Literary Falsehoods

Passage A The path a historical novelist has to tread is clearly beset by dangers. One cannot have medieval characters using correct period language because no one would find the speech readable. Similarly, in depicting the lives of real individuals, authors must invent dialogue, as well as other details missing from the effect, the creation of a good narrative requires the telling of lies.

Nonetheless there is a clear and important distinction between telling lies and making mistakes. A lie is intentional and purposeful; a mistake is accidental and often unforgivable. The spectrum of historical fiction is therefore not as simple as “accurate equals good” and “inaccurate equals bad.” It depends on whether lies add to the story; mistakes detract from it.

Of course, some lies go too far and alienate the reader. Some are too obvious. But some lying is necessary, and to get away with it, one has to be both subtle and convincing. Shakespeare is a good model in this respect. He distorted the facts freely and knowingly makes the drama of human lives meaningful and memorable.

Passage B As a writer of autobiographical texts, I’m always astonished at how falsely I remember things, astonished at how unreliable memory is. And even when I know a memory is incorrect, part of my brain cleaves to the wrong, imagined memory. I hold two memories in my head, and the false me than the actual one. Which, then, is the truest memory?

It’s convenient when the actual events adequately convey the emotional experience, but sometimes they don’t and the writer has to choose. While I wouldn’t be so disingenuous as to argue that a false memory is valid simply because it is vivid, a subjective truth to it, an emotional truth.

Ultimately, lying is all but inescapable for a writer attempting to create an artistically coherent autobiography. One reads an autobiography to see how the writer experienced and evaluates his or her own life, and a biography to find a more objective view. If false memories have an emotional power misleading to omit them than it is to include them.

My argument grows strained and my tone shrill because I’m unhappy with the patently illogical and unethical position that practical experience has led me to. Nonetheless, the trust a reader brings to reading an autobiography is a trust in a convincingly told tale, not the trust one brings to a newspaper article fiction, and different writers will draw their lines on that ground in different places.