8 .
TRUE CONFESSIONS
— TRUTH - TELLING

TRUTH, JOHN KEATS said, is a beautiful thing. ‘Truth is Beauty; Beauty, Truth.’ The words, so familiar, even commonplace, are thrilling every time they are fully considered. The idea that truth, by its nature, is beautiful and that beauty, by its nature, is truthful, is an irresistible one for any writer, any artist. It is poetic insight of the highest order, economical and encompassing at once. Perhaps it is ‘all ye know on earth and all ye need to know’. But for the memoirist, truth is rarely so beautifully poetic, especially in the beginning. It is complex, messy, confronting and fraught with dangers.

For a start, there are many reasons not to tell the truth. As another English poet, John Donne, said, ‘No man is an island.’ No woman either. You are part of a family, a circle of friends, a social or professional community, a country. All of these groups have varying levels of tolerance for the truth, and, without it being stated, you know the rules. You know not to tell your mother about your father’s affair because it would break her heart. You know to talk only about the happy side of life to a work colleague because that is all she wants to hear. You know that stating a particular political viewpoint will alienate half your school community. You know not to tell the truth every time you open your mouth. You and everyone else. In daily life,most people who are not sociopaths edit the things they say. It can be a difficult habit to break when you come to the page.

Not that it is simply a habit. It would be much easier if it were. Editing the self comes not just from a sense of what is appropriate, from obeying social rules, but also from a desire not to cause pain. If you write about the impact of being aware of your father’s affair when you were a teenager but not telling your mother, what is that going to do to your mother now? What will it do to your favourite aunt if you write about your uncle molesting you? What will your children feel if you write that you had never wanted to get married and have babies? The likelihood of hurting or upsetting family members is the strongest single argument against telling the truth.

Sometimes, with family and neighbours, it is not as serious as avoiding hurt, but simply the desire to avoid embarrassing someone,or a wish not to invade their privacy. There are many things hidden within families and many confidences given. Do you have the right to reveal information given to you in confidence, or even things you observed that may now be embarrassing to others? Do you have the right to tell the world your mother was an alcoholic, knowing it will mortify your very proper sister? What about revealing that the boy next door liked to wear girls’ nighties when he was little, knowing that he is now a federal politician? How far is too far?

In the wider community — in your work, school, sports group or church — there are practical reasons for not telling the truth. If people in your small country town knew you were gay, would they still attend your medical practice? If your church community knew you had a baby when you were fifteen,would they still treat you the same? It is not that you are hurting others in such revelations, but you may be affecting the way others respond to you.

There may also be legal and personal safety considerations putting pressure on telling the truth. One woman writing a memoir about a long mental illness was concerned that a particular doctor could sue her if she revealed what she considered his misdiagnosis. Another woman writing about her involvement with the African National Congress in the 1970s in South Africa was concerned her revelations about men who were now in power might endanger her or her children. A man writing about his clandestine missionary activity in China was worried he might be endangering the lives of the Chinese people who had helped him.

Sometimes the pressure is simply that you want to be ‘nice’.Women especially feel the pressure to smooth things over, to keep the peace, to make everyone feel comfortable. Virginia Woolf personified this pressure as ‘the Angel in the House’who was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred always to sympathise with the minds and wishes of other.For many women writing a memoir, this can be the least conscious but strongest pressure against truth-telling.

How can the truth be told when there are so many valid reasons not to? And do you always need to tell the truth anyway?

Truth-telling — some non-literary considerations

• Check your motives. I don’t mean literary motivations, such as whether the structure needs it, but personal motives. All memoirists probably have non-literary motives for some of the things they write — for example, to honour someone, to criticise someone, to give thanks. The writer is not exempt from responsibility to others, however, and some motives are clearly more just than others. What is the reason for revealing this piece of dirty underwear? If the story and themes concern dirty underwear, then by all means reveal it, but if the reason is to embarrass or inflict pain, then its inclusion might be reconsidered. The truth, the whole truth, is important and no one can go forward without it, but as American memoirist Annie Dillard said, ‘Writing is an art, not a martial art.’

• If the truth you have to tell will hurt others,weigh up its importance. This includes its emotional importance to you and its narrative or thematic importance. Does your story need the revelation about Aunt Kate’s much younger lover? Perhaps yes, if it shaped your own sense of sexuality, and perhaps yes, if it affected the family dynamic. There is no absolute answer, but if it is necessary to your purpose, include it; if not,weigh up whether your story can do without it.

