Novel or Memoir? Or Why I’ve Been So Afraid to Show my Underpants

Similar to the difference between painters and sculptors, some writers, it seems, naturally gravitate to fiction as their primary form for telling their “stories,” while others find creative nonfiction to be their preferred method of expression. And still others do both exceptionally well: to name just a few, Hemingway, Styron, Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Ta-Nahesi Coates. Writers themselves have defined the difference between the elements needed for writing fiction and writing creative nonfiction in many ways. For example, Amy Bloom has said, “Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It’s easier because the facts are already laid out.” Albert Camus famously said that “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” Joan Didion, a writer equally adept in both genres, said in a Paris Review interview that, “Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with.”

Some writers like what they consider the freedom of fiction or the ability to lose oneself in other lives and other worlds; opposed to this are writers of nonfiction who often feel compelled to tell the truth of their lives directly, without “making stuff up.” The writer Jenna Blum has said that the difference between writing fiction and writing memoir is that “fiction is hiding your emotional truth, memoir is stripping to reveal it, saying, ‘LOOKIE, reader, underpants!’” Certainly, more writers now are choosing to show their underpants through nonfiction than they were a generation or two ago. When I was in graduate school, there were only two concentrations: poetry and fiction.

So what makes a writer decide to write in one genre or another, or in both? Is it a cultural trend or a market-driven response? Is it something fundamental within a writer? Or do different life experiences make the writer lean toward one form or another?

I had the good fortune to direct an MFA program for ten years and had the opportunity to work with hundreds of writers of both genres. Many entered the program committed to one genre but over time migrated to the other. Some who wrote a memoir first found that they had nothing more to tell about themselves through nonfiction, but they still very much had more stories they wanted to write. One of the very best MFA writers I’ve worked with was David Fitzpatrick. After writing a brilliant memoir called Sharp https://tinyurl.com/4m6b3sfw David went on to write several successful novels. Regarding writing in both genres, Fitzpatrick had this to say, “I like both but I felt limited back then after Sharp.” He also said he found writing fiction a lot harder than memoir. After writing fiction for many years, he says now he’s writing a hybrid book with his wife which is part fiction and part nonfiction.

For most of my own writing career, I felt I had a natural inclination for fiction as the best vehicle to tell my stories. One time I was having a drink with a friend, who knew, as they say, where all the bodies of my life were buried. This person suggested that I just had to write a memoir of my life. “It’s so odd and so interesting,” he said. I told him I had already written about it many times and in many ways using fiction. But he countered with, “No I mean your life, not your characters’ lives.” I tried to explain that my life was both too grotesque and unbelievable, on the one hand, and too boring and pathetic, on the other.

Besides, I felt the memoir by the latter part of the 20^th century had turned from being another sort of well-crafted personal narrative of insight and wisdom, to a sort of “one-upmanship” of victimhood and abuse. Like some Dickensian novel, too many memoirs, it seemed to me, strove to outdo the previous one for the “suffering” prize. Oh, yeah? So you were beaten and forced into a closet by your parents? Well, top this: I was beaten and forced into a closet WITH rats while having to eat cold porridge. I didn’t want to compete with that. Of course, I’m being more than a little facetious; good and great memoirs were being written, published, and read during this period. But my point is that too many of the other variety were being published, even lauded by critics and readers. We’ve all read memoirs that seemed to go out of their way simply to shock us, without providing the kind of wisdom, insight, vision, and poetry that we normally expect from a good memoir.

Then again, perhaps my own reluctance to write a memoir about my life had more to do with my own failings as a writer than anything else. Unlike writing about the characters in my novels, I told myself I couldn’t quite get my arms around my own life; I felt unable to understand my screwed-up family, our not-so-much-tragic-as-pathetic lives, to tell a story truthfully and fairly, let alone interestingly. So I poured the many parts of my life into short stories and later novels—creating, as the French put it, aroman à clef, a novel with a key, one that was a thinly disguised version of real people and real events. Those who knew me intimately saw that parts of my novels were about family members and friends, and incidents from my past. Therefore, I felt I was, in fact, writing my story, just hidden behind the protective veil of my fictional characters’ lives.

In many ways, this is exactly what I do in my upcoming novel Skunktown (www.michaelcwhite.com) One important part of the novel centers on the young narrator Lyman’s family, especially his relationship with his father, older brother, and mother. Lyman is named after one of my older brothers while Lyman’s father is named after an uncle. The core relationship between father and son in the novel, especially the inimical patois they use with each other, comes almost literally from my own childhood. I guess as Blum put it, I was afraid to show my “underpants” so I fictionalized much of the novel’s characters and its setting. My fear was based on two things that have always plagued me about writing my story as memoir: I didn’t want to become vulnerable, to expose myself, and, even worse, I didn’t want to have that vulnerability be considered poor art. For me, as painful as it was to have someone critique my fiction, I could at least say they were criticizing my craft, something that was more objective as well as something I could change or improve. But if they didn’t like my memoir, they were attacking me, my life, my very soul.

I work with both novelists and memoirists. Most come to me already having made their choice of which genre to use. Seldom do I try to talk them into changing forms. I only try to help them make the best of their chosen genre. But is the choice of writing nonfiction or fiction one of bravery versus cowardice, as it has mostly been for me? Is it one that we actively choose? Or is it chosen for us, a function of how we see the world and our place in it? Frankly, I’m not sure.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.