Bridgewater State University Virtual Commons - Bridgewater State University Master’s Theses and Projects College of Graduate Studies 5-2016 She Said, He Said: The Gendering of Truth in Memoir Angela M. Furioso Follow this and additional works at: http://vc.edu/theses Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Furioso, Angela M. She Said, He Said: The Gendering of Truth in Memoir. In BSU Master’s Theses and Projects.
Available at http://vc.edu/theses/33 Copyright © 2016 Angela M. Furioso This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Furioso 1 She Said, He Said: The Gendering of Truth in Memoir A Thesis Presented by ANGELA M FURIOSO MAY 2016 Approved as to style and content by: Signature: ________________________________________________ Dr. Kimberly Chabot-Davis Date Signature: ________________________________________________ Dr.
Lee Torda Date Signature: ________________________________________________ Dr. John Kucich Date Furioso 2 She Said, He Said: The Gendering of Truth in Memoir A Thesis Presented By ANGELA M FURIOSO Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies Bridgewater State University Bridgewater, Massachusetts In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English MAY 2016 Furioso 3 The Introduction: They Say. The study of fictive literature purports to be the study of the human condition, a way to examine how the literary art and artifacts we leave behind serve as records of the broad range of human life, emotion, and suffering. Creative nonfiction also taps into this central precept, seeking the human story in its purest form.
Put simply, creative nonfiction is a true story told well; the writer roots the story in personal truth and uses the basic hallmarks of creative writing in order to shape the narrative. Here, the creative elements exist solely to engage the author in his or her own personal truth while reiterating a more universal truth for the reader. Thus, for the writers of creative nonfiction, the emphasis is not merely on the search for understanding the human condition, but rather the hunt of this understanding via personal experience; it is the quest for a truer truth. But this quest is not without its trials.
Russell Baker in his discussion of his memoir, Life with Mother, synthesizes the difficulty of writing about one’s own story; “The biographer’s problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer’s problem is that he knows too much” (Zinsser 38). Often when we are so close to the subject, we lose our ability to easily distinguish what is essential information or we falter on how to effectively convey the tremendous weight of emotions we connote with the memory. In this way, the creative aspect of this genre of nonfiction seeks not to embellish the narrative so that it moves away from the fact that grounds it, but serves more as a means of editing and structuring it into a powerful and a purposeful piece.
The consummation of the art of writing and the truth of the personal experience produces a story that transcends the role of fictive literature; it is a story that is mine, is yours, and is ours. This procreative property is singular to the genre; we become our own source of literary inspiration - our own muses - and, in this fertile realm of memory and personal experience, our stories are born. Furioso 4 The history of creative nonfiction is nebulous to navigate; no one knows for certain when the term first began to make its appearance among the scholarly and academic masses, nor do people seem to know to whom to credit with its invention. Lee Gutkind, a professor of the genre and editor of the magazine Creative Nonfiction, describes the reactions of one of his snickering colleagues when he, in the 1970s, proposed teaching a course on the subject: “After you read all these books [of literature and poetry] and understand what they mean, I will consider voting for a course called creative nonfiction.
Otherwise, I don’t want to be bothered” (Gutkind xxviii). By the mid-1990s, however, the literary trends had shifted and “an explosion” of creative nonfiction rocked both the publishing and academic world. Nevertheless, the moniker “creative nonfiction” is a modern label for a genre that is anything but new. Lee Gutkind who is identified as the “Godfather behind creative nonfiction” defines the adjective for us as “being indicative of the style in which the nonfiction is written” (Gutkind xix) - emphasizing the coercion of the facts into a narrative which embraces and adheres to many of the key tenets of good fiction writing: dialogue, description, plot structure, characterization, and emotionality, to name a few.
The primary difference between fiction and creative nonfiction, however, emerges in the second part of the phrase; although creative nonfiction reads like fiction and although certain poetic and literary liberties may be taken in the crafting of the narrative, the distinction must always remain that creative nonfiction is, on some level, true. But “truth” in writing is a loaded precept. In his “The Creative Nonfiction Police,” Gutkind discusses the difficulty some authors face when having to choose between the truth of the story and the literary choices they must make in order to execute that truth. To tackle this dilemma, authors then must ask themselves: what’s the most important truth I want my reader to derive from my story and what is the best way to get readers to understand it? In one anecdote, Furioso 5 Gutkind describes John Berendt, the author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, who often teeters and dances the lines between untrue, partially true, and truth in his work: “Berendt made up transitions in order to move from scene to scene in his book.