• If you have decided the truth you want to write is important, consider how many people it will damage, and how severely. Include yourself in this tally. This is not to say that you should avoid the truth if the numbers are too high and the disruption too great, it is simply to say: be aware of it. You can decide whether you are prepared to weather the storm. Although truth, however subjective, is central to memoir, each writer needs to weigh up for himself if he is ready for emotional storms that could damage relationships with family and friends.

• Consider the unreliability of memory. Although memory is fascinating, complex and often the only truth we have, it is manifestly not a totally reliable witness. All of us are made of our memories, they constitute the fabric of ourselves, and it feels like a betrayal of self to question memory. But while a memory always has value, it is clear that not all memories are equally valid. At least allow room for other possibilities.

It may sound as if the truth is impossible; I mean only to acknowledge the difficulty. There is no point in dodging the taboos against the truth because they can prevent you from going forward with your writing. Facing them, you can continue. There are a few ways to tell the truth and survive.

Writing the truth

• The tone of voice you use will make a great deal of difference to how your truths are received. It’s not what she said; it’s how she said it. If your tone of voice is whining, accusing or bitter, then most people will find your words unpalatable, no matter how true. It is a curious fact that bitterness and self-pity, in particular, are universally unappealing — both imply that everything is someone else’s fault. If your tone of voice is clear and direct, then even unpleasant truths can be listened to. Of course, all this depends on your own relationship to the truth. If you still feel bitter about something, it’s not worth faking a relaxed tone of voice — it is rarely convincing. It might be best to try and work it out in the first draft.

• Say everything you want to say in the first draft — you can take it out later. If a particularly distressing episode feels too exposing to write — drunken father turning up at school and abusing your favourite teacher — tell yourself it is secret writing, that it is only for your eyes. If you want to scream and rant about something, even if you want to preach about something, do it in the first draft. It might mean that you go places you would otherwise not have gone; it might also mean that you realise it does not look so bad written down.

• Remind yourself that writing is not about being ‘nice’. The truth would never be told if everyone kept up a smooth and smiling front. Sometimes, the Angel in the House has to be locked in the wardrobe, at least during the first draft. Truth has more power than ‘nice’. (Although ‘nice’ in its rarely used sense of ‘most precise’ can be very powerful.)

• Remember that ‘the truth’ is not just about painful or unpleasant events. It can be just as difficult, sometimes even more difficult, to be truthful about happiness because, very often, happiness is not well observed. Even though it was Tolstoy who said it, I don’t agree that ‘all happy families are happy in the same way’. It is more that the details of happiness are not noted with the same attention as the details of pain. Try to write the details of happiness, of love and parental pride and delight, with attention to the particulars.

• Telling the truth, especially when it involves what has happened to other people in your life, can be a matter of finding your perspective, your relationship to the story. What happens to other people is not necessarily your business, but sometimes it is.What happened to your sister in Africa may be part of your story if it reveals a key aspect of your relationship to her. Find out what matters to you about the story and you will find your perspective and how to tell it.

• Consider the saving grace of humour. Many difficult topics can be written about — and read — more easily if there is a humorous or ironic approach. It doesn’t mean that you should be flippant about serious topics, but even the heaviest subject can have a humorous aspect. In Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs writes about his mother’s avid and destructive desire for fame with such humour that the reader can see the truth but does not have to feel judgmental:

Okay, now I need your honest reaction. Did it feel powerful to you? Emotionally charged?’ I knew the only correct answer to this question was,‘Wow. That really does seem like something you’d read in the New Yorker.’ She laughed, pleased.‘Really? Do you really think so? The New Yorker is very selective. They don’t publish just anyone.

• Admitting to your readers that your memoir is your version of events, your perspective, can be disarming. There are nearly always contending versions of events in any life, the more so when there is conflict, and admitting to this reality means that at least family and friends have some room to move. Being absolute is often irritating. Uncertainty is often more appealing and more believable than adamant assertion that will not hear of any other possibility.

• Talk to the people concerned if possible. It may not be possible, lack of communication may be part of the problem but sometimes, especially if people are given the chance to air their point of view, it can make it easier for you to write yours. Susan Varga says that she showed an early draft of her memoir, Heddy and Me, to her mother, who was upset at first by her daughter’s view of her. Varga showed her the manuscript again at proof stage and her mother was still bothered, but more fascinated by the process of a life becoming a story. When the book was published, her mother read it again and by now was thrilled to be the subject of a book. I am not saying everyone will be thrilled to be in your memoir, but people do change their responses. It can be worth persisting.

• Be aware of the difference between fact and truth. Any number of facts do not necessarily add up to truth; facts are true, but to contain truth they must convey some illumination, some insight. A manuscript I read recently contained endless facts about religious life, but it did not reveal to me any truthful insight about such a life. It is usually dull to include lots of facts about dates, times, places, and people that do not convey anything other than an accurate record.

