Hi beautiful humans,
IT IS THE BIRTHDAY OF MY FAVORITE HUMAN: FRANCESCA (FRANK/FRANKIE) DOWNING. I love this woman so much I wrote a book about it. Happy birthday, dear heart <3
When we were little, we watched two movies pretty much every other day: Robin Hood and The Three Musketeers. At the end of The Three Musketeers there is a music video for the song, All for Love. We’d rewind the music video and dance in the living room to Rod Steward, Bryan Adams, and Sting jamming out (I blame these movies and this music video for my issues with romantic love).
Here’s to you, kid! It’s All for Love :)
*p.s. I know there are typos in the below essay. I am tired. Please forgive me.
I’ve been having a difficult time with fiction recently. I’ve tried reading a variety of books and nothing seems to stick. When my copy of The Paris Review arrived in the mail (me=snob of snobs!) I started every story and read a few lines and then moved on, frustrated and annoyed. Where’s the heart?! Where is the life?! Then I came to a piece written by Annie Ernaux. It’s a stunning excerpt from her journal written while she was having an affair with a Russian officer before the fall of the Berlin wall. I dissolved into the piece. When it was over, I looked up and noticed that I was not in Paris in the 80’s but in my apartment. It felt so real! So intimate! So unashamed to be ashamed—to be grotesquely obsessed, filled with desire and anguish. I then went on to read a piece by Kathryn Scanlan (who are you, you mysterious genius?!?) about a horse trainer. I knew it must be a story (based on the very little information I can find about Kathryn Scanlan, I know she was never a horse trainer) but I couldn’t put it down. Finally! Fiction that was engaging! But when I came to the end of the story I noticed a footnote that said the story was constructed from a series of interviews. It was fiction. It was crafted and honed and manipulated for story and tension and yet it was also real. I could feel the life in the work—pulsing and human—like the smell of a person who just woke up, sweaty and a little sour. I want that raw honesty! Give me vulnerability or give me death! Fiction feels like a heavily buttressed cathedral with structural and methodical wings holding the roof aloft. I want to worship in the grass under nothing but space.
A few days ago I went to a bookstore and asked the clerk for On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a book I’ve read already but wanted to look at again.
I said, “I looked in biography and didn’t see it.”
He said, “It’s not a biography.”
“Oh, do you have a section for memoir? I didn’t see it”
And then he laughed and said, “It’s a novel. It’s fiction.”
I was embarrassed to be mocked and embarrassed because I knew it was a novel. But I also believe that it’s not really a novel. It’s a work of art that belongs to no genre. You could call it poetry as easily as you could call it fiction.
TL;DR- If you don’t have time to read this essay, just read this:
For the love of all that is holy, can we please live without labels?!?! Who cares if a book is memoir or fiction or somewhere in between? Memoir is a misnomer. There is nothing “factual” about memory. The only question I care about when reading literature is: is it real?
Autofiction
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous could be described as autofiction. Autofiction is difficult to define, but I think this quote by Christian Lorentzen is helpful: “In the past, I’ve tried to make a distinction in my own use of the term between autobiographical fiction, autobiographical metafiction, and autofiction, arguing that in autofiction there tends to be emphasis on the narrator’s or protagonist’s or authorial alter ego’s status as a writer or artist and that the book’s creation is inscribed in the book itself.”
Marguerite Duras is said to have pioneered the genre with her book, The Lover. The Lover is about a fifteen-year-old French girl in Saigon who has an affair with a twenty-seven-year-old man. It spans years and countries and ultimately describes a woman’s attempt to reckon with the past that built her. The Lover is not a book of fact and anyone who attempts to read it that way is an unimaginative slug (yes, I am a judgmental person, sorry not sorry). People have criticized the piece for not being “accurate” to Duras’ real life. Although she did state that the book was completely autobiographical, according to her interview in the New York Times:
“Truth, in the Durasian universe, is a slippery entity. After "The Lover," Duras said, in Le Nouvel Observateur, that the story of her life did not exist. Only the novel of a life was real, not historical facts. ‘It's in the imaginative memory of time that it is rendered into life.’"
While The Lover is not fact and it is not true, I do believe that it is real. What do I mean by real? I don’t mean: actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed. I suppose my definition is more spiritual and amorphous. I believe The Lover to be true to a woman’s emotion and true to an experience. The book is an honest, vulnerable excavation of what made this woman herself. The Lover is real according to the spirit not the world.
