Nonfiction: The Art of the Personal Story

Conversations from the Archive
April 2014
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, Meghan Daum
The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison
The Object Parade, Dinah Lenney
Trying to Be Cool: Growing Up in the 1950s, Leo Braudy
The Man Within My Head, Pico Iyer

Excerpts:

Pico Iyer: Growing up in England, you’re taught to be as impersonal as possible. Through the mask of the impersonal, you reveal things you wouldn’t normally share.

Leo Braudy: I grew up in the 1950s. There was an impersonality in general.

Leslie Jamison: When gazing at an object outside the self, it brings the self to bear. When I rise up to meet the external thing, everything I’ve ever lived is part of that. I started off writing fiction. I follow where the energy feels, what my heart has something to say about.

Braudy: Stick to emotional certainty, if not factual truth. I had to free myself to get at emotional truth. [Events are out of order. Characters are blended.] I gave all my friends different names.

Iyer: Memoir is always fiction. Nonfiction takes liberties with facts, and fiction tends to draw from real events and real emotions. The personal parts are slippery. That doesn’t matter. Emotional truth matters. The destination is the imagination of the reader. I didn’t want this book to be categorized. It’s not nonfiction or fiction.

Dinah Lenney: You do a lot of “maybe,” “perhaps,” and “my mother would say it differently, but . . .” Watching someone’s mind at work is a nonfiction enterprise itself. I catch myself when I start to make things up. You do have a contract to uphold.

Jamison: Presenting the self on the page is presenting a character. Writing nonfiction is different from writing fiction. I believe more in the “bookshelf definition.” Collaborative memory/memory itself is an event.

Lenney: Tobias Wolff said, “Memoir is not written by committee.”

Meghan Daum (Moderator): Your parents are not the committee.

Jamison: I’m not the bearer of good news. [Writing about other people] is a case by case basis, but write a draft without any thought to a committee.

Braudy: I’m writing about fifty years ago, so I don’t have to worry too much about other people. [Someone told me after reading my book,] “You put the movie theater on the wrong side of the street.” I said, “I don’t remember what side of the street it’s on.”

Iyer (on returning to a childhood location): I misremembered every last detail. It humbled me. A writer is powerless before the responses.

Lenney: I don’t write fiction. I don’t know how. I write nonfiction so I have control over what I share. I don’t write about my husband and my daughter very much. I want them to continue to speak to me. But for some reason, my parents feel like fair game. In some cases, I’ll pull back. It’s a risky business either way: writing fiction or nonfiction. Either way, [the readers] come after you.

Jamison: You have to surrender control about how people respond. I can think of a piece as an homage, and people will be offended.

Iyer: I’ve only written about one family member, departed actually.

Braudy: I was a character in someone else’s writing. [My ex-wife wrote about our marriage and divorce.] I got a lawyer. I insisted our cat’s name be changed.

Jamison: Writers tend to respond differently to being written about. There’s an intense generosity.

Lenney: My students write about me. I never like the way I sound. “I said that? I said it like that?” It’s awful to be written about, and yet we do it.

Jamison: I wrote an essay about being a medical actor, the experience of becoming a character. It was a formal experiment. It didn’t feel like straight-up narrative. Playing with form can crack open an experience [to show] new facets. How do we make our own pain legible?

Lenney (on her latest book): What would your life look like if you wrote about the objects around you? What if I had chosen other objects?

Braudy: The ideas take over, create a rhythm, almost musically. There’s something between the past that will be written and the past that will remain unwritten. If memoirs aren’t in some way embarrassing, what is the point?

Iyer: [My book is] very strange and unreadable. Sometimes people we’ve never met understand us more than our own family. Every son tries to rebel against his father until he realizes he has become his father.

Lenney: Guide a reader as to how to read your book and then stick to that structure. My editor said, “You wouldn’t serve a beautiful meal, then not give them silverware.”

Braudy: If you think about the market when you’re writing, you’re doomed.