• On the other hand, it is a good idea to check the facts, particularly information that is a matter of record. It can be embarrassing to get the facts wrong — I still squirm when I see the wrongly named church in one of my earlier books. More seriously, in some circumstances you could even be sued. However, if it is necessary to include a lot of factual material in your memoir, it is a good idea not to spend too much time on research — it is often very difficult to begin writing when you have spent a lot of time and energy on research. I find it better to write and leave gaps — to check the facts afterwards.

• Consider changing identifying details. This is generally not the best course of action as the people who know you will still be able to identify characters, and for the general reader it does not matter anyway; but if there is a risk of legal action, or of identifying someone who does not want to be identified for a good reason, then it might be worth changing details such as place names, dates, people’s names — if these details are not crucial to the story. In Whatever The Gods Do I changed the names of everyone because the child I was writing about was, by then, a teenager, and I did not want him to be embarrassed at school. I did not change any of the details of events or actions, as these were the essential facts of the story.

• Writing your memoir ‘as a novel’ to avoid the difficulty of exposing truth is often suggested but, as I have said, this is generally not a good idea. The memoir and the novel require allegiance to different kinds of truth; one to the truth of what actually happened, the other to the integrity of its structure. (See chapter 2 for further discussion of this topic.)

Too much information

There’s a phrase teenagers use if an adult tells them anything they find embarrassing — ‘too much information’. Stop right now, however much you want to tell me, I do not need to know these details. Trying to construct your perception of truth on the page can feel like walking a narrow line between ‘too much information’and skimming the surface. Memoir,by its nature, can easily tip over into details which, rather than enlightening the reader, make them squirm. These can be details about bodily functions, including sex, but can also be what feels like invasive information about parents, lovers or friends. The reader feels that the memoirist has gone too far.

On the other hand, it can be just as easy to avoid the truth by omission, by simply leaving out whatever feels too difficult. The reader is left sensing the gaps and feeling cheated that she has not been trusted with the truth. How far is too far? How to walk that line between too much and too little? For a start, maybe you want to make your reader squirm. That, I suppose, is a legitimate aim. If that is what you are interested in, why not push the boundaries of comfort?

Many memoirists at present are declaring the end of boundaries so that the reader can enjoy burping, urinating, scratching — all completely human activities, of course. If you want to include such details, it really is a matter of your intention, the effect that you want your memoir to have. If it is to impress upon the reader the banal physicality of life, for instance, or the absurd and comic nature of pretensions, then this is a necessary part of your material. The breaking of taboos has its place in memoir, but the more shocking the material, the more crucial the voice you use to convey it. Personally, I enjoy a contrast between tone and material, such as the contrast between the calm, correct voice and the startling sexual material of The Sexual Life of Catherine M by Catherine Millet.

It becomes problematic when ‘going too far’ is in emotional or psychological territory, especially when it involves, as it must, other people’s lives. Many times in class, students express their outrage that a writer has gone too far in exposing a mother’s faults or a lover’s inner thoughts. Outraging a sense of privacy can be more shocking than outraging a sense of propriety, but again, there are no hard and fast rules, for each person has a different sense of what is private. I can only say, follow your own sense of privacy, expose what you feel needs to be exposed, keep hidden what is not necessary for readers to know.

A sense of privacy should not, however, be used as an excuse for sweeping everything unpleasant under the carpet, or as an excuse not to trust the reader with difficult material. There is nothing so unnourishing, or unbelievable, as a memoir which gives only the light and sweetness of life. It is like eating fairy floss — pretty and fun to eat at a carnival, but unsatisfying and boring for a long-term diet. Sometimes you might have to push your sense of privacy — peek into the tent and see how the fairy floss is manufactured — the oily machinery and sweaty arms. Sometimes you have to give yourself a push into the taboo territory.

That’s not to say that everything ought to be exposed in great detail. Going into too much detail can become self indulgent (see chapter 9).What is not said can be as powerful, sometimes even more powerful, than what is said:withholding the full horror lets it expand in the reader’s mind, rather than it being constrained by your words. In Skye Rogers’Drink Me, she is restrained about the mother of her boyfriend, only letting the reader see that she sweeps compulsively, day and night. The reader is left to conjecture what this might mean. Rogers respects the privacy of his family while giving the reader a useful glimpse. This kind of brief image — words that suggest more than they say — can be very effective when you do not want to expose others to scrutiny but still want to tell the truth.

