Does It Have to Be Memoir?

By Beth Kephart






In the end, we make it. We craft the poem, we THE END the novel, we choose the cover art that will announce our work. No matter which pronouns we’ve used, no matter how many autobiographical facts we’ve either deployed or disguised, no matter how we defend or announce ourselves in our gussied-up flap copy, the books by us begin with us; they are personal. There is always the glimmer of an I standing in plain sight.



Having written and taught memoir for more than thirty years, I understand the impulse—better than I sometimes wish—to uphold the I as a verifiable I, to go to market with a memoir. The true story can, after all, be nearly anything at all—splinters, streamers, details, arcs—so long as it is true. But sometimes, even after years of work, the memoir we think we have been writing simply wants to buck the truth. It wants to suppose. It wants to bend. It needs a dose of artifice. It’s just not interesting anymore. It’s stuck inside its cage.



If that’s the case—if your memoir has become not an odyssey but a job, not a fervent search but a grinding duty—why not set it free? Why not liberate your best true stories by exploring other forms?



Think Ocean Vuong. Think Francisco Goldman. Think Vaddey Ratner. The first made, of his personal history and his great love for his mother, the art of the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous . The second transformed the harrowing sudden death of his new wife into Say Her Name , a book he sold as fiction. The third recreated the trauma of her experience with the Khmer Rouge into the transporting In the Shadow of the Banyan , also a novel. These three authors are among the many authors (Claire-Louise Bennett, Sheila Heti, Lisa Halliday, to name a few) who gave themselves the freedom to write toward emotional truths without lashing themselves to the absolutes of mindful autobiography.



Throughout my nearly forty-book career I’ve swerved from personal memoir to a river’s memoir that felt more true than anything that had preceded it. I wrote a wild corporate fable (with a chief executive officer friend) that encapsulated so many of my years spent writing annual reports and vision statements and executive talks without betraying a single confidence or company policy. I wrote a middle-grade novel called Undercover which is, in all the most important ways, the story of my teenaged years that I would never write as memoir, and I once wrote a young-adult novel called The Great Upending that features two young people I loved, on a landscape I loved, with a message that, had it been written into a memoir, might well have come off as a screech.



Finally, in November, my newest book, My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera, was released—a book in which memoir sits alongside deeply researched history, and in which the narrative adhesive is a series of letters written to a man I never met, a paper adventurer named Dard Hunter who died in 1966.



Every book I’ve written, in other words, began as something true—a memory I had, a problem I faced, a regret I couldn’t neglect, some kind of beauty I wanted to hold onto, some question that needed to be answered, or at least heeded. Writing beyond the truth hasn’t just given me room to go deeper and farther than the facts sometimes allowed. It has also returned me to memoir, and to memoir teaching, with a greater respect for the possibilities of form, and tense, and attitude.



In the end, the words we’ve written are the words we’ve written. We claim them. They claim us. If memoir has become, for you, too small a space within to dream, consider the novel, the watercolor, or the poem.



__________



Beth Kephart is an award-winning writer and teacher and a paper artist. More at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com. Please join her for her upcoming Craft Talks presentation, Does It Have to Be Memoir? Reimagining Your True Story , April 3rd at 2PM Eastern time (yes, there’s a recording!)