract thought. They do not extend their argument to fantasy, creativity, or the imagination in general. In their very cautious way, however, they step into the memory versus fiction question.

… this explanation helps us to understand why memory is constructive and why it is prone to errors and alterations. Perhaps a feature of this core network that is involved in self-projection is its flexibility in simulating multiple alternatives that only approximate real situations. The flexibility of the core network might be its adaptive function, rather than the accuracy of the network to represent specific and exact configurations of past events.17

It seems to me that we have come to a cultural moment in the United States that is inherently suspicious of fiction and attached to an idea of “real memory” or “the true story” that is in itself a fantasy. Why write a novel when you can tell the real story? Isn’t this what James Atlas was proposing in his reference to Proust? Not long ago, I received a novel in the mail with a letter asking me for a quote. In the form letter, the editor explained that the book is about a rape and that the author herself had been raped. Moreover, the author was willing to talk about her experience of the real rape while doing publicity for the novel about a fictional rape. I have not read the book; it might be good. It might be subtle. What interests me is the inference that the fiction I was being asked to read was more genuine because life and fiction had crossed, as it were. What are we to make of this? The book in question is not a memoir but a novel, and yet it is being marketed as a form of hybrid. The factual rape is cited to give credence to the fictional rape. There is nothing new about novelists using their own experiences to make a fiction. What seemed new was the need for the publisher to declare what those experiences were.

Let us return to Proust. Proust’s biographers have written extensively about his sadomasochism. Apparently, he did enjoy torturing rats. His housekeeper Celeste Albaret relates that after one of his visits to a male brothel, he returns and tells her that he had peered through a small window and witnessed a man being whipped “till the blood spurts all over everything. And it is only then that the unfortunate creature experiences the heights of pleasure.”18 Proust then talks to the shocked Celeste for hours about the flagellation he has seen. In her book on Proust, Time and Sense, Julia Kristeva argues that “Proust uses the good woman’s participation-indignation to help him reconstruct the scene from a distance. In this way, he can create a quasi-comedy that will allow him to detach himself from his sensations…”19 In Time Regained, Proust’s narrator also sees a flagellation, but before he sees it, he hears groans of pain, then two voices, one begging for pity, the other menacing, “and if you yell and drag yourself about on your knees like that, you’ll be tied to the bed, no mercy for you,” then the noise of a cracking whip. Moments later the narrator discovers “a small oval window” and peers through it.

And there in the room, chained to a bed like Prometheus to his rock, receiving the blows that Maurice rained upon him with a whip which was in fact studded with nails, I saw, with blood already flowing from him and covered with bruises, which proved that the chastisement was not taking place for the first time—I saw before me M. de Charlus.20

There is nothing “quasi-comic” about this passage in isolation, but in the context of the novel, it is, in fact, kind of funny. After his bout in the theater of cruelty, the baron, weak and tottering to be sure, but, remarkably, up on his pins, jokes with the hotel’s “boys.” We discover that Maurice plays the torturer for a few francs and that his heart is decidedly not in it. But this comes later, after I, as a reader, have participated in the fascinated horror of that other “I” who creeps “stealthily in the darkness” toward the peephole and then sees that the abject person on the bed is someone I know. This is not the nameless “unfortunate creature” Proust described to Celeste Albaret; it is the Baron de Charlus, the depraved but also generous dandy, the gallant, absurd survivor of his own perversion for pain, the same man, who, recovering from a stroke in his dotage, delights in reeling off the names of dead friends as World War I rages not far away and men howl and die in the trenches. Does it matter that Proust stole some of the baron’s other character traits from Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, who was privately mortified by the novel because he recognized parts of himself? The transpositions from real experience to art are like the strange mingling that happens in dreams. I dream of a friend, who does not look like my friend, but like someone else. The name seems to be attached to the wrong person. One person, one thing, blends into another, or two stories from my waking life collapse into one. A minor character in my novel What I Loved (2003), Lazlo Finkelman, gained his first name and his hairdo from a friend’s baby boy; his last name from my daughter’s pediatrician; his hip, laconic patter from yet another friend; and his penchant for stealing food at parties and stuffing it into his raincoat from a story I once heard about the young, impoverished Henry Miller.

Would we prefer that Proust had catalogued his voyeuristic experiences as his very own, that he had stuck to the facts and not taken the horrific spectacle of an unknown man being whipped and turned it into an image of the baron? Would Proust’s autobiographical memory of real events, in his vast book about memory and time, have served him better than his memories and fantasies, that Janus face of a single human capacity? There is a distance in writing fiction, in writing as another person, in allowing the slippage of remembering and imagining, always in the service of emotional truths, but from another perspective than one’s own, even when the narrator is a kind of self-double, as Proust’s narrator is. Comedy and irony both rest on this step backward. I often see more clearly from somewhere else, as someone else. And in that imagined other, I sometimes find what I may have been hiding from myself. In the free play of the imagination, in the words that rise from unconscious sources, as well as in the bodily rhythms that accompany the act of writing a novel, I am able to discover more than I can when I simply try to remember. This is not a method for disguising reality but for revealing the truth of experience in language.

