The latest installment of the L.A. Times’s Off the Shelf series features an essay by writer Maud Newton on why she’s writing a novel instead of a memoir. Newton describes how, as an adolescent, she always thought she’d write a tell-all True Story:
Pre-teen novels were my frame of reference. I envisaged a story in the downbeat, questioning vein of “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” or “My Darling, My Hamburger.” But unlike those books, mine would be true, and, because I could not see beyond the sphere of my own unhappiness, it would be called, “And You Think Your Family is Crazy.” I shudder to think of it now.
I guess it’s not surprising, in the Oprah era, that so many other people had the same idea. Nowadays bookstores are overrun with narratives that could be sold under exactly the title that so appealed to my adolescent self.
But as she began to write more, Newton began to see that fiction offered her a different way to write about her experiences:
At 19, at the University of Florida, I took a fiction class from the formidable Harry Crews. When Crews handed back an inchoate story I’d lamely based on my father, I could feel his scorn radiating off the paper. “The creation of a monster is not the creation of fiction,” he’d written, in all caps.
Crews taught me that an event doesn’t make for a resonant story merely because it’s weird and bad and actually happened; he helped me to see that the books I love most–such as Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair”–are powerful and moving because the author breathed life into them with words and hard work and imagination.
- Read a memoir by Maud Newton–and her novel excerpt that won the Narrative Prize.
- In these FWR interviews, we asked novelists to talk about taking material from life:
- Miles From Nowhere: A Conversation with Nami Mun
- Who We Are Now: A Conversation with Colson Whitehead
- Little Plots of Real Life: A Conversation with Lydia Davis
- Interview with Susannah Felts: This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record
- More on Fiction vs. Memoir:
- “Read me, see you”: writer and teacher Lisa Romeo on writing nonfiction
- “Two Way Street”: writer Philip Graham on the fiction writer’s task vs. the nonfiction writer’s
- Vintage FWR: Stranger Than Fact: Why We Need Fiction in a World of Memoirs
Thanks for this post, Celeste. It’s a resonant and sticky subject for the fiction writer: how to avoid the trap of thinking that goes, “If it’s real, it’s worth a story.” The idea that a moment or event, however absurd, eye-catching, hilarious or pathetic, does not make a story, but must be shaped into a story with hard-work and elbow grease is something I come back to again and again when things aren’t working. Even great memoirs, like Hemingway’s A Movable Feast or Shirley Hazzard’s Greene on Capri, have the careful shaping of the best short story collections – spare, considered, every word weighed.