A million little truths
Posted on Thu, Aug. 07, 2008
By KERRY COHEN
In his new memoir, New York Times reporter David Carr describes soaking his arms, with their ''pus-filled track marks,'' in a tub of detergent, as well as other low points in his life as a junkie. But those graphic details aren't the reasons why his addiction memoir makes me nervous. It's because of what he implies about the genre of memoir itself.
To write the book, Carr conducted interviews and extensively researched and fact-checked his own life, intentionally exposing how our memories are often fabrications. On his website, he writes that ''sometimes the stories we tell about ourselves are just that: stories.'' The implicit suggestion: We must question whether those stories are in fact true.
Like Carr, I've written a memoir. That means that I've written a history of my memories, that I've taken a part of my life and put it down on paper for others to read -- and perhaps judge. I thought I was ready for that. What I wasn't ready for, though, was the call earlier this year from my editor, asking me for digital files of my diplomas. ''I'm not questioning the truth of your story,'' she said, ``but others might.''
''I know your degrees won't really prove anything, but since you have a masters in counseling psychology, it does show, in kind of a roundabout way, that you went through something that you tried to make sense of in your life.'' Then she laughed and said, ''At least it proves that you are who you say you are.'' I sent the documents, along with a short note reassuring her that I hadn't been raised by wolves.
My memoir, Loose Girl, was published this summer in the wake of several false memoirs. First there was James Frey, who notoriously manufactured a good deal of A Million Little Pieces, in which he tells his tale of drugs, alcohol and criminality. Then came Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, the fabricated foster-child-and-gang-member book by Margaret B. Jones. Jones, as was soon revealed, was actually Margaret Seltzer, who grew up in a privileged household with her biological parents. Add to the sullied shelf the made-up Misha Defonseca, who claimed in Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years that the Nazis had taken her parents and that she had grown up, quite literally, with a family of wolves.
The publishing industry reeled from these betrayals. Books were recalled, and memoirists like myself were suddenly put in the awkward, often impossible position of having to prove that our stories are factual. In light of this roll call of impostors, Carr's shoe-leather approach seems inevitable: Memoir 2.0.
People don't want to get fooled again, and who can blame them? Reading is an act of trust, and the relationship between reader and writer is intimate. Memoirists urge us to believe in them, and when we do, we open ourselves up to them, as they have supposedly opened themselves up to us. We make ourselves vulnerable, exposed.
Frey, perhaps having learned his lesson, marketed his latest book as fiction. Carr seems to be marketing his book, in part, as journalism. I'm hyper-aware of these choices -- not only as a memoir writer but as a novelist. Before I wrote Loose Girl, I wrote a young-adult novel called Easy. It's not autobiographical but it has the same theme, a teenage girl's promiscuity. I wrote a fictional account first because the theme isn't generally one most people want to see explored, and I knew that a memoir might be attacked.
I thought publishing the novel would satisfy the part of me that needed to tell my story, but it didn't. Honesty mattered most. I knew that some people would judge me and others would doubt me, but I believed that if I told the true details of my story, other girls might feel freer to confess theirs.
My memoir begins when I'm 11 and goes on to the years when I engaged sexually with more than 40 boys, many of whose names I can't even remember. As I suspected, people took offense. Some claim 40 is a paltry number, as if the number -- that fact -- were anything but beside the point. I didn't write the book to parade my conquests or establish what has been called my ''slut cred.'' I wrote it to examine the reasons I chose to harm myself -- constantly needing the sex to mean more than it did, constantly letting it define me. I wrote the book because plenty of girls and women are still living this same story. I told the truth, drawing on the benefit of experience and the imperfection of memory, always aware of the difference between what could and could not be substantiated, always aware that I would need to protect the other players in my story -- all those boys, the friends I betrayed, my unknowing parents.
Some readers are disappointed to see that I didn't become a person who no longer craves male attention, that I didn't transform myself into someone new. They see it as a flaw in the book, a plot device I should have employed. They can't fathom that I might be both the girl that I wrote about and the woman I am today. I wish I could prove to these readers that these facts coexist, that my story has an ending of sorts, in which I'm still me. Carr seems to wrestle with the same thing -- which is why, I think, he offers different versions of his life, why he looks to others for verification. Was that really me?
But how can we prove any of this? Must we all report our stories the way Carr did? I could put someone on the phone with my gynecologist, I suppose. I could try to track down some of those boys. Imagine that conversation: ''Um, hi, John? Remember Jones Beach back in July 1987? It was a Wednesday?'' But at the time, I hid most of my behavior, so I'd be out of luck trying to get corroboration. I withheld the truth back then as something few girls would want to admit to. I kept it from family and friends alike. My memoir is the story I didn't tell when I was young. It's the real one, but I have no way to prove it.
And while I'm busy proving what's right and wrong, other readers might ask: What is there to prove anyway? Plenty of girls have been with lots more boys than I have. People want to know what makes my number, fact-checked or not, more slutty -- more true -- than theirs, as if being a ''loose girl'' can be proved mathematically, as if truth were a numbers game.
But if truth isn't a question of fact, what is it? I could talk about the emotional truth of my memoir -- how I wanted attention at that time in my young life, how I wanted desperately to matter -- but that phrase ''emotional truth'' has been so badly overused as to be almost a stand-in for a lie. The real truth of my story, of many girls' stories, is so covered, so hidden, that it can be difficult to unearth. Some statistics tell a certain kind of story: about girls and sex, facts about sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies and about how many girls lose their virginity before age 14. But the real truth, the truths that lie beneath those facts, can't really be proved.
Reporting the facts of one's life -- especially the darkest chapters, the way Carr did -- is an interesting exercise. But sometimes we have to stick closer to our memories than to someone else's recounting. The truth of my story isn't particularly special; most women share the desire for male attention, even if they don't act on it in the way I did. It's the story of a girl who felt so bad about herself that she slept with anyone who seemed to like her. It's a truth that remains misunderstood, no matter how many times it gets told.
c. 2008 The Washington Post
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