![]() For example, in their splendid joint memoir, “Back Then,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Justin Kaplan and his wife, the novelist Anne Bernays, describe their young adult lives in 1950s New York City. Such distortions are mostly inadvertent and benign. Personal biases can easily result in a self-serving omission or distortion of numerous facts and details that don’t support the autobiographer’s position.īesides the selective memory produced by self-justification and personal bias, there is another type of faulty memory that leads to inaccuracy. What political memoir doesn’t have an ax to grind? To read an autobiography is to enter into a subjective realm, where we often need to read against the grain and continually remind ourselves that, much of the time, we are seeing only part of the picture. The reader of a memoir about an ugly divorce might not want to accept the writer’s account of an ex-husband or ex-wife as totally honest or objective. As writers, we tend to extol what we like and condemn what we dislike, whether our subject is our personal relationships, cultural values or political beliefs. Our personal recollections are also filtered through our individual perspectives and worldviews. ![]() including those which were burned into his memory because he was ashamed of them.” Twain found his brother’s autobiography disappointing, but when he began to write his own, he recognized that his advice was impossible to follow: “I have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet.” The desire to make a good impression can easily defeat our determination to reveal the unvarnished truth about ourselves. to refrain from exhibiting himself in creditable attitudes exclusively and to honorably set down all the incidents of his life. Twain advised his brother to “try to tell the straight truth. When memoirists lie, they usually play it safe (as Frey unfortunately did not) by fabricating unverifiable private incidents, many of these prefaced by the now clichéd phrase, “Suddenly, I realized.”Īnother, and far more common, form of distorting the truth in autobiography was succinctly articulated by Mark Twain in a letter to his brother, who was attempting to write one. Most serious writers try to avoid using detailed public information that could lead to such unfavorable exposure. ![]() The first, of course, is by means of outright lies, but although such falsehoods are highly publicized, as we saw with the 2003 publication of James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” they are not as common as supposed. In the personal essay-and autobiographical writing in general-truthful accounts and historical facts can be distorted in several ways. “The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.” Robert Louis Stevenson, “Truth of Intercourse”
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