In my first novel, The Blindfold (1992), I took my own first name and reversed it for my narrator: Iris. She was given my mother’s maiden name as her last name: Vegan. I placed her in the apartment where I once lived: 309 West 109th Street. I robbed some close friends of mine of their various characteristics and mixed them together with fictional ones, and I used parts of my own experience as a patient in the neurology ward of Mount Sinai Medical Center. But Iris’s adventures are not mine. I invented them. They came to me as necessary, as true, but they are fictions. And yet, there were those, including a close friend of my parents, who were certain that everything had happened exactly as it was related in the book. I have been told that inhabitants of the town where I grew up have amused themselves by identifying every single character in my second novel, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), with real people in the town. Although the book’s Webster is a fictional version of Northfield, Minnesota, and there are several minor characters based on actual persons, many, including all the main characters, were born of my imagination. Throughout my fiction I have borrowed bits and pieces from my life and the lives of others and reimagined, combined, condensed, and reconstituted them, but this is a far cry from telling my life story. In the autobiographical essays I have written and in the single memoir (which is less about me than about medicine, diagnosis, and what illnesses of the mind-body might mean), I have honored the pact of nonfiction with the reader—which is simply not to lie knowingly.

And, however unreliable our memories may be, we can tell the difference between our present given reality—the chair on which I am sitting now before my computer in my study as I write this essay—and the world of my fantasies, which I inhabit when I write a novel and am sitting in the very same chair. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues in The Phenomenology of Perception, “the normal subject” does not confuse the phenomenal present with the potential space of the imagination.21 I would say it like this: unless we are mad, we can recognize the difference between the here and now and the mental there and elsewhere of remembering and fantasizing.

But robbing one’s own memory for fiction can have a peculiar effect on the recollection itself. In his memoir, Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov addresses this change.

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone, and presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the artist.22

I have noticed this myself. Once a person or place or even just parts of those persons and places from the past have been transplanted into a novel, the fictional transformation can at times subsume the memory, but it happens only when the person or place is no longer a part of your daily experiences. Once, years after I had written my first novel, I met the original model for one of my characters in a restaurant. We chatted amiably and, when we parted, and I was about to say good-bye to him, the name of the character appeared in my mind before his real name, and I had to suppress the former. I almost said good-bye to a figment. This slip of the tongue, which I fortunately censored in time, revealed not only that the book had, to one degree or another, supplanted my memory of him, but that my emotional connection to the novel, to the writing of it, and to the character I had made, had become in some way more real to me than the man himself. As Kristeva puts it when she is writing about Proust, the beaten man, and the flagellant’s reappearance with another face in fiction: “what is experienced gradually becomes what is represented.”23 And word representations are different from both mental images and sensory experiences. Don’t we all have memories that have hardened into stories? We remember how to tell the story, even though the sensations and pictures that accompanied it have begun to fade. The words master a dimming past.

Proust’s dream was to bring back the past, not to cheat time so much as reincarnate it and its vicissitudes as it surged back into the real present, and he wrote and wrote and wrote, and the writing was an active, aching search for bringing then into now. Johannes the Seducer, a character in Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, has a similar wish:

It would be of real interest to me if it were possible to reproduce very accurately the conversations I have had with Cordelia. But I easily perceive that it is an impossibility, for even if I managed to recollect every single word exchanged between us, it is nevertheless out of the question to reproduce the element of contemporaneity, which actually is the nerve in conversation, the surprise in the outburst, the passionateness, which is the life principle in conversation.24

To long for the immediacy and presence of what we have lost is human. What we retain from that former time in words, images, and feelings is not stable. Only rarely can we measure our memories against documentary evidence and, even then, our phenomenological perspective is missing—the “I” who is experiencing the family gathering, the sailboat, the dinner party. For memory itself exists only in the present. I remember Arne Krohn Nilsen. He was my history teacher during the year I spent in Norway when I was twelve and turned thirteen. I am calling him forth now. He had remarkably long eyebrows that reminded me of sprouting plants, and he moved in a jerky, awkward way, and he could be very irritable with the children, who poked fun at him in his absence. But I loved him. I cannot summon him whole, not in an inviolable present, not as he was in 1967. And yet, what if he returns as a character in a work of fiction? Then he might find a new reality, an immediacy and presence born of a recollection that moves forward rather than backward. That is the magic of fiction. Great memoirs also partake of a vivid re-experiencing, a re-seeing of the past that is also a fantasy, but it is nevertheless true to the present self, the one who recalls hoarfrost on a window long ago and, with that image, experiences an intense feeling of melancholy.

Just as memoirs may lie by borrowing hackneyed forms and spouting nothing but received knowledge, novels can do the same. And both genres can reveal small or large truths about what it means to be human. Perhaps my most gratifying moment as a novelist occurred after I had published What I Loved. I read from the book in Iowa City, and when the reading was over, a woman came up to me and said she had a verbal message for me from her father. She explained that like the novel’s narrator, Leo Hertzberg, her father was a Jew who had been born in Berlin. He had fled the Nazis with his parents, first to London, but had eventually ended up in the United States. He was now living in Florida. The message was: ‘Tell her I am Leo.’”

Of course, this cannot be true in any literal way, despite the similarities between the fictional and the true story. Leo recounts his early life only briefly, and it takes up very little of the book. The woman’s father was speaking to some other reality, one of feeling, perhaps a feeling of exile and grief. I don’t know. What I do know is that in my own life as a reader, I, too, have felt I was the narrator of a novel. I also know that, like Rousseau, I have taken those people and their stories into myself, and they have changed who I am. Fictions are remembered, too, and they are not stored any differently in the mind from other experiences. They are experience.

2010