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In Praise of Lying: Fiction vs. Nonfiction
By Amy Hassinger
Nonfiction is very much in the news these days. Capote, the James Frey
debacle and the even creepier Nasdijj scam have raised the kinds of
questions that plague many a memoir writer: how much can you really
remember? How much can you ethically invent (creating dialogue, for
example, from a forgotten conversation), and how much do you have to base
on verifiable fact? What is the truth, anyway?
Here's where I turn tail and run. This is one of the reasons why I'm a
fiction writer -- because I don't know the answers to these questions.
They paralyze me. I much prefer the freedom of lying. There's no wracking
your brain trying to remember what someone actually said, no sleepless
nights imagining the faces of the jury in the courtroom on the day you're
sued for libel. Give me the bliss of pure invention.
Now, I'm not throwing down the gauntlet here. I don't mean to claim that
fiction is a superior form. Both fiction and memoir are after the same
thing, ultimately, which is to make order and meaning out of the chaos of
experience. But as a fiction writer, I can't help but wonder at our
culture's current infatuation with the "real." Memoir and creative
non-fiction have been fashionable for the past ten or fifteen years.
Simultaneously, we've seen the rise of less literary counterparts: reality
television, the confessional talk show, round the clock news, and the
blog. We're a culture obsessed with literal truth, with the facts. (This
new literalism of mind has also reared its head in the world of religion:
both fundamentalist and secular thought require a literal approach to myth
and metaphor.)
Why? Where does this obsession come from? I suspect it might have
something to do with fear. There's so much to fear -- dirty bombs, Avian
flu, global warming, sexual predators, identity theft -- yet very little
to do. So we prepare by gathering information. Reading about Avian flu can
make us feel proactive. It's as if finding out the precise scale of an
oncoming tsunami will prevent it from laying waste, as if knowing the
statistical chances of a nuclear dirty bomb attack in the Manhattan subway
system will keep the terrorist from setting one off. Information is
knowledge, after all, and as we all know, knowledge is power.
Power maybe, but wisdom? Do we really understand our lives better the more
we know? Do we have a better sense of how to behave in the world, of how
to treat our fellow creatures? Do we know where to find peace? Do we have
a fuller appreciation of beauty? We might find poetry in scientific
discoveries -- in the fact that we can see into the past by looking
through the Hubble Space Telescope, for example -- but as a rule, pure
information does not supply the sublime experience that art offers. Facts
may be useful when you want to graph the distribution of convicted sexual
predators in your neighborhood, but they're not a terribly effective way
to come to understand one of those predators, to begin to grasp not only
the suffering he has caused but also the suffering he endures.
This is where literature comes in. Both memoir and fiction can offer
wisdom, moments of beauty, and -- corny as it sounds -- teach us how to be
better people. But the memoir writer limits herself to her own experience,
to what she knows. Writing what you know -- advice every beginning writer
receives -- can be a great way to get started, but ultimately, I find it
too limiting. I agree with John Gardner, who said you should write the
kind of story you know best, in other words, write what you like to read.
If you like to read realistic fiction about small Midwestern towns, and
you happen to have grown up in one, then you might be able to do both. But
what makes literature so rewarding is that it can take us to places we'd
never otherwise go. Writers inhabit the country of the imagination -- the
nation of image, as poet William Higginson likes to say -- and one of
imagination's greatest virtues is its unfaithfulness. Imagination rambles
and roams. It delights in transforming a single daffodil into a rose
garden, in making a slightly irritating teacher into a miserable, tortured
tyrant.
Exaggeration, embellishment, invention -- these are the things I love
about writing fiction. If I want, I can imagine the trials of a tribe of
hunted elephants in the African savanna (Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone)
or inhabit the body of a hermaphrodite (Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex). I
can tell all sorts of lies, be as unfaithful as I like to factual truths,
as long as I'm faithful to a different sort of truth: the perennial
emotional truths that permeate human experience, truths that bring us
closer not necessarily to power, but to wisdom. These are the reasons I
write fiction.
These, and the fact that I have a crappy memory.
Amy Hassinger is a graduate of Barnard College and the Iowa Writers'
Workshop. She is the author of
The Priest's Madonna (April, 2006) and
Nina: Adolescence. She teaches in
the University of Nebraska's MFA Program in Creative Writing and lives in
Illinois with her husband and daughter.
For more information, please visit her website.
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