Philip Graham is a professor of English and the director of the English department's Creative Writing Program. He is the author of two short-story collections and a novel, and a co-author with Alma Gottlieb of a prize-winning memoir of Africa. He also is the fiction editor of Ninth Letter, a journal of literature and the arts, published at Illinois. He was interviewed by News Bureau Humanities Editor Andrea Lynn.
Is there a difference between a memoir and an autobiography?
Some writers and critics seem to use the two terms interchangeably, though "memoir" is perhaps becoming the contemporary word of choice. But there remain distinctions. An autobiography tends to be more ambitious, particularly in the range of what an author examines-one's full life (or as much of it as possible), as opposed to a treatment of a particular era of one's biography, which is more typical of memoir. This nomenclature is complicated by a recent term, "creative non-fiction," which is now being used to define a broad range of non-fiction work: travel writing, memoir, natural history, etc. The "creative" part of the term is meant to refer to the voice of the author, the interpretive eye that arranges and holds in place the facts of a subject, the memories of a life.
How rigid are the conventional guidelines for autobiographical writing?
No literary rules or guidelines have ever been legislated by any legal body, no literary police will come knocking on your door in the middle of the night. So any commitment to following conventions of truthfulness in autobiographical writing is the decision of any individual author. How can one accurately remember, for instance, a conversation that took place 10 or 15 years ago? What's most important, I believe, is to try to come as close to the elusive truth of the past as possible.
When my wife, Alma Gottlieb, and I co-wrote our memoir of Africa, "Parallel Worlds," we carefully referred to Alma's field notes, letters I had written, photos we'd each taken, and ordinary events (the weather, what we'd eaten for dinner) recorded in daybooks. Often we found our memories of events at odds with what we'd recorded at the time, and so we had to adjust accordingly. We're about to write a second volume, "Braided Worlds," and I expect we'll encounter similar tussles with memory.
Have traditional standards softened through the years?
There's always been controversy over what constitutes "truth" in autobiography. Memory, as we all know, can often be an unreliable companion, and an honest writer of non-fiction struggles daily with how best to re-create events. What could be more authentic about a writer than the choices she makes about how to represent her life, what stories to include, which to exclude, how to order them, how to interpret them? If a writer has a tendency to inflate his accomplishments in his private view of himself, then those exaggerations will very likely make it, unfortunately but revealingly, to the page.
Lillian Hellman, near the end of her life, wrote a series of memoirs ("An Unfinished Woman," "Pentimento," and "Scoundrel Time") that were regarded by some readers as overly embellishing the facts of her life. The writer Mary McCarthy famously said of Hellman's memoirs: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " Hellman responded by suing McCarthy, a lawsuit that only ended with the death of Hellman at the age of 79. Recently, the memoirist Lauren Slater caused a stir with her book "Lying," in which she left it an open question how much she had made up, imagined of her life.
Is there a lesson for readers in the revelations about "A Million Little Pieces?"
Buyer beware. James Frey is an easy target because he so egregiously invented events. In fact, he initially tried to sell his book as a novel, and only met success when he marketed it as memoir. I've met a number of people recently who've read "A Million Little Pieces" and claimed that they had their doubts about a number of sections of the book. While this may be 20/20 hindsight, there is something like a smell test: When you're reading a memoir, if it seems too comfortably true, perhaps something is amiss. Life is too messy, too filled with surprises and uncomfortable truths, to be easily shaped and packaged.