Most creative nonfiction writers will refrain from imagining and reporting that which did not happen, even in transitions, but Berendt was making the experience easier for himself and more enjoyable for his readers, a process called ‘rounding the corners’” (Gutkind xx). Thus, the question plaguing many contemporary writers of the genre stems from the moral and ethical dilemmas posed by finding a way in which to achieve credibility to the authenticity of the story without sacrificing compelling storytelling. When writers of creative nonfiction discuss “truth,” their definition often must rest, then, on how their individual literary conscience dictates this complex relationship between narrative and fact. Gutkind further delineates his “checklist” for writers of creative nonfiction, highlighting the importance of striving for truth and treating the subjects of our writing with respect and affording them the opportunity to respond to what is written.
He disagrees with Berendt’s tactics, warning writers not to “round the corners” or “compress situations of characters - unnecessarily” (Gutkind xxxi); he also warns against assumptions, surmises, and guesses - particularly in terms of characterization and remembered dialogue. Creative nonfiction narratives are linked to memory, which is unreliable in scope, but writers should then strive to be “as true to [their] memory as possible” when crafting their version of the truth (Gutkind xxx). And truth, it is said, is often stranger than fiction. Certainly, by the rising popularity of the genre, many writers and readers share this proclivity and fondness for strangeness in the texts they read.
William Zinsser, editor of Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, crystallizes this phenomenon by proclaiming the closing decade of the twentieth century as “the Furioso 6 age of the memoir,” suggesting that “Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone is telling it” (Zinsser 3). With this new interest in the “true” story comes a paralleled fascination with the grotesque and traumatic: “Today no remembered episode is too sordid, no family too dysfunctional, to be trotted out for the wonderment of the masses in books and magazines and on talk shows” (Zinsser 3). This all-too-human preoccupation with the sordid creates another problem for the modern creative nonfiction writer who feels pressure to out-dysfunction other writers of the genre. Certainly, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, an emphasis on memoirs such as Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which highlighted difficult and socially scandalous subjects like alcoholism, incest, anorexia, depression, rape, and drug abuse populated the market; however, while quality texts of the genre like the aforementioned list emphasized the protagonist’s ability to survive or overcome the horrific obstacles of living dangerously, most of these memoirs read as little more than “chronicles of shame and victimhood” representing “the dark side of the personal narrative boom, giving the form a bad name” (Zinsser 5).
The audience’s penchant toward authorial “true confession” over truth spawned several titles whose existence serves mostly to bring degradation to the genre. Zinsser distinguishes between the need for truth in memoir writing and the basic precept of the genre: “The truth is that memoir writing, like every other kind of writing, comes in good and bad varieties. That’s the only standard that matters” (Zinsser 5). As with Gutkind who cautions writers in the genre to carefully consider the morals and ethics behind truth-telling in creative nonfiction, Zinsser also reiterates that the issue at hand is not whether someone should or should not reveal what he/she chooses to; rather, the issue is far more simple: is it a good book or a bad book? Zinsser synthesizes creative nonfiction of good literary merit into two components: integrity of intention Furioso 7 and a careful act of construction.
Trouble arises, however, when authors manufacture more than just an order to the chaos of partially-recollected events. When authors of creative nonfiction lie about the past - favoring the construction over factual integrity, the damage to the genre’s reputation is undeniable. However, despite the modern audience’s staunch expectations of factual integrity, by considering our society’s complex relationship with lying, we can glean greater insight into how we read and why we write. Societally, we tell little lies every day, and yet, as readers, we demand entire truth from our nonfiction writers.
To complicate matters, we live in a society where any political soundbite can be instantly fact-checked; subsequently, we have a learned distrust to contend with beyond merely the integrity of a written piece. Historically speaking, good art - as we have already established - resonates because it “feels” true, mirroring accurately some aspect of the human condition. Nowadays, readers can be more cynical or suspicious of intentions; if you purport to tell us your life story, we want to ensure that you have provided us with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and, we have far more access to information than previous generations to ensure that you do exactly that. In recent history, we have the cautionary tale of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces which most famously violated the “good-faith bond between the writers of autobiography and their readership” when Frey was - on national television as of guest of Oprah- defrocked as a rising nonfiction star and relabeled as an imposter of truth (Cardell and Kuttainen 102).
Frey’s highly publicized betrayal of this bond only serves to complicate the matter for contemporary writers of nonfiction who now must contend with both fact-checkers and other armchair detectives in their pursuit not for the altruistic sense of truth but for the self-satisfaction of being able to catch someone else in the lie. Humor memoirist David Sedaris notes that “ever since that business…[with Frey] fact checkers Furioso 8 are in overdrive. They’ve made my life miserable. Like, the fact-checker from The New Yorker will say, ‘We talked to your father [.] he said the grandfather clock is made of oak [.] you say it was made out of cherry.’ And it’s not a story about a grandfather clock.
It doesn’t really matter” (Knight 80). Cardell and Kuttainen rightfully address Sedaris’s use of the word “story” in this remark: “Sedaris’s intention is to entertain and he does not see autobiography as anything other than story” (Cardell and Kuttainen 102).