Fidelity To Fact in the Memoir: The Necessity of Reshaping Recollected Emotions

I'm concerned with the conflict between fidelity to the facts and fidelity to emotion when writing - emotions recollected in the *relative* tranquility of the present. How to balance these conflicting fidelities? Render as factual an account as posible of the facts? Or, be true to your emotional memory?. These two aims will fight each other, often without a winner, resulting in a bloody battle where everyone is ends up injured, a loser. In both cases, you are attempting in frustration and futility to capture the truth of something. You try so hard to find out what really happened and what you really felt at a given point in the past, and you find this is like trying to catch the wind or step on your own shadow.

In many cases it's OK and perhaps necessary to reshape facts and events, to give them some sort of form, maybe even mess with chronology (perhaps even impossible not to), if 1) this is acknowledged and the reader knows you may be playing with the truth, accepts the fact that a story is not the same thing as pure recounting of the facts and participates in a 'willing suspension of disbelief' ; and 2) it adds to the artistic design of your piece.

Often, the facts as they happen in the past are barely coherent because we are too much alive (or maybe unconscious) in them to be so reflective. When the "facts" occur we are in a sense part of that fact, inseparable from it. As we look at them now, we may not remember them exactly as they happened, and the way things really happened may not add to a particular truth we are trying to convey right now with our wiser self. These past events may have been chaotic, irrational, and may even lack the form needed to be understandable. The very process of remembering facts renders the actual events amorphous, inchoate. So, reshaping an account of the past to fit the current state of your own artistic imagination Now might not only be all right, but even necessary to achieve the truth of the memory. I don't mean lie, as we're used to thinking of the word as meaning a deceitful deception, but recreate the past in a way that leads to understanding. In a court of law, we may be guilty of perjury, but in the memoir, we might have found a deeper truth.

In this process, it might very well be necessary to fictionalize yourself, mythologize who you are. Not romanticize, mind you, but see yourself as a character. Your own face as you conceive of it is a mask, the mask of a character you can control. You see now the face of a young child you were in grade school, soft, pudgy, dirty, flittering a 100 different emotions in the course of an hour. You see the face of you as a teenager, a wife, a husband, a father, a teacher. A nearly endless gallery of masks to choose from. All yours, under your control, to use as you see necessary.

The Me I look back upont rarely resembles me now, so that self is already a fiction. When I write about him, he is a character. Often in journals I will use myself as a character and follow certain paths to their conclusion to imagine how I might have turned out had I made other choices. I may be teetering in the edge of fiction, but this power to create liberates him from his own fate.