Why Fictionalize Memoir?

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Today’s post is by writer and educator Cecile Popp.

My Grossmama’s annual visits throughout my childhood figure prominently in our family albums and in my memory. But while the photographs attest to the frequency of her trips east from Vancouver, my memory stubbornly insists on blending all her visits into one: we are sitting around the dining room table. It might be breakfast, it could be summer. And although I know that only two or three of my father’s five sisters ever managed to visit at the same time, living as they did in different countries and cities, in my memory they are all there.

They linger for what seems like hours, long after my mother and brothers have left the table. And I stay, transfixed by their animated conversation, punctuated by laughter that only subsides when they can no longer breathe, bosoms heaving and tears streaming.

My Grossmama’s life spanned the 20th century and four continents, and was disrupted repeatedly by revolution and war. I have long wanted to write about my family’s history of exile and migration, but I knew early on I didn’t want to turn my grandmother’s story into a sweeping historical drama. Rather, I’m interested in the effects on subsequent generations, most notably mine. The stories I grew up with, and the meaning I parsed from them, have informed how I live my life. But what happens when my memories, formed when I was eight, ten, thirteen, differ from those of the adults at the table? Which takes precedence—fact checking their stories, or interpreting my memory of them?

I am drawn to family histories that intersect with 20th-century events. Call it craft research. Recently, though, three such books challenged me with their ambiguous relationship to fact. If I were to arrange fiction and nonfiction on opposite ends of a spectrum, would memoir be in the middle? Can its position shift, sliding closer to one end or the other?

Example 1: Anne Berest’s The Postcard

Anne Berest’s The Postcard is carefully researched and highly personal, centering the author as first person narrator in several parts of the book. Berest herself has said, “There is not a single sentence in these passages that is invented.” Yet the original French edition is subtitled un romain vrai, or a true novel. The copyright page of the English version clearly states that historical events, real people, and places are used fictitiously. So why is Berest calling her memoir a novel? Why present something true and historical as fiction?

Certainly, Berest had options: many memoirists include a disclaimer stating that some names and distinguishing details have been changed. Indeed, Berest explains in an NPR interview that she did exactly this for anyone who was depicted negatively, so as to protect their grandchildren. Is it ultimately just a question of semantics, then? After all, Berest hasn’t departed from her family’s history, hasn’t written a novel “inspired” by true events.

Or perhaps Berest didn’t feel comfortable calling The Postcard a memoir because some parts of the narrative shift away from the author’s discovery and self-reflection and place the reader in-scene with the author’s ancestors. Berest’s great-grandparents are introduced as young newlyweds in Moscow in 1919, and the narrative stays with them until the couple and two of their children are arrested and taken to Auschwitz, where they were killed in 1942. Later, that narrative arc is picked up and the reader follows the surviving daughter, Berest’s grandmother, through the years of Nazi occupation. Is this where the memoir ends and the novel begins? Did Berest take creative liberties to flesh out these scenes? And what does all this mean for me and my decision to call my book about my grandmother a memoir?

Example 2: Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History

Claire Messud’s 2024 novel This Strange Eventful History is based on her family’s Pied-Noir history, although readers have no reason to doubt its fictitiousness. It reads like an epic family history, spanning seven decades and three generations. Told in the third person from the point of view of different characters, Messud has removed herself entirely from the story; the first-person narration is from a granddaughter. But the stories so closely resemble the author’s family history—the characters even carry the names of the author’s grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts—that I have to ask why she fictionalized their stories.

Messud has likened herself to a safecracker, whose job it is to tell the story and not get in the way. In a revealing article in The Guardian, she suggests that we write to “bear witness to lives now gone, lives that were never of themselves dramatic or, in society’s terms, important, but that, in their flaws, contradictions, joys and disappointments, were meaningful.” One could therefore argue that Messud’s story was best served by packaging it as a novel, that she could not have “given her family’s treasured memories a new life” in memoir form (source). Ultimately, Messud’s decision stems from the desire to do her family’s stories justice; and the more these stories resonate with readers, the more validating.

But since I do know that Messud’s novel is based on her grandfather’s memoir, I cannot simply enjoy the book as fiction. Indeed, it is this “ambiguous relationship to reality,” according to Julia M. Klein, that makes Messud’s book so compelling. There is a tension, a mystery, where the reader wonders how much is true. This enhances the book. I can only conclude that it is enough for Messud—or any writer—to feel seen, and that for some stories, especially if they are sweeping family histories, fictionalizing is the best way to accomplish this.

How much will I need to embellish or depart from fact, filling in the blanks, to tell my family’s stories in a compelling way? And will I also feel compelled to call my book fiction, or a “true novel”?

Example 3: Vinh Nguyen’s The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse

Vinh Nguyen’s decision to include speculative chapters in his memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse—and still call it memoir—balances out my investigation into the question of why fictionalize. If anyone could have called their memoir fiction, it would be Nguyen. And yet his (true) story is made all the more powerful by the chapters that are fictionalized. By playing with truth, fact and memory, he brings to the forefront not only the problem these present in memoir, but more importantly the trauma and impact of the Vietnam War. “Those who have been through war know that war scrambles our stories and timeline … To make sense of what happened to my father and to my family, I would need to bend memory, stretch facts, conjure desire.” His book’s form matches its contents, its message, the writer’s lived experience.

It is that phrase, conjure desire, which I find the most striking. Unlike Berest and Messud, Nguyen’s decision to invent a history for his father, indeed a hypothetical history and subsequent present day for himself and his mother, is not about the reader but rather for himself. And he doesn’t stop there. At the beginning of the book, Nguyen touches on why write memoir at all: “to make his [father’s] fall from this life acquire some significance beyond another senseless refugee death, a nameless person disappearing from history.”

“Magical thinking” is a phrase Nguyen mentions several times in his book, referencing Joan Didion’s memoir about the year following her husband’s death. Through this memoir, particularly the invented parts, Nguyen lives through an alternative reality, the life he wishes he could have had with and for his father. And—spoiler alert—by the end of the book he has worked through this need and achieves closure.

Still, by writing the book he needed to write, and being transparent about his departures from fact, Nguyen has created a powerful reader experience.

Final thoughts

A history of my Grossmama’s life, especially if written to inform readers of a geopolitical movement and its subsequent Baltic German diaspora, would understandably have little room for her granddaughter’s personal stories and interpretations. Swing the pendulum in the opposite direction and write autofiction, and I could freely embellish to serve the story. As Sarah Twombly so succinctly put it, writing in Craft, “Unburdened by facts, you are beholden only to the emotional truth of your story.” But a memoir of how those events affect me today in 21st-century Canada should draw on both the emotional and historical truth of my family’s stories. Berest, Messud and Nguyen have all done both, albeit with varying degrees of fictionalization. As if they each asked themselves what would serve their reader and their story; and then proceeded to write their respective books.

Like Messud, I wish to bear witness and breathe new life into my family’s stories. Like Berest, I feel compelled to counterbalance the past with my own experience, especially as I learn more about our history as an adult. And, inspired by Nguyen, I may (transparently) experiment with speculation.