One of my long-time writing friends believes the highest responsibility for writers is to explore artistic truth—not truth, mind you, but artistic truth. Memoirs and personal essays should strive for coherence, beauty and order even if it means doctoring (or dirtying up) the details to suit an aesthetic objective. 

He never advocates changing a major detail or fact, but he feels no qualms about messing with the color of a dress or screwing with chronology to suit the demands of the narrative. Of course, he leaves open the question of what constitutes minor or major details.

Other writer friends draw a line in the sand at even the most minor details (the weather on the day grandma died, the color of your sister’s sneakers) and suggest that anything short of the hard facts represents a betrayal of writer ethics and audience trust. 

Self-Incrimination

In graduate school, I worked with a mentor who suggested a sort of middle ground: incriminating ourselves by leaving clues to our biases and personal failings right there in our manuscripts. Undermining our own authority would, in turn, undermine our power. 

He wanted writers to confront their complicity in their experiences, their writing, their own misery—everything. 

That last idea appeals to me.  I like to poke holes in my own case. I like to plant the seeds of reasonable doubt about my own ideas. I consider my own point of view unreliable at best, and I drop hints in my writing in the hopes readers will feel the need to cross-examine my characters (including me).

But what about when “complicity” is itself a false construct – or at the very least, an ethically slippery one?  For example, one of my graduate-school essays depicted abuse I endured growing up, and a mentor wrote notes in the margin along these lines:

Good work here, but try to explore what you did to incite this. How were you complicit?

The scene: a five-year-old me, beaten with the buckle end of a belt.  

The very suggestion that I incited this violence set me back at least several years in my process of healing. More importantly, it seemed to me an unethical direction for the essay, given that other abuse survivors – and abusers – might read it.  I did not want to perpetuate myths that pin blame on victims. 

Perhaps “complicity” in this context has to imply something other than culpability or responsibility. Maybe it has to refer to process instead: recognizing our complicity in manufacturing truth whether we stick to the facts or not.