ESSAY

At the Crossroads of Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

A gifted writer who began an MFA program the same year I did dropped out her first term when it became clear that she couldn’t reconcile her calling to tell the absolute Truth (capital T) and the program’s emphasis on good storytelling. I was part of the group that critiqued her work. Over lunch we discussed the critique, which had left her confused and defensive.

As we ate our salads, I tried to explain what I thought had happened in the session.

“I think the problem is that you’ve told the end of the story—that you were reconciled to a loved one’s death—before you ever tell us the story of how you got there. Most of us don’t reach a point of reconciliation without some struggle. As you write it here, you walked out of his room and immediately came to a sense of lasting peace.”

She stared at me. “But that’s how it happened.”

“No battling at all? No fighting the reality of the situation?”

She shook her head. “I’m a Christian.”

“Okay.” I paused, seeking words that wouldn’t offend. “But then where’s the story?”

She pondered for a moment. “Then I chose my life work, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”

At that moment, I perfectly understood the thesis of Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, a book I happened to be reading at the time. My friend was relating the situation—a chronology of the death of someone close to her and her acceptance of it—but failing to get at the story: the meaning behind the situation. She had given us little background about this relationship and never discussed why the loss of this person led to the subsequent decisions she narrated. As a result, her readers felt cheated, as if someone had ripped out the most important pages of a “who done it” and left only the dénouement. By a certain age, we’ve all experienced loss. What we are looking for is illumination and the process of reaching it, in the hope that it will ease our own journey into meaning. My friend was leaving out anything that made her story unique or memorable, and consequently she failed to engage her readers.

“Could you provide some dialogue between you and his mother to help illuminate what happened?” I asked, remembering what she had told me about their deep and loving relationship and its impact on her decisions. She shook her head.

“No, because I don’t remember the exact words.”

“You can’t recreate a dialogue based on memory?”

She shook her head again. “Absolutely not. That wouldn’t be the truth.”

“But isn’t ‘truth’ more than just the exact words that two people spoke to each other? Isn’t truth relative, in that it’s also about the impact of those words and not just the words themselves? There’s an emotional reality or ‘truth,’ if you will, that seems to be missing.”

She leaned forward and looked me in the eye, grasping my arm for emphasis. “Dixie, truth is never relative. What happened, happened. It wouldn’t be right to fabricate dialogue to explain the impact of that death on me.”

I went no further in the discussion. I didn’t want to hurt her, and it was clear that we weren’t speaking the same language. For her, truth was the factual recording of real events. If she couldn’t remember the color of the dress she was wearing at the time, she would not put herself in a red dress in the scene. Literal truth, factual events, a narrative of what happened and when it happened was all that she was willing to relate, lest she compromise the facts of what “really” happened.

In writing this little scene about our interaction, I have entered into the winding corridors of “creative” nonfiction. I have not written the factual “truth” because I didn’t audio-record our dialogue. But I remember being struck by how adamant she was about how she could—and could not—write her own story, and how it made me reflect on how I write my own.

While most of us aren’t addressing religious scruples, most of us who write personal narrative do struggle with where truth ends and fiction begins. Gornick herself was excoriated when she admitted in an interview that a scene in her widely acclaimed memoir was a series of scenes conflated into one event that capture Gornick’s emotional reality—the relative truth, if you will, of her relationship with her mother. Her mother undoubtedly would have an entirely different emotional experience. Writers don’t scruple to create an entire dialogue with only the remnants of childhood memory as a guide (after all, Frank McCourt wrote an entire memoir as a child’s stream of consciousness), but they had no problem expressing outrage at Gornick’s supposed betrayal of the factual truth, and there is no question that the controversy damaged Gornick’s reputation in literary circles for a time. Peter Selgin, fiction writer and memoirist, wrote, “It’s incredible to me that so many readers are so unsophisticated as to not understand that ALL writing is a construct; that, for a start, life isn’t made of words, and therefore can’t be faithfully ‘recreated’ using them. What we create on paper is a simulacrum, a construct, something that imitates and tries to capture the essence of an actual experience (in nonfiction, that is).” (Personal communication, April 2016)

The apparent lesson in this is that if fabricating anything in a personal narrative, you should either admit it up front or never admit it at all; and if incontrovertible evidence is supplied showing you were wrong about something you wrote, you should blame what Maureen Murdock calls “unreliable memory” as the culprit. One can otherwise take the route that Jeanette Walls took after the publication of her bestselling memoir, “The Glass Castle.” Her next book, “Half Broke Horses,” is her rendering of her grandmother’s story, written in the first person but subtitled “A True Life Novel” to avoid any need to defend the “creative” aspects of her “nonfiction”—perhaps a response to widespread criticism of the believability of certain scenes in “The Glass Castle.”

When do we draw the lines? When does “creative” nonfiction become “unacceptable” fabrication?

Musing about my own struggles with how to address literal fact and the ways in which we embroider it to our own ends leads me to offer the following story and its subsequent anatomy.

* * *

The Situation: The Story’s Anatomy

About eighty percent of Broken Wing is based on factual events recounted to me by my aunt and my grandmother. I wrote the story from the viewpoint of my Aunt Charlene (“Sissy,” changed here to “Sassy”), who was nine years my father’s junior. While my father rarely spoke to me about Korea, both my grandmother and my aunt told me about his behavior when he returned from eighteen months of fighting. I still don’t know the whole story, and I’m guessing that the full scope of his dysfunction was much worse than what is portrayed in this story. I fabricated the following “facts” in the story:

My aunt had an aunt who lived in Newton, Kansas, but never lived with her.
My aunt never stayed with her family in outfitters cars.

