To Tell the Truth

Guest Post by Wayne E. Groner

A common oath for courtroom witnesses is: “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” While witnesses may still raise their right hands, the use of a Bible in taking the oath has mostly gone out of favor in deference to a variety of non-Christian religious beliefs. The word God is deleted for Atheists and Muslims.

Rotary International encourages members to use its Four-Way Test in all personal and business matters: Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned?

Which brings me to memoirs; to what extent are writers of memoirs required to tell the truth? After all, a memoir is a collection of remembrances, not an exercise in journalism. The best memoirs tell good stories with conflicts, lessons learned, issues resolved or not, and changes that bring growth. Can a memoirist accurately and fairly remember all that stuff, especially the dialogue? And do readers really care?

Storytelling has its extremes. Local and regional liars’ clubs encourage the telling of tall tales for fun. Mary Karr, in The Liars' Club: A Memoir, tells of “a terrific family of liars and drunks” with tidbits and chunks of redeeming truths. Some critics claimed to be unable to tell whether, in some cases, Karr is retelling a fabrication or creating one. James Frey was embarrassed by the national media when it revealed much of his bestseller, A Million Little Pieces, was made up; Oprah Winfrey publicly rebuked him for lying after she initially praised him. A lot of movies are declared to be based on true stories. Based on are the operative words; many of the opening credits should include, “Some of the following is true.” Does memoir qualify as creative nonfiction, that ambiguous and relatively new term for using fiction writing techniques to tell true stories? Lee Gutkind posits creative nonfiction encourages personal viewpoint and conjecture.

Ben Yagoda and Dan DeLorenzo, writing for the Nieman Storyboard project at Harvard University, declared there are no simple answers for the complex questions surrounding truth in memoirs. That said, they tried to take on the problems of memoir inaccuracies by constructing a scoring system, a system they admit is half-facetious and half-serious. They rate inaccuracies according to their negative reflections on people, living or dead; corroboration of facts; questionable dialogue; clichés and flat writing; and self-deprecation. A passing score is 65 out of 100. They applied their scoring to nine memoirs from the year 397 to 2009. Ernest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast received a 69, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces got 29, and Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue: An American Life got 69. Read the full scoring report and download a printable worksheet to evaluate your memoir. It is a subjective process, since we are all biased about our own work, but it could prove insightful.

What does all this mean for today’s writers of memoirs? If you want to be accepted and respected then you must be as accurate and truthful as possible. What does it mean for today’s readers of memoirs, who are the final judges because they approve or reject memoirs based on what they buy? As Yagoda and DeLorenzo said, “. . . an informed reader has to make the call.”

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Wayne E. Groner is a personal historian and memoir writing coach who blogs at www.waynegroner.blogspot.com

How Will They Ever Know?

It took me a second to recognize the Skype ringtone. Knowing it must be Susan calling from New Zealand,  I ran to my computer. We talked for a few minutes about the people she met whose home was destroyed in the earthquake. It’s in the Red Zone and can’t be rebuilt. She mentions that everywhere they go, Kiwis swarm around and strike up conversations. “They are so friendly, so unlike your average American! I love it down here!”

The girls told me they baked chocolate chip biscuits (British word for cookies) with their babysitter last night. They told me about other new words, like riding in lifts (elevators), and pushing trolleys through the grocery store.

When we hung up I had goose bumps. My girls are literally on the other side of the world, and we had just had a real-time video chat. Fifty years ago a computer-based video chat was beyond imagining.

I had goose bumps. The girls take it for granted, much like I took telephones, radios, flush toilets and electric lights for granted, but my grandmothers didn’t. What could I do to let these little girls know what life was like before WiFi, iPhones, and Homeland Security?

How can I clue them in that there was a time when anyone could walk out onto the runway to see someone off on a flight? How do I tell them about lighting stoves with matches, and the pleasure of standing on a floor furnace with hot air ballooning out your skirt? How will they ever know about 45 rpm vinyl disks that held only one song? What about typewriters? Or making cakes from scratch?

You already know the answer: I can write stories! I can write stories with detail rich scenes, dialog and tension-laden plots. These kids are not going to read how-to manuals.

"“How do you make a story about getting on an airplane exciting?” you ask. Adventure is a matter of perspective. A question as simple as “What will happen if I make cake icing with regular sugar instead of powdered?” can create tension. Remember how you felt when you first sat down in front of a computer? Use your description skills to convey that awe. You certainly faced plenty of challenges getting it to do things!  I once read that many people feared electricity would gush into the room if they unscrewed the light bulb, and heaven only knew what would happen then! Wouldn’t you love to read a story written by someone who had faced that fear?

