Memoirist's Commitment to the Truth Essay

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It is about impression and feeling, about individual recollection. This memoir is a combination of facts about my life and certain embellishments. It is a subjective truth, altered by the mind of a recovering drug addict and alcoholic" (Frey 2006).

Defenders of Frey were even more explicit in noting that telling a good story and creating a vivid image in the mind of a reader often demands the use of certain literary techniques. Lee Gutkind, in an article titled "The Creative Nonfiction Police" pointed out that even Henry David Thoreau compressed certain elements of Thoreau's famous two years spent on Walden Pond into one for the sake of creating a more compelling narrative (Gutkind 2004). Compressing certain events can be used to create the impression of how an event 'really felt' even if it is not how the event really was, much like how time sometimes seems to slow down or speed up, or how in the mind of a child a teacher might seem like an ogre, even if this memory is unfair.

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Creating such impressions through distortion is part of the memoirist's art. Furthermore, any time a reader sees: "I said" or "I thought" on the page of a memoir, charges of fraud could arise. It is unlikely the writer has the ability to accurately recollect conversations and thoughts in their entirety, years after the events took place.

There is a line over which memoir cannot cross, however: blatantly pretending to have an experience one did not, such as living through the Holocaust, would clearly be unacceptable. But creating a work of fiction and claiming that to be a memoir was not quite what Frey did: admittedly, the ethical line is a fine one, and it is subjective in terms of where the writer 'crosses the line.' But demanding absolute veracity from memoirists would come at a great price: the death of literary nonfiction itself. Ultimately, no one was really hurt by Frey -- the truth was brought to light by real journalists, for those readers who needed to….....

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