Writing a new truth

Memory is fluid for a reason

When the truth shifts

Last year I wrote an essay about a guy I dated where I shared why I stayed with him for a few months even after I knew he wasn't good for me. I remembered him as aloof, self-assured, more erudite than me, and that he steered our somewhat emotionally-stifled relationship. He couldn’t or didn’t express himself and that felt to me like disinterest. As I wrote about him for this essay I explored how I felt smaller than him and how I wanted him to treat me better. And it is a fact that he didn’t talk to me in vulnerable ways or share of himself very much.

But recently while making a photo gift for a relative’s birthday I was going through albums from my 20s and I came across several photos of me and this guy. And in these pictures, I don’t look subdued or uncomfortable. I was surprised to see I actually appear happy. Furthermore, I found a photo of the two of us dressed up for an awards dinner for his organization that he had apparently brought me along to as his date. I have zero recollection of attending this dinner. I'm wearing a little black dress and look pleased to be there, no sign I need saving or that I’m not showing up as myself. Yet, the subject of the essay I mentioned above was feeling less than, disposable, and like he didn’t value me.

This photo of the two of us arrested me. Had I made up the story I put in the essay? Was what I wrote no longer true? Less true? Was I a creative nonfiction charlatan crafting stories from lies I told myself? What was the truth/TRUTH?

One of the photos from this time

TRUTH in all caps

By TRUTH in all caps I mean a generally accepted order of events in a shared history, a societal truth or truth a family system may invest in, perpetuate, and believe. I think of it as a sort of big-block letter stamp determining the case is closed, not up for investigation or challenge, as definite as two plus two equals four.

But truth in memoir, in life, is more of a fluid thing which I learned more about when I spoke with Dr. Virginia Campbell on the first season of Let’s Talk Memoir. Dr. Campbell hosts her own podcast Brain Science. and I asked her to join me on Let’s Talk Memoir to help illuminate truth and memory for memoirists.

During our conversation, she shared that every time we call up a memory, we RE-remember it because “the purpose of memory is for our survival….It's needed in our human experience," she said, "and for our survival to be able to amend the memory.” Memory is the way it is because it helps protect us, it helps us to make decisions in the future. "So the accuracy," she said, "is not as important as usefulness of the memory. (italics are mine)” The bottom line, Dr. Campbell shared, and what she hoped memoirists would keep in mind is that our brain creates our experience. Little fireworks of recognition went off in my head as she spoke; as a memoirist crafting narratives from what I remember this was affirming to me.

Perhaps most important to memory is that we are able to incorporate stuff that we learn as we go so that we will choose better actions in the future. So while the memory we might have is not TRUTH, it is a truth and it is telling us something. When we write our memoirs we must search for our truth and interrogate it against the backdrop of the TRUTH we’ve always believed.

Truth is a question

Truth is a question, a seeking, an exercise in curiosity, and especially in memoir writing, it is vulnerable and bendable.

If you already know the TRUTH of something and want to share only that in your memoir you might accidentally wander into formulaic territory or perhaps you are actually writing an autobiography. Why bother excavating if you already know the answer. If you already knew how a book ends would you feel as compelled to read it? If you already know everything there is to know about your story, will you feel as compelled to write it?

Our memoirs become more bracing and alive when we take a closer look at what we might have previously accepted but don’t anymore, who has been able to see us, really see us and love us for who we are, the ways in which a part of us fought to make it out of a situation even before we fully understood how it was hurting us. And truth is also the aspects of our personalities we’d rather not claim. The cranky, tetchy, picky, unkind parts of us we really don’t want to write about but that need to be on the page if they’ve impacted our relationships and lives.

Your truth and the truth in your memoir is what you uncover and come to understand. In memoir as we excavate, our truth can shift and bend; become a new truth.

In my March Substack What Don’t You Know I shared that what we don’t have answers to can be a powerful place to start. Ask yourself: Why do you think the way you do? What would happen if you thought a different way? Do you wonder why you feel the way you do about an experience?

As a memoirist and memoir instructor and absolute emotional ruminator, I spent some time reflecting on my ex-boyfriend essay and whether it was true. I realized that my essay was still accurate and I stand by it because in it I’d taken what I’d remembered and fashioned a story from my lived experience and made meaning from it. I delivered a truth that resonated with me and helped me express a piece of who I was and who I am now. I had ultimately ended it with my ex-boyfriend because I did value myself and I wasn’t happy in the relationship. In my memory I juxtaposed that against how I’ve come to value myself and found a relationship in my marriage that fulfills me and is light years away from that unhealthy dynamic I once was part of in my 20s.

But the photos I found reminded me: There are myriad truths to the stories we think about, read, and create. There are many truths to us: new truths, old truths, current TRUTHS, and old TRUTHS, and when we write CNF and memoir we get to better understand them all as we create meaning and write a new truth which is what we understand of our experience and make of it now. And that says a lot about who we are. We are always writing a new truth.

Thank you for reading this issue of Let’s Talk Memoir. I’ll be winding down season 6 of the podcast soon and preparing to launch season 7. As always, thank you so much for being here!

Ronit