We live in a time of such change. I moved to Pittsburgh 26 years ago when the Monongahela River was lined with rusty abandoned steel mills. Today that real estate is covered with sparkling research and shopping centers. I never saw this area in the days when street lights were on all day if the mills ran at full capacity.

It’s entirely possible that ten years from now, half of all manufactured items will be made on 3D printers, completely revolutionizing industry and the world economy. Who will tell the story of what life is like now, and what it was like within our lifetimes? Does it matter? I think it does, and I believe it’s up to each of us to save our little piece of that history.

Write now: write a story about an amazing innovation in your life, like getting your own typewriter, or your first computer. Polish it up with description and a little dialogue – write your thoughts if no other people were involved. Send your story to somebody young, or somebody who will love the memories.

Writing Your Traveling Life

Anna meets a wallaby in Sydney

Trips pose a challenge when writing life stories and memoir. If they took place decades ago, unless you kept a journal and/or lots of photos, you may have trouble remembering even such broad details as where you went. Ask me about that – I’m among your numbers. After many tens of thousands of miles on the road here and abroad, I realize that I go along for the ride and enjoy the scenery, but pay little active attention to where I am at any given moment. I have impressions, but few specific memories.

More than once I’ve left home with a blank journal, intent on capturing trip details. Maybe my mistake was capturing too many details. My good intentions always fell by the wayside within three or four days, but the notes I did write are terrific. Not even the pictures are much help, because we never got around to labeling them, and after twenty years, who knows which village was which?

Since the advent of digital cameras and laptop computers, this has gotten better. Now that I’m taking my own photos, I pay more attention to where I am when I take them. Photos are great memory joggers. But they aren’t quite enough. Words help. Labels are better than nothing, but a few notes are even better.

Now that wireless connections are available all over the world, often free, the situation has improved. While the day’s photos download from camera cards, I take a few minutes to write an email to people back home with details of the day’s events, highlights and observations. If I’m not online, I save the email and add to it each day until I do connect. Of course I keep a copy when sending. That lets everyone know, more or less in real time, what we are doing, and it serves as a trip journal for me.

Our daughter has taken this one step farther. She is in New Zealand this month and next with her family while her husband teaches at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. Rather than trying to stay in touch by email or limiting contact to Facebook friends, she set up a blog and posts every couple of days, complete with several pictures. She’s not only sharing accounts of daily life down there, she’s serving as an ambassador for New Zealand with her humorous tales.

Everyone they know and hundreds more are following the adventures of the Mack family, and such adventures they are. The Chilean volcano ash cloud caused them to be rerouted through Sydney, Australia where they were delayed four days en route to New Zealand. After learning to drive on the other side of the road, they are learning their way around the massive earthquake detours in Christchurch. Their six-year-old daughter was attacked by an indigenous parrot in a wild-life park. Both girls are learning to ski (it’s winter down under). I’d love and follow that blog even if she weren’t my daughter, and you are all invited to follow it too.

There is one factor to consider before going this public with your travel reports. Security. She can do this safely because a house sitter is living in their home and feeding their great big dog. I don’t have this sort of protection, and my house is secluded in woods. I would not feel safe letting the whole world know I’m on the other side of it, so I’ll stick with emails to people I know and trust.

Write now: pull out pictures from a vacation and write about the trip. Tell it all, the good, the bad and the ugly. 

Fireflies and the Power of Story

What else holds the fascination of fireflies? Once again they light the night with mysterious flashes. One unforgettable night a few years ago I glanced out the window and saw several dozen fireflies blinking their little hearts out. I'd never seen so many in our yard at once. and I stood transfixed. Watching this fascinating show. I soon noticed that they were flashing in cycles of six blinks in three seconds, then idling for about ten seconds before repeating the sequence. They weren’t moving around much. Once in awhile I saw one blink through the air like a plane approaching the runway, but most hovered in the same spot indefinitely.

Eventually I spotted a pattern involving maybe two dozen fireflies flashing a complicated sequence of blinks. This rhythmic frenzy of flashing started in the same place every ten to twelve seconds, and though it became intuitively predictable, it was too complicated to remember. Alien code? Could be! I thought of the light show and intergalactic concert ending of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, recalling how sound and light bridged the communication barrier between different life forms.

