The art of writing memoir with Vivian Gornick, Ferdinand Mount and Kathryn Harrison
CBC Radio | Posted: June 24, 2016 10:44 PM | Last Updated: November 15, 2021
This interview was originally broadcast in 2016.
The saying goes that autobiography is about invention and fiction tells the truth. But it's a little murkier when it comes to memoir. To talk about the appeal of memoir, Eleanor Wachtel spoke to three writers who know the genre well during a panel discussion in 2016.
Vivian Gornick is a critic, journalist and essayist from New York. Her most recent book, Taking A Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time, brings her incendiary essays on the emergence of the 1970s women's liberation movement back into print. In March 2021, Gornick was awarded the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for nonfiction.
Kathryn Harrison is the author of several novels and works of nonfiction. Her books include The Kiss, Seeking Rapture, The Road to Santiago, The Mother Knot and True Crimes: A Family Album. Harrison's most recent work, the memoir On Sunset, was published in 2018. She lives in New York.
Ferdinand Mount is a British novelist, essayist and political journalist. He has published several novels and works of nonfiction. His acclaimed memoir, Cold Cream, was published in 2008. Mount's latest books include the novel Making Nice and Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca, a family memoir exploring the life of his aunt Patricia Elizabeth Mount.
The most honest truth
Kathryn Harrison: All the memories that we retrieve over and over again, the few things that we sieved out of our lives that we use for the story of our lives, are all set pieces that have been pulled out over and over again, and they change each time.
I sometimes say that the truth is not a destination, but a direction. One does one's best to point oneself in the direction of truth. We know when we're telling the truth and when we're leaning toward discomfort and that's what I ask of a good book.
Vivian Gornick: My only quarrel about the question of factuality in memoir is that nothing should be made up. But that you are composing, without question. You are making use of those memories in order to write about what you actually want to write about.
This word "truth" is one I never employ. I never think about it and I never use it. My idea of what a memoirist owes a reader is honesty, however that is constructed. The reader must feel that the narrator, the memoirist, is trying to get to the bottom of the experience that one is writing about, whatever that experience is. The truth seeker — that's how I think of the duty of the memoirist. The truth of one's self. The truth of what one is trying to understand and puzzle out. It doesn't have to do with factual memories.
My only quarrel about the question of factuality in memoir is that nothing should be made up. - Vivian Gornick
Ferdinand Mount: Writing a memoir is oddly like writing a historical novel. You must not put in anything you know to be untrue, but you have a skeleton of fact as far as you can get it right. But upon that, you build and colour and decorate — whether consciously or unconsciously. There has to be a basic substratum of truth, as best as you can recall it.
That not-so-free feeling
Kathryn Harrison: The analogy drawn between narcissism and memoir, which is interesting because you can draw an analogy, but memoir seeks to break through that pretty surface. It's all about going under it and finding out what is beneath the face you prefer to show the world. That's very palpable when you read a book. That's the honest intent. It's something you can feel.
There might be something entrapping in writing memoir. When I'm writing memoir, I feel a sense of freedom that I don't in other occupations. But that would apply to writing in general.
Vivian Gornick: I don't think anyone is free by writing. Virginia Woolf used to say that after she wrote To the Lighthouse, she was free of her family. But I always quarrelled with that. I think she couldn't have written it until she was free of her family. People are always saying to us, "You're so searingly honest." We're not searingly honest.
What we are, I believe most of us, the writing is not good unless you are not in peril at that moment yourself. You're not writing about what's actually hurting at the moment.
There might be something entrapping in writing memoir. - Kathryn Harrison
Those words, "searingly honest," imply that you are setting yourself up to be exposed. That you are exposing yourself and I don't think that's what happens. Writing a memoir is like writing anything else. You're involved with the writing.
The only distinction is clearly that the narrator is the writer. Memoir has its own agenda. It has its own conventions. But essentially it involves the same responsibility as writing. You're there to shape a piece of experience. Your feelings are not a subject. Your feelings are there as a tool. They are an instrument of illumination. They are the way you get to something of interest to somebody other than you and your friends and your family.
Kathryn Harrison: I think that's the first requirement of good memoir — that the writer knows the difference between what is of significance and interesting to the world and what he or she finds fascinating because it's his or her pain.
Ferdinand Mount: I agree that it's like any other sort of writing. You are shaving a bit of experience and you aren't setting out to be searingly honest, unless you're more than usually pompous. I don't think that's the kind of thing that gets you going. I'd written a novel about my father, who was a steeplechase rider, who once, on one glorious occasion, rode the best steeplechase horse in the world, Golden Miller. The novel was The Man Who Rode Ampersand.
Then I wanted to write something about my mother, who died when I was 16 and she was 41. I started that off as a sketch that started off like a screen memory because it starts with a dream which I had at regular intervals all through my adult life — that my mother was still alive and I was going into a cafe and there she was with her long golden hair and squint in her eye. I had it very repeatedly.
After writing this story out, I never had the dream again. I just wanted to write about her. I hadn't thought about it as a cathartic process, but it was. But that led me on to talk about myself at extreme length and I was led into the ways of the memoirist.
Some people write memoirs as a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. I very much didn't do that. I dotted around. - Ferdinand Mount
Some people write memoirs as a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. I very much didn't do that. I dotted around. You aren't trying to tell a story — "Then I passed my exam and then I got a job," — you are trying to dwell upon the bits of your life which seem worth dwelling upon, and the people and the milieu that seem worth recreating for the reader.
The panellists' comments have been edited for length and clarity.