I’m not sure if any of you remember the Million Little Pieces scandal, but I’ve been scarred by it for life. James Frey sold his book about dealing with addiction as a memoir and went on Oprah describing his experiences with addiction. But lo and behold! He exaggerated. Frey originally wrote a novel based on his experiences, but it was denied by most publishers so he made it a memoir. Why would a memoir be more attractive to publishers than a novel? Because we live in a society that likes to hang our hat on reality! We want to say—this is what really happened! We want reality where, if life were a cake, we could slice out this man’s experience and eat it. His story is so real we could hold it in our hands! Even though we’re continuously duped by social media, deep fakes, politicians and systemic and structural manipulation we still believe there is a single source of truth to be had! We believe there is a “real” life physical enough for us to hold.
Frey has said he "stands by the book as being the essential truth of my life". And yet he was crucified by the literary community and accused of literary forgery. Since then writers live in fear of the scandal of someone combing through their work and fact checking how many times they’ve had a root canal. So much for Duras’ “imaginative memory of time that it is rendered into life.”
I would say, presumptuous as this may be, that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is also real according to the spirit. And I would go so far as to say that what sets the book apart, what makes it spectacular is the reality of its emotional spirit.
But where is the room for creative freedom, for art, and for craft if all writers fear being indicted by the community as literary forgers? The answer is: calling every book a novel and that little disclosure at the front—
“This work is fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.”
The Problem with Memory
My novella, The Family that Carried their House on their Backs, is technically speculative fiction but, if we lived in a world that wasn’t so aggressive about fact and fiction and the truth, I could call it a memoir. It’s true, my dad did not turn into a wolf and my mother, sister, and I are not nomadic people with houses literally stitched to our backs. But, the book is real.
When I was in my final semester of college I wanted to write about what it was like growing up with an addict as a father. House began as a poem describing what crack cocaine does to an addict’s lungs—it causes pulmonary alveolar and interstitial edema which, in X-rays, looks like a tree or a blossoming flower.
But after I wrote the poem, I realized that the reality of the piece prevented any true feeling. The work felt impotent. In the end, I didn’t want to be trapped by the confines of what had really happened. Memory is fantasy; what we carry with us has little to do with fact, everything to do with feeling.
Memory is defined as an organism’s ability to store, retain and retrieve information. It’s been clear to psychologists for some time that trauma can mar the brain’s ability to perform these functions. That is to say: trauma can so radically transform the landscape of memory that often it is nearly impossible for a person to return to their regular thought patterns.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve struggled with conveying my memories to certain members of my family, often because those people don’t hold those same images, feelings or thoughts to be true. When I set about writing this novella, I wanted to avoid the trappings of fact versus fiction. Instead, I wanted to create a world that felt, smelled and looked exactly like the world in which I’d grown up: the world from which I’d watched my father slowly disappear, in which I’d watched my mother stripped of her agency. I didn’t want to build this world within reality because, in the end, belief in reality is belief in fantasy. What I remember and what my mother remembers are two different universes. I wanted this novella to feel like a story passed down for generations until the truth of what happened begins to feel like myth.
Writing requires craft. What makes a book a work of art and not just a series of sentences on the page are the creative choices the author made while writing. Every story can be written a hundred thousand ways. What point of view are you going use? What’s the timeline? What tense? In the end, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a work of art— special and transcendent, not because of its relation to fact or fiction. What sets it apart are the craft choices that Vuong makes in order to maximize the emotional weight of the story and to wring the reader dry. When you finish that book you’re spiritually consumed. You’ve fallen into a space outside of your time and body. Vuong’s lyricism, insightfulness, and poetic syntax carry an emotional weight that builds and crashes through you. He manipulates time and space in order to ensure that every scene maintains maximum impact. He integrates memories and poetry and utilizes that juxtaposition to help the reader infer hidden intentions and draw their own conclusions. If Vuong were confined to the truth of what really happened, there would be less freedom to craft that crash and the book would be the poorer for it.
Let us consider the phrase “the truth what really happened.”
I’m sure you have all heard about the flaws in eye witness testimony. One of the most famous fictional representations is the 1957 film Twelve Angry Men. I am about to spoil this film, so skip ahead if you don’t like spoilers. Twelve Angry Men centers around the trial of a young man accused of murder. One of the main witnesses claims that she saw the young man in the apartment across from hers. She says she woke up to a startling sound and saw the young man clearly in that single moment. Henry Fonda points out to his fellow jurors that this woman couldn’t have seen him clearly because she wears glasses and she couldn’t have seen the young man without taking the time to put on her glasses.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has an entire report about why eye witness testimonies fail:
The first step toward correctly identifying something you’ve seen before is seeing it accurately to begin with. Research over the past few decades has revealed much about how vision works. Visual sensation is the initial process of detecting light and extracting basic image features. Sensations themselves are evanescent; only a small fraction of what is sensed is actually perceived. Attention is the filtering process by which information sensed by the visual system is selected for further processing. Perception is the process by which attended visual information is integrated, linked to environmental cause, made coherent, and categorized through the assignment of meaning, utility, value, and emotional valence.