Nearly thirty years ago I discovered Theomatics, an arcane library book demonstrating that both Hebrew and Latin words can be converted to numerical values. So can light waves, sound waves, and even matter (using atomic weights). We all understand the concept of writing music on staffs, a form of graphical notation. Color could be graphed in a similar way, using the numerical values of specific color tones. It is hardly a stretch of the imagination to consider translating our thoughts to Latin or Hebrew and graphing numerical word values.

I envision mind-boggling symphonies of light and sound transmitting pure thought-waves, beaming light and love through the universe. Perhaps the firefly symphony I saw was a demonstration of this possibility — a demonstration conducted in yellowish green and black, much like early computer monitors.

My thoughts turn a corner to my writing groups, both local and online, formal and ad hoc. I think of our stories as dots of light, building bridges between people. They create a web of links between us wherever we are, and that web will grow larger as they shine forth to others. Each time we share stories, we create a symphony of life, with each story carrying part of the tune. I hear everything, from lullabies, to stirring storms, combining in perfect harmony, creating something greater than the sum of the parts. As we write and share, our stories show us life and the past from new angles, hopefully wiser stronger ones. We light each others lives by sharing hope, love and humor. My life is better for the writing and sharing.

I think of the song, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”, and edit it ever so slightly. “I’d like to teach the world to write, in perfect love and truth.” How could peace and harmony not result?

Write now: about fireflies, dreams, visions, love, peace, truth, or anything else noble and exalting that comes to mind. Share your story with at least one other person, maybe in email, maybe in person. Let your stories build bonds.

When Are You Ready to Publish?

I recently finished reading Meredith Baxter’s memoir, Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame, and Floundering. My initial reaction to the book was quite favorable, but upon reflection I realize that was primarily based on the fact that I personally related, though in a different context, to many of the things she was saying about her early life.

I was also pleased to discover that this book is not what I consider a typical celebrity memoir that sounds like it was cranked out by a publicist, full of name-dropping and plastic humility. Behind the glamor of stage life, Meredith’s life was rather ordinary.

The material is blazingly honest. She pulls no punches as she describes experiences with her stepdad, her drug abuse as an early adult, and the physical and emotional abuse heaped upon her and the children by her second husband, actor David Birnie. She berates herself as she reflects on the erratic thinking that led to her third marriage to a prescription drug addict she met at AA.

Finally she gets to the sensational part about the belated discovery of lesbian preferences and how she finally began to break through her own delusions to live a life of freedom, honesty, truth and love.

Basically, the book is about relationships and dysfunctional thinking. There is a lot to think about, and from that point of view, it’s a thought-provoking read for nearly anyone. From another point of view, I wonder if she may have rushed it to publication a bit quickly, or perhaps relied overly much on her editor/ghost-writer for advice. Three factors prompt these questions:

She begins the book by explaining that she has learned some valuable lessons and wants to write about them. She barely touches on those lessons. The primary focus of the book is her general cluelessness. In the final part she writes of glowing happiness with her partner Nancy, but there is almost nothing about her transformational process.

The second factor relates to the first. In the most satisfying memoirs, such as Glass Castle by Jeannett Walls, or Angela’s Ashes  by Frank McCourt, the dark times of abuse are told and concluded in way that demonstrates deep understanding and compassion for those who “caused the problems.” That sense of compassion seems to be lacking in Untied, which may be a sign that she has not fully resolved the underlying anger and hurt.

The lack of compassion may be the source of the hornet’s nest she stirred up. A bit of web research about the book disclosed that even before David Birnie pointed out in an interview that she didn’t appear to remember one single happy moment in all their years together, she told another reporter that she realized her words would cause David and his family great pain. She sounded a bit chagrinned, even apologetic, as if perhaps she hadn’t thought that through.

Many authors I know such as Linda Joy Myers (Don’t Call Me Mother), Heather Summerhayes Carriou (Sixty-five Roses), and Karen Walker (Following the Whispers) wrote five or more drafts and took at least ten years to complete their stories. It doesn’t have to take that long, but those piles of drafts and prolonged time of reflection give plenty of opportunity to consider multiple angles and other points of view as well as developing a full heart of compassion.

Baxter’s book was on bookstore shelves, available for purchase thirteen short months after she “came out” on Good Morning America and less than five years after she began her serious relationship with Nancy and began shedding the layers of secrecy and denial that had kept her locked in previous patterns. Her book, which she says took nine months to write, definitely has value, but if she had let the material age another year or few, her box wine story might have matured into a fine vintage one.

Write now: give deep thought to people you know who can be trusted to evaluate your work’s compassion index. Look for a trusted cluster of friends, preferably writer friends, who can challenge your assumptions and help you refine insights into the pure gold of wise compassion as you write.