The Paradox of Honesty...
Or, Why Exit Tickets: A Novel Is Truer Than Memoir
In writing a memoir you’re telling the truth, while in writing fiction, aren’t you making stuff up?
On the surface, and literally (if not literarily), sure. But there’s a far deeper realm to be explored here, if you’ll bear with me…
My novel, Exit Tickets, could’ve easily been circumscribed to fit the contours of a memoir. You know, the first-year experiences of a newbie teacher…yada-yada-yada. The thing is, you’d’ve been stuck with only my POV, and it would’ve likely been overstuffed with challenging/rewarding seesawing incidents. Worse, given that I’m a white guy of a certain age, it could’ve too easily devolved into a white-savior-trope extravaganza. If you’re into that, there’s always the option of streaming, say, the movie, Dangerous Minds—and Michelle Pfeiffer is a lot easier on the eyes than conjuring the looks of Mr. J.
I got a lot of early well-meaning critiques—even feedback from a couple of agents similarly weighing-in—that carried recommendations to transform my “prism of perspectives” novel (per Kirkus Reviews) into a straightforward memoir. There was even a literary agent who suggested I consider relocating it to an impoverished white neighborhood somewhere in the Midwest— maybe rural Indiana, where Mr. J/Martin hails from—and so leave out the characters of color. Uhm, really…?
Often, in the best fiction (which I can only hope my novel approaches), more enduring “truths” emerge than in memoir. I’ll state this straight-up: Quality literary fiction outperforms memoir in the ways I most value, as a reader and a writer.
How’s that, exactly? Somewhat immodestly, I’ll continue using my novel as an example. There’s no way, if I’d written a memoir of my first year of teaching, that I could’ve gotten into the heads of other folks—teachers, students, the principal, a paraprofessional, a school volunteer—and explored those characters the way I was able to in my novel. My feelings about the folks I worked with and the young people I taught aren’t the same as viscerally experiencing those emotions coming from the people themselves. Are they fictional? Sure, but, in being untethered by actual events, I had the freedom to invent moments that spoke to greater truths, their lived experiences.
In my novel, when you’re reading a chapter with a different title than Mr. J, you are only getting that character’s—Kandra’s, Shirley’s, Mr. Cody’s, Big Henry’s—thoughts and feelings. Assuming I wrote persuasively enough in close-3rd-person mode, those chapters should come alive and allow you access to fully dimensional human beings. Memoir can only observe from a distance, from outside; in fiction, more than one character can be inhabited.
Which brings us to the conjuring of empathy. If a book can persuasively and credibly—and intimately—provide empathy for more than one character, folks who are living lives much differently than ours, so much the richer. This is what I most value as a reader. But that’s tough to do in a memoir, since, other than the narrator, we as the reader are residing outside the lives of every other person, which is why I’m not a big reader of memoirs.
If you have a couple more minutes, I’d like to drill down on this intriguing idea of, for lack of a better phrase, “the paradox of honesty,” as regards fiction vs. memoir.
Memoir comes chained to what happened, obviously. With that, however, comes the very real possibility of distortion attaching itself to the “truth” of what happened (think: Kurosawa’s Rashomon). There’s only the one perspective that you, the reader, are provided. Not only that, but a memoirist cannot invent a different scene that might work better, or create a revealing subplot.
On the other hand—and in another form—literary fiction is not limited by such guardrails. A novelist can crib from many lives and create moments and emotions that cannot be accessed by a memoirist, revealing greater truths and exploring richer themes. That freedom is what the best fiction exploits and revels in.
Also, while memoir can collapse the gap between author and subject, it can, as mentioned above, warp what’s being presented as “fact.” Everyone, even the best and most practiced memoirist, remembers selectively. Can one really portray oneself with the same rigorous clarity as one might portray others? I don’t think so; the “I” can’t help but be shaded.
But good literary fiction surmounts such a problem by transforming it. I distributed parts of myself across multiple characters in Exit Tickets, none of whom were burdened with the full weight of my ego. This felt, in the writing of my novel, like an honesty I wouldn’t have been able to achieve if I’d written a memoir. I could be more ruthlessly true because I was, well, lying—that is, writing fiction. Or, to put it another way, inventing these lives gave me cover to say things I couldn’t say about real people. In The Things They Carried, one of my favorite books of the past fifty years, Tim O’Brien calls it the difference between “happening-truth” (what literally occurred) and “story-truth” (conveying the real experience, even if invented).
I hope that my novel operates at this transformed frequency of story-truth. Exit Tickets doesn’t say “this actually happened”; it shows how it felt to be their, in the skins of these characters. Several friends warned me early on that this project was highly ambitious, especially for someone attempting the writing of a novel for the first time. Not only ambitious in the number of voices I wanted to employ, along with their stories, but because the form, in general, is a greater challenge, a bigger leap: while memoir recovers, fiction creates. I’m asking you to believe in people I’ve invented, yet to empathize with them as if they are real.
Finally, to bring this paradox home: I hope, as you exit the reading of my novel, you’ve come to know my fictional characters as if they are real people, experiencing and living their truths via the honest invention of their lives.
TEACHERS’ LOUNGE
I was happy to get this review late last month from Library Journal’s Open Shelf Reviews. Here’s the blurb, with the link to the full review below:
“Rooted in the systemic flaws and genuine triumphs of public education, this multifaceted novel speaks to the complicated relationships and struggles facing students, education staff, and families. The clarity of voice and authentic dialogue for every character create space for them to be beautifully flawed. Students at PS 961 have emotionally charged lives, and their worlds are complicated. Motifs regarding the plight of young people of color, trauma-informed care, racism within schools, barriers within education systems, and familial relationships are deftly explored in this fast-paced and compelling read. Ideal for educators, this book is also an opportunity for anyone to understand the contemporary disconnect between education and student success.” —Open Shelf Reviews/Library Journal
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