TL:DR:
Perception is your brains organizational process as it attempts to make sense of what it sees. And what our brain actually sees is very little.
Bias fills in the blanks when visual information is uncertain, fills them in with what we believe is likely to be out there based on prior experience. Formally, this characterizes vision as a problem of statistical inference, in which the observer infers properties of the world from data in the form of retinal images. Bias refers here to prior probabilities (“priors”)—knowledge or dispositions derived from experience—that enable the observer to make context-dependent inferences about the environmental cause of visual stimulation. For example, prior knowledge that bank robbers carry guns enhances the probability that the bank robber will be perceived with gun in hand, even when the sensory evidence is equivocal.
But there is a catch: This same system that grants certainty of perceptual experience in the face of noise is also capable of filling in the blanks with the wrong information. In other words, misinformed biases cause us to perceive or make decisions about things that don’t exist. The coat rack may be experienced as an intruder in the hall, the shrubbery is mistaken for a police car, or the woman at the rendezvous point is wrongly identified as a friend. Similarly, uncertainty and bias can yield a situation in which information sensed by an eyewitness is of poor quality but the witness nonetheless perceives what he or she expects to see.
TL:DR
Our brains were designed to fill in the blanks. We see very little of the actual physical world and our little, lizard brains were trained to use context and bias to complete the picture.
Why am I talking about eye-witness testimonies and vision in an essay about fiction vs. autofiction vs. memoir? I’m using it to prove my point that memoir does not exist.
Memoir is defined as a writing based on an author’s personal memories. They are interpreted to be “factual”. But, factual and memory can never be synonymous. Not only because our brains fundamentally cannot be counted on to record the truth in any given moment, but we cannot be relied upon to recall such events accurately.
The reason James Frey was shunned by the literary community was because he wrote about his experience and used craft to make it more interesting, to intrigue readers, to enhance tension—which is what writing is! Augusten Burroughs faced a similar issues with his book Running with Scissors. Do I think that Augusten Burroughs exaggerated the story? Yes. Do I care? No. Because I’m not delusional enough to expect my art to be fact.
I trust artists to ingest the world—evanescent and elusive—and craft an artifact that represents the core of their perception.
Subject vs. Object vs. Truth
I’ve stated many, many times that I want a single truth. I want there to be an answer! One unadulterated and pure truth! Specifically related to death and love. Those are the two unknowable forces in my life that I’d really like to pin down. Just stick them to the floor and violently shout, “Stay!” But I have also acknowledged that despite my profound, visceral desire for truth, I don’t believe in it.
In my attempt to understand truth I’ve read a lot of philosophy books (only a few of which I actually fully understand) and I think the correspondence theory of truth resonates most deeply with me.
Proklos (In Tim., II 287, 1) speaks of truth as the agreement or adjustment (epharmoge) between knower and the known. Philoponus (In Cat., 81, 25-34) emphasizes that truth is neither in the things or states of affairs (pragmata) themselves, nor in the statement itself, but lies in the agreement between the two. He gives the simile of the fitting shoe, the fit consisting in a relation between shoe and foot, not to be found in either one by itself.
Truth then, is like our vision. Truth is like human memory. Truth is the act of perceiving the world and creating an agreement between ourselves and what is presented to us. (Obviously this gets sticky when it comes to outright lies—I’m not trying to excuse politicians that craft stories to justify drone strikes that murder civilians). What I am saying is that it is impossible to consider our reality without considering ourselves.
If we can’t trust our eyes or our memories to translate “the truth of what really happened?” what are we doing when we write and when we make art?
Michael Singer says:
When you were ten years old, did you ever look in a mirror? Did you see what you see now? No. Was it you looking? You’ve been there the whole time haven’t you. That’s the core. That’s the essence of everything we want to talk about. Who are you? Who is that that is in there, that is looking out through those eyes and seeing what you’re seeing… When you look out at the mirror, you are not what you see. It’s what we call subject object. You’re the subject. And what you are looking at is the object.
We can perceive an infinite amount of objects. All our lives we are looking at objects beyond ourselves. We perceive the world through that being that is us.
The act of creating art, then, is similar to the act of opening our eyes. We see the world and our brain bounces light, distance and color back to us and we fill in the blanks from that which we are, which is the subject of our own lives. We are incapable of achieving anything else. Even the most spiritual leaders of the world don’t suggest reaching outside of ourselves for truth or understanding—rather becoming more deeply rooted within our own consciousness.
So, what is the point of all of this?
