How Much of This is True? On the Subtle Nuances of Memoir and Autofiction

“We are all unreliable narrators, recounting our stories through the filters of perception and memory.” When my first book, a memoir about my time in the Marines called Eat the Apple , was published back in 2018, I did an event at Powell’s with a fellow writer, Matt Robinson, who’d written an amazing collection of stories called The Horse Latitudes. Robinson’s an Army vet and was writing about Iraq through fiction, which was obviously colored by his lived experience in some way, and that fascinated me as it seemed so much more difficult than what I’d done, which I saw as basically just spilling my guts all over the page and rooting around in them like a hog. For years after my enlistment, I’d tried writing fiction about the war and it all ended up trite and didactic, sounding like someone else—the writers I admired mostly. And while I think imitation can help explore things like cadence and rhythm and syntax—it doesn’t do much for a writer’s personal voice. I’m big on voice. The voicier the better. For me, it brings a piece of writing to life. That’s partly why I wrote a memoir: struggling to write fiction, I found my voice while writing nonfiction and kind of stood aside and let it do its work. I keep seeming to find myself writing into genres that demand palettes of gray. Fiction to me seemed so much more complicated—there are so many choices. So much breadth and depth. How do you know you’re making the right decision? The best one? The Marines taught me that any decision is better than no decision, which is all part of the mentality of being hard to kill (if you’re moving, you’re not dying, the thinking goes). It’s a good lesson for war. It’s also a good lesson for creativity. I don’t see creativity as war, but I do think our inner critic—that thing that wants to keep us from making a bad decision— often makes us slow down and think and second guess and while I do tend to revise as I write, […]

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