I built the story around factual events recounted to me by not just my aunt and my grandmother, but my father himself:

My father lived in outfitters cars between 1939 and 1940—not in 1950—while his father painted the Santa Fe stations along route 50. He was nine years old at the time—the age my aunt is in Broken Wing.
My grandfather was an itinerate house painter, and he moved his family constantly, never staying in one place for long. My father went to 38 schools before he graduated high school.
My father served in the Korean War. During that time, he went behind enemy lines with an Allied unit on a raid. The North Koreans were hunkered down, two to a sleeping bag, against the cold. The Allied unit waged psychological warfare by chloroforming one of the two men and slicing the throat of the other.
My father returned from the Korean War suffering from what was then called “shell shock.” He would grab my aunt against him and hide behind furniture at night when “hearing” the North Koreans approaching.
My grandfather had the chance to stay in Dodge City, Kansas working for a home builder and gaining some stability for his family, but didn’t want to work for someone else and left instead, family in tow, to pick crops.
My father hated the fact that his mother didn’t have a decent stove to cook on, and proceeded to buy her one on credit. He then left, leaving my grandfather to pay for it.
My father bit his nails, a habit begun in Korea along with smoking.
My father, as a child, bagged cow poop and set it on fire on the porch of a neighbor none of the kids liked, and rang the doorbell. The neighbor, opening the door and seeing the flames, proceeded to jump up and down on the bag to put out the fire. No additional description is necessary.

I wrote “Broken Wing” as fiction because I wrote it from my aunt’s perspective, and because I changed the chronology of the story of living in outfitters cars. Though she confirmed the events and felt that I had captured the sick terror that my father’s behavior at the time created in her, my aunt was horrified by the story. She would have preferred a happy—or happier—conclusion. That would have been further fictionalizing the story in a way that I didn’t find useful or meaningful, and I chose not to change the ending.

In an interview with national award winning fiction author Pat Carr, I asked how much of the material for her short stories comes from personal experience.

“About fifty percent,” she said. “My experience and the experiences of people close to me.”

An informal survey of friends and colleagues leads me to believe that most fiction authors would say the same. Fiction often begins with an element of truth—a factual event, for example—that the author then manipulates in order to create an engaging story. Ironically, many fiction writers express exasperation over the insistence of a gullible public that their fiction—particularly the more lurid aspects of it—must be based in some kind of truth.

The nonfiction writer has a more difficult task—convincing a gullible public that truth need not depend on incontrovertible fact in order to render an authentic story. This issue predates the contemporary rage for memoir.

Two generations of children have been reared on the “Little House” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, believing it to be fact. And most of it is. But the book Pioneer Girl: An Annotated Autobiography is a meticulously researched rendition by editor Pamela Smith Hill of the Ingalls family’s migration westward using diaries and public records to illuminate Wilder’s story line. What child would not be horrified to find out that the dog Jack was left behind in Indian Territory rather than faithfully following after the family as they made their way west? Or that “Pa” never held a job for long, leaving the family in ongoing poverty? It is a moot point that Ingalls herself elected not to tell those parts of the story; Pioneer Girl includes diary entries detailing discussions Ingalls had with her journalist daughter about how to craft an engaging story line that would get the book published. In fact, Ingalls was unable to find a publisher when simply giving a factual account of her admittedly extraordinary upbringing. Once she moved away from a factual recounting of events and developed the personalities of her characters more thoroughly through expressive dialogue and expanded scenes, her books found a market, and a passionate following that might well have surprised the author herself. The Ingalls books never claim to be anything other than fiction—although, in fact, the author never hid the autobiographical nature of the adventures of the Ingalls family. The fact that the author gave the protagonist her own name and based the characters on her own family members certainly suggested from the beginning that the books were based in fact.

The dialogue about factual truths and what I (and others) choose to call the emotional truth of a story is undoubtedly a healthy one. It is safe to claim that most literature is a hybrid of fact and fantasy, of what was and what might have been, of a kernel of reality spun into alternate universes, internal and external. No author, however wedded to the “truth” of factual events, ever renders it completely. I wrote Broken Wing in an attempt to explore the unspoken parts of my father’s story—parts that occurred long before I was born—that shaped his worldview and his subsequent behaviors, and that impacted our relationship in ways I am only now beginning to understand. I wrote it to open myself to greater compassion and understanding at a time when I felt only anger and grief. I will continue to call it fiction, but I can tell you that it is a far more authentic rendering of the truth than any piece of nonfiction I have yet written about him, “creative” or otherwise.

I like to believe that this is the value of our calling, that in writing my own emotional reality, I can bring the reader momentarily into relationship through a shared emotional experience. Rarely will the “facts” of a tale create that experiential “dialogue” between reader and writer; rather, it is the crafting of facts—their manipulation, if you will—that creates the emotional response in the reader. How far we can take factual truth before it becomes fiction is a moot point. Ultimately, whether working in the realm of fiction or of nonfiction, I write as I read: to know that I am not alone.