Marguerite Duras did live in Saigon. She did have an affair with a twenty-seven-year-old man when she was fifteen. She wrote about the experience of the affair and how those months ricocheted throughout her life—coloring every preceding moment with its fire. I believe that much to be true. And I don’t care to pin her to anything else.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
So yes, I want to write “a novel of a life.” I want to live in that liminal space between memory and experience. But that sort of raw vulnerability comes with high stakes and hight consequences.
In her journal excerpts, Annie Ernaux describes having sex in her son’s studio with a younger, married, man. How do you think her son feels about that? How do you think the married man, unnamed but loosely identified enough that I’m sure her friends and acquaintances know who he is, feels about having his sexual encounters described with specific and tangible details? This affair obviously had a profound effect on Ernaux. She wrote a novel about the experience. The writing she produced after the affair is described as her best work. I’ve never had an affair. I’ve yet to become a middle-aged woman with two children. But Ernaux’s journal entries awoke in me the same sense of furious hunger, of unrequited need that leaves you starving and bereft. Her honesty, perhaps not to historical fact, but her honesty to her emotions, allowed me to melt into the piece until author, reader and page lost all distinction. Ernaux’s detailed description of her sexual exploits while her sons lingered just beyond the door made me believe her story even more. It’s not pleasant. She’s not behaving “well,” but that’s the point. Ernaux is laying her humanness bare. The writing is phenomenal. But there’s a cost.
If we’re to be artists working in this space of “a novel of life,” we’re obviously going to affect the lives of those around us. If we’re translating our experiences into art then our family members, our lovers, our teachers will all feature in our work. And with great power comes great responsibility. Joyce Maynard is quoted as saying, “Write like you’re an orphan,” because the fear of betraying those you love will keep you from ever putting pen to paper. You must psychologically kill your parents in order be creatively free! Anne Lamott has said, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
Sure, I agree with both of those statements and yet…
Nicole Krauss writes about this in her short story The Young Painters. She describes how a writer tells the story of her friend’s tragedy in a short story. In writing the story she changes little, merely embellishes and fill in the blanks. Krauss says;
Yes, I believed—perhaps even still believe—that the writer should not be cramped by the possible consequences of her work. She has no duty to earthly accuracy or verisimilitude. She is not an accountant, nor is she required to be something as ridiculous and misguided as a moral compass. In her work, the writer is free of laws. But in her life, Your Honor, she is not free.
How do you navigate being free in your work while also being responsible in your life? How do you write what’s true to you, how can you be as honest and free as Ernaux without harming the people closest to you? You can write like you’re an orphan but you are, in fact, not an orphan—even if both your parents are dead, there is someone out there who cares about you and will be hurt by what you say.
I recently attended a reading in which the author, Sheila Heti, was asked what trait a writer needs in order to create great work. She said, “kindness.” I think that’s how writers should navigate their art. Esther Perel says that when navigating tough conversations with your partner you should ask yourself: is it honest? Is it helpful? Is it kind? And I think that’s what writers should ask themselves every day as they create.
Is it honest? Don’t slander people or tell wild untruths just for the sake of being mean or for revenge. Sure, you can manipulate details to create maximum emotional effect but don’t be cruel and don’t make shit up just so you can make people look bad.
Is it helpful? Why are you writing about this event? Does it serve the larger question of the story? Does it advance the themes of the work? Or did you just slap it in as an exposé. Look at this horrible thing this person did! Look at this horrible thing I did to someone else! Don’t put that shit in if it doesn’t contribute to the material. Does the scene make the work stronger? Is it essential to the art?
Is it kind? You know how you’re supposed to use I statements when fighting with a partner? Well, I think that goes for your work as well. Being an artist of any kind is narcissistic. Embrace the narcissism. You’re creating this because you have something to say—you have questions to answer—whether or not you intend to show it to others. Your work is, literally, all about you. Anyone who say’s differently is selling something. But everything that happened to you happened through your own perspective. Acknowledge your bias! Your memories aren’t real. Get over it. While your perspective should always be the focus of the story you shouldn’t ignore the very real experience of those around you. Write from your perspective but remain objective enough to acknowledge that there are as many way of looking at things as there are galaxies: infinitely unknowable.
Also, don’t share stories that aren’t yours to share. This goes for a lot of things—like don’t be a white dude writing about what it’s like to be a black woman. Don’t be that guy. Write what you know, or what is in the realm of your understanding.
It’s difficult to take responsibility for your art and make the best work you can possibly create while also protecting the people you love. My family has been super patient, especially my mom, with me writing about our joint story. My sister let me write about her personal and intimate history in my most recent “novel.” But it’s still uncomfortable for them and I know that in a lot of ways, they’d prefer I wrote about other things.
But, I hope that by following the rules: is it honest? Is it helpful? and is it kind? I can be true to my work and also remain true to those I love.
Art and Responsibility