Truth and glitter

A photograph can make the most banal of scenes look ‘interesting’ or ‘romantic’. The stilling of the flux of life, the choice of light and the framing, give the illusion of completeness, an ordinary life made into art. It is just as easy to over-polish experience with words and make it so ‘shiny’ that it no longer bears much relationship to raw reality. Truth is a slippery creature and it can just as well hide itself in pleasing language as in avoidance or self-indulgence. The more experienced and skilled you become as a writer, the more temptation there is to give everything the frame and gloss of a photograph.‘I seal loose ends with cadenced prose and add glitter where I know things were quite lustreless,’ comments American writer Andre Aciman in his essay,‘Lies Sweet Lies’.

It is not to say that this is necessarily a bad thing — beauty is truth, after all. But perhaps beauty can be emptied of truth. Perhaps it can happen that when beauty is the aim, truth can be lost and beauty becomes over-elegant and formal. Sometimes what is required, as an earlier American writer, Henry Miller, said, is ‘a gob of spit in the face of Art’. There is a raw energy, a fierceness of experience, which can be lost when you focus entirely on the words. Then you may need to write with your heart and with your gut, pegging the bloody mess out on the page without concern for appearance. Write wildly, fiercely, unrestrainedly, disturbingly, passionately. Write without respect, write inappropriately, scream if you want to. Write with only the fierce discipline of the desire for truth to guide you.

In any case, it is always difficult to know the truth, especially about yourself. Each one of us has a preferred version of ourselves and even in our secret moments we can entertain that version quite satisfactorily. We can maintain it for years too; Chilean writer Isabel Allende wrote a story, Tosca, about a woman who managed to maintain an illusion for her whole life about the ‘Great Love’ for which she had abandoned her loving husband and child. Even when the facts contradicted her, she held onto the myth of her life. Such a feat is not uncommon. There are doubts about the adequacy of the self,which we can cunningly hide even from our own conscious awareness. Perhaps all writers write to build a screen against that doubt. As Andre Aciman says,‘We write about our life, not to see it as it was, but to see it as we wish others might see it, so we may borrow their gaze …’

Still, the truth, however one imagines it, seems to me to be something worth trying for. Despite the quicksands of ‘too much information’ and the glossy shine of the stylish facade, there is a way through which is yours alone. There is the possibility of putting down on the page what I inadequately term ‘a real relationship with what is’.Where does this possibility lie? It comes when you let go the desire to impress, the greatest pollutant of the truth. The desire to impress others with our cleverness, sensitiveness, awareness, insight, begins by muddying and ends up supplanting the desire for truth. If you can write free of that desire, then you have a good chance of writing clear, passionate truth. You will recognise it when you have, even if you have never seen it before. It will have a beauty that is unmistakable.

READING

Running with Scissors

by Augusten Burroughs

She stood up from the sofa and walked slowly across the white shag carpeting, as if finding her mark on a sound stage.‘I’m hysterical?’ she asked in a smooth, low voice. ‘You think this is hysterical?’ She laughed theatrically, throwing her head back.‘Oh, you poor bastard. You lousy excuse for a man.’ She stood next to him, leaning her back against the teak bookcase. ‘You’re so repressed you mistake creative passion for hysterics. And don’t you see? This is how you are killing me.’ She closed her eyes and made her Edith Piaf face.

My father moved away from her. He brought the glass to his lips and took a deep swallow from his drink. Because he’d been drinking all evening, his words were slightly blurry. ‘Nobody’s trying to kill you, Deirdre. You’re killing yourself.’

‘I wish you’d rot in hell,’ she spat. ‘I regret the day I ever married you.’

While they were fighting, I was sitting at the dining room table fastening and unfastening the lobster claw clasp on the gold chain my mother had bought me in Amherst. I worried constantly that it would fall from my neck. And the only thing that reassured me was to test its dependability over and over again. I glanced up and said,‘Can’t you two stop fighting. You always fight and I hate it.’

‘This is between me and your father,’ my mother said coldly.

‘No it’s not,’ I shouted with surprising volume. ‘It’s not just between you because I’m here too. And I can’t stand it. All you ever do is scream at each other. Can’t you just leave each other alone? Can’t you try?’

My mother replied,‘Your father is the one who is making things difficult for us.’

Eventually the fight moved next door to the kitchen, providing them with better lighting as well as potential weapons.

‘Look at your damn face,’ my mother said.‘You’ve got the face of a man twice your age. Thirty-seven years old going on eighty.’

My father was very drunk by now and the only way he could imagine restoring silence to the house was to stop my mother from breathing.

