To paraphrase, it goes something like this: A sailor is gone for months and months, and eventually comes home to his staving family on Christmas Day, carrying a bushel of oranges. In her book, The Art of Memoir, she tells of the story Anne Fadiman wrote once. Do you owe it to them by virtue of writing about them? Why must you have to give to those that have taken from you? Should you have to make excuses to those that wronged you? I don’t think so. So yes, it’s true – you own your experience. In many ways, writing nonfiction is a way to feel in control of a narrative, to claim agency over your own life, and that’s empowering-especially for those that are often disenfranchised by society for whatever reason.
I am interested in this concept, possibly because I ascribe to it less than I would maybe like to. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” In her book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, writer Anne Lamott offers this on the subject: “You own everything that happened to you. I would love to say that I have an answer, but this piece is as investigative for me as it is anything else. So then, the core of these questions is revealed: ‘How do I write about other people?’ Very specifically, I have been thinking about how we write about those we consider bad people, or at least people who have wronged us. Sometimes as background fodder, mentions that remind the reader ‘Hey! Other humans are here! I don’t live in an isolated world!’ but our lives are naturally entangled with others, and so naturally, their lives are part of the core fabric of our stories. When people begin their foray into nonfiction, I feel like the first line of questioning is almost always something like this: Could someone sue me? Should I use their real name? How much do I have to reveal about them? What about dialogue – can I make up a conversation? What about someone who is dead? What about someone who is alive?īecause we live in a world of people, naturally our creative nonfiction must have people too. Was I making excuses for them? Or trying to offer my readers a fully fleshed out person, one with both beauty and terror within them the way so many people are? Maybe both? I was talking about how I wanted to explore our teenage years together, our friendship, masculinity, what caused him to act that way, and the friend interrupted me. Once I was telling a fellow writing friend about an essay I was writing, about a man that assaulted me in college.
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