Memory and Literary Nonfiction

I have a hard time tolerating those literary nonfiction writers (and teachers) who demand that every detail of a personal essay – every image, every piece of dialogue, every thought or emotion at the time – be precisely accurate, as it actually happened, as if it were a finely pixilated digital photograph. The “literature of reality” (as it is sometimes called, begging the question) requires devotion to a photographic (and phonographic and aromatic) rendition of experience. (This is an issue that has been actively engaged in the genre for at least a few decades; the most prominent being Lee Gutkin, the author, teacher, and editor of Creative Nonfiction.) Consider this passage from Jonathon Starke’s “The Wound” (Brevity 34):

I looked from the horse over to my brother, who was holding the trailer door open with a hip, both hands gripped together at his stomach. He was seven, two years older than me, but always afraid to get near something like this. I stepped closer to the horse.

. . .

Teddy walked over. He ground his teeth together so hard I could see the muscles in his jaw wriggle. He took the bucket up high in his hands. I didn’t know what was coming, what he was capable of, so I tucked my head in my arms and closed my eyes. Teddy growled and dumped the water over me. Then he threw the bucket into the dirt and took me by the arm. Teddy dragged me over to the horse with the stranger and the other men right behind.

"This funny?” he said, letting go of my arm and taking hold of the horse’s reins. He jerked hard on them so the horse’s neck was pulled. “You think this is goddamn funny?”

No doubt the title of the essay, “The Wound,” is meant as a metaphor for the traumatic effect of this experience on the then five-year-old author. But could it have really been so traumatic as to etch it onto his immature mind in such perfect detail for all of these years? How his brother was holding the trailer door open, gripping his stomach? How Teddy was grinding his teeth, growling, tossing the bucket into the dirt? How Teddy jerked the reins and said exactly the words “You think this is goddamn funny?”

Perhaps. But I seriously doubt it, if only based on my own memories of being five years old. Or rather memory. All I have from that age is one fleeting image of lying down on one of those woven cotton mats for a nap in kindergarten. The next memory I retain (and a more traumatic one) is from two years later, running from our duplex after getting into a fight with my mother (over what I have no idea), punching my fist through the front picture window, and fleeing down the alley, only to finally, at the end of the block, see the blood dripping from my hand. What happened after that, I don’t recall. I do, though, still have a scar on the back of my right hand.

Again, perhaps Starke has a more vivid memory of his childhood than me (and, I suspect, you). But my guess would be that he would explain his narrative as being “true to the spirit of the experience,” as most writers, teachers, and students of literary nonfiction would probably agree. Reality – and thus “the literature of reality” – is elusive in memory. Recall is selective (personal) from the outset. And over time it foregrounds and suppresses, smooths and roughs, illuminates and obscures. The literary (or creative) of nonfiction is the aesthetic embellishment of memory, of experience, true not just to the spirit of the experience but more important to the point of remembering – and relating – the experience in the first place.