‘Get your damn hands off me,’ my mother screamed, struggling against my father’s hands, which had found their way around her neck.

‘Shut the hell up, you bitch.’ His teeth were clenched.

I had followed them into the kitchen, and was standing in the doorway in my Snoopy pyjamas.‘Stop!’ I screamed. ‘Stop this!’

In one motion, my mother shoved my drunk father, sending him reeling backward against the kitchen counter. His head hit the dishwasher on the way down and when he made contact with the kitchen floor, he didn’t move. A small pool of blood began to form under his ear and I was sure he was dead.

‘He’s not moving,’ I said, moving closer.

‘The spineless bastard is only playing another one of his pitiful games.’ She nudged his bad knee with her red toe. ‘Get up, Norman. You’re frightening Augusten. Enough of your pranks.’

My father eventually sat up, leaning his head against the dishwasher.

With disgust, my mother tore a Bounty paper towel from the roll and handed it to him. ‘I should just let you bleed to death for terrifying our son like that.’

He pressed it against the side of his face to absorb the blood.

Seeing that my father was still alive, I was now worried about my mother. ‘Please don’t hurt her,’ I said. ‘Please don’t kill her.’ The problem was that my father’s unemotional nature scared me. There was a difference between the calm expression of the man on a jar of Taster’s Choice coffee and the blank expression my father wore. I was afraid he was, like my mother said, bottled with rage, ready to snap.

Again, I leaned forward. ‘Please don’t kill her.’

‘Your father isn’t going to kill me,’ my mother said, switching on the front burner of the stove, pulling a More from her pack, and leaning over to light it on the heating coil.‘He’d rather suffocate me with his horribly oppressive manipulation and then wait for me to cut my own throat.’

‘Will you please just shut the hell up, Deirdre?’ my father said, weary and drunk.

My mother smiled down at him, blowing smoke through her nostrils. ‘I will please shut the hell up the day you please drop the hell dead.

’ I was seized with panic. ‘Are you going to cut your own throat?’ I asked her.

She smiled and held out her arms.‘No, of course not. That’s just a figure of speech.’ She kissed the top of my head and scratched my back.‘Now, it’s nearly one in the morning; way past your bedtime. You need to go to sleep so you can be ready for school in the morning.’

I walked off to my room where I selected an outfit for school and carefully arranged it on hangers at the front of the closet. I would wear my favourite polyester tan pants and a blue shirt with the vest cleverly sewn on. If only I had a pair of platform shoes the outfit would be complete.

Still, knowing my clothes were ready gave me a sense of calm. I could control the sharpness of the crease in my double-knit slacks, even if I couldn’t stop my mother from hurling the Christmas tree off the porch like she did one winter. I could polish my 14k gold-plated signet ring with a Q-tip until the gold-plating wore off even if I couldn’t stop my parents from throwing John Updike novels at each other’s heads.

So I became consumed with making sure my jewelry was just as reflective as Donnie Osmond’s and my hair was perfectly smooth, like plastic.

In Running with Scissors, Burroughs pulls out all stops as he re-creates the instability first of his parents, then the even more insane household of his mother’s psychiatrist where he spent his adolescent years. He writes with sometimes unpalatable or harrowing detail, but holds his readers every moment with his humour. He goes to the heart of the monsters in his childhood, observes everything, right down to the brand names, and examines himself with the same truthful, sardonic eye. Read this memoir for its searing and comic truthfulness.

WRITING EXERCISES

1. Secret writing

Simply write about yourself, some incident, something you have done or thought which does not incriminate anyone else, but you prefer no one knew about. Write with the full knowledge that no one is ever going to see it. It is not going to be part of your memoir. Notice the freedom you feel knowing there will be no judgment of the incident, no evaluation of the writing. You can even destroy it when you are done. But before you do, read it through. See if there is anything in it worth salvaging. (20 minutes)

2. Opening the closet

Write an episode that you know someone you care about would not like you to write. It may involve them or just you. Again, remind yourself that no one need see this piece of writing. When you are finished, clarify whether you want to include the incident in a memoir, and why or why not. (20 minutes)

3. Breaking taboos

Write about a topic that makes you squirm. It can be anything from bodily functions to embarrassing flaws. Write it twice, once from a serious or, if you like, impartial perspective, once from a humorous perspective. Try being ironic, try exaggerating. (10 minutes each)

4. Happy days

Write about an experience that carries strong positive emotions — anything from parental pride to love to happiness. This might sound like an easy exercise, but generally it is even more difficult to write about happy times because, very often, they are less well observed than unhappiness. Try to avoid generalities, instead noting precise details of the experience. (20 minutes)