I need to go to graduate school

As many of you are aware, I wrote a thesis this past semester. Something new has come to light since I wrote it, and I want to discuss it, because I'm an academic at heart. If you're not in the mood for a literature lesson, feel free to go read something else.

First, some background in case you are, by some miracle, intrigued: my thesis discusses how the first modern woman memoirist, Lillian Hellman, and the current "Grand Dame" of memoir, Vivian Gornick, examined their mother issues through their memoirs. Tangential to that exploration is the scandal of Hellman's memoirs: they've been proven to contain significant factual errors—Hellman evidently created people and encounters. Gornick, who is a highly regarded literary critic and journalist in addition to being a memoirist, has been sharply critical of Hellman for constructing scenes to serve her own purposes, and so it was particularly interesting to compare the two women.

And then in July at a talk to Goucher College MFA program, Gornick admitted that she had constructed conversations in her own memoir, Fierce Attachments, Salon.com reports.

Laying aside the issue of Gornick's obvious hypocrisy, I have a question. Does this really change anything?

The issue of trust between a narrator and a reader is a volatile one at best. Everything has a certain perspective, obvious or not. In the genre of memoir, perspective is extreme and the issue of trust is constantly at the forefront of critical discussion. Critics seem to think that the highest duty of the non-fiction writer (as memoir is so often classified) is absolute truth. But memoir is not normal non-fiction. The narrator struggles to tell her story, but since it happened to her, instead of being observed by her, she is flawed, falliable, and limited in her ability to recount it correctly. She can provide perfect insight on her own experience, but could Gornick possibly know what her mother is thinking? No, and we as readers can't expect her to. But somehow we expect exact recall and hard, proveable facts, or we feel deceived. That expectation is the skewed perspective.

What I'm saying is this: If you feel betrayed by your memoirist, you're missing the point.

The point of memoir is not to reconstruct events exactly as they occured. Memoirs aren't history textbooks. The point of memoir is to provide insight to the writer's mind and experience of events, and thereby insight into the human condition at large. "Truth" and "falsehood" are too limiting at this level.

Gornick's admissions of construction have no detrimental effect on the conclusions of my thesis, written months before she spoke at Goucher. I stand by my original statement: Gornick wrote "Fierce Attachments" to resolve lingering issues with her mother. In fact, Gornick's revelations underline my conclusions. By creating conversations with her mother, Gornick was seeking to understand and document her own experience, to portray her cognitive comprehension of and emotional reaction to her mother. She was not attempting to present a psychological anaylsis of the mother-daughter relationship, or a biography of her mother, or a linguistic breakdown of women's conversational patterns. She was writing a memoir. What she wrote remains true, no matter how much of it Gornick constructed. I hope she will reconsider her position on Hellman's factual holes, which might be bigger, but in essence are no different.