Whether you’re writing memoir, fiction, or something in between, you’ll eventually face the question: what do I owe my reader? The answer depends on the contract you’ve made. In fiction, the promise is emotional truth. In memoir, the promise is that this really happened. The trouble starts when writers break that contract without telling anyone.

Contract with the Reader

James Frey wrote A Million Little Pieces as a novel first and couldn’t sell it. Then he sold it as a memoir and it became huge. Of course, those of us who were alive at the time remember how that turned out for him: Oprah destroyed him on national television after it was discovered that he had fabricated parts of his story.

In whatever form Frey conceived of his work, the emotional truth matters more than the literal truth. This may just be an assertion on our part, but it’s born out from a knowledge of the craft. If you write a memoir, every fact is accurate, but it doesn’t feel true, it fails. If you write a novel, none of it really happened, but it feels true, it succeeds.

The problem with Frey wasn’t that he lied. The problem was that he broke the contract. He said “this happened” and it didn’t. If he’d said “this is a novel inspired by my experiences,” no one would have cared.

Facts vs Emotional Truth

John D’Agata brings this idea of fact versus truth to the essay form. Famously, he got into a huge fight with his fact-checker about whether you can change the number of strip clubs in Las Vegas for rhythmic purposes in a sentence. He said yes, of course. The fact-checker said no. They wrote a whole book about it, The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, his fact-checker.

The question D’Agata raises is: what do you owe to facts versus what do you owe to the experience of reading? There’s no clean answer.

Blur the Line: An Exercise in Life Writing

Take a piece of your writing and reconceptualize it as either fiction or nonfiction, whatever the opposite may be. This might be as simple as swapping a first-person narrator into the third person, or vice versa.

Do a freewrite based on this reconceptualization, then write out any new discoveries. Does the fictional frame give you more license to tell difficult truths about your life? Or does pivoting a scene from your novel into nonfiction give the action higher emotional stakes? 

Now revise the piece accordingly, injecting real life into your fiction or making the factsheet of your memoir a little blurry.

We give you permission.