Lies we call memoirs

My July reading/listening has thus far been memoirs. Walter Kirn's Blood Will Out and Remain in Love by Chris Frantz.

Other than well-written detective fiction, memoirs are my favorite genre, especially in relation to crime, music, or writing. But if it's an interesting story I'll be hooked regardless.

Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure along with Invention of Solitude are my all-time favorites. Auster is one of the most influential writers for me. From New York Trilogy, to Mister Vertigo, those books shaped my young writer's brain in so many ways: Economy of words. The magical realism in every day life. And building worlds out of ideas.

Though I've not written a memoir, I have written creative non-fiction, although that's not a term I particularly like as it sounds pretentious. The fact is that in A-Sides & B-Sides, the story "I can't put my finger on it," is 100% word-for-word truth I experienced. It's just very few people believed me when I told them. This is also true of "Eye of Fatima," in the same book, although that one is more believable.

Stories don't have to be true to be believable, though, any more than stories that happen in real life have to be considered non-fiction. Stories exist regardless of whether they happened or were fashioned out of whole cloth. Even if something happened to me, the very act of committing it to paper or screen makes it ever-so-slightly detached, because of my relationship to the story has gone from being something I tell, to something I write.

Blood Will Out is Walter Kirn's chronicle of befriending a man who claimed to be  Clark Rockefeller, an impossibly rich bon vivant, but was in reality Christian Gerhartsreiter, a German conman and murderer. In one sense the book is an introspective meditation on who we are and who we appear to be as much as it is a straight-forward memoir. It's not an objective journalistic account. How could it be? The story was happening to the author, and it was one he didn't realize was made up until well after the fact. There is only so much detachment one can attain in that regard. I imagine writing it and piecing everything together was a lot like watching a replay of a game you didn't see the first time around.

When I was listening to the Audible version of it, I couldn't help but feel the same pleasure I do as when I'm reading a good detective fiction novel. This was large in part due to the storyline.

Even if it's straight non-fiction there's still a certain necessary fictionalization that occurs whether we are conscious of it or not, because life's stories simply don't come with neat arcs and denouements unless we create them for the purposes of putting them to paper.

I'll take this conceptual rabbit whole a few feet further, because this feeling is augmented in the Audible version because the narrator was someone other than Kirn. A book about a conman, read by someone pretending (in a sense) to be the author.

It reminds me of when I got the idea to end New Roman Times, by having the unreliable narrator show up only after the story was finished. It seemed like a fitting way to end a story where each chapter unraveled the previous chapter with competing narratives by breaking the fourth wall, but only after the house had been burned down.

In a sense, we're all being conned or we're conning ourselves, and often at the same time.

On the flipside of this is Chris Frantz's Remain In Love, a memoir that is as much a celebration of Talking Heads (and Tom Tom Club) as it is a love letter to his wife of forty-two years, Tina Weymouth. Though I am reading the hardback I also bought the audio rendition because it is read by Frantz. As such it is incredibly endearing.

I've always been a huge Talking Heads fan. "Love for Sale," was the first song I learned on the drums. Watching "Stop Making Sense" still fills me with excitement as one by one the band members come out to augment the sound. As far as concert films go, there is nothing else like it.

I'm only about a third of the way through the book but it is thoroughly enjoyable. And while it's 100% earnest, the reason I titled this post the way I did is that this is an example of a lie being the sin of omission. Don't get me wrong: I don't need to know all the dirty laundry any more than I need to know the banal day-to-day stuff either. But memoirs, like biographies, need to leave something on the cutting room floor. We've all got things to do and places to go.

In skimming the end chapters just now, I see that Frantz hits the gas around the  time of True Stories, flying through the most recent decades with just a few stops along the way. Fiction or non-fiction, this is necessary. You have to lie somewhere.

And you do what the story demands, true or not.