Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 10, 1995 TAG: 9504110030
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In fact, I rather need to think I have a pretty good memory in order to keep up my faith in myself as a writer.
But this presents a problem. Not just for me, but for any writer engaged in the use of memory.
The problem is this: Writing is not life. Writing is an organization of the details of life that, when completed with skill, seems like life.
But it isn't life.
Life is a mess: no beginning, no end, no reliable causation. Writing is just the opposite: a beginning, a middle, an end, with a line of reasoning running down its core that lets the reader say, ``Oh, so that's why it happened the way that it did.''
When you ask me of something recorded in this space, ``Did that really happen?'' the answer is nearly always ``Yes.''
And, ``No.''
The incidents I choose to record have all really happened to me, but in the very act of recording these incidents I necessarily change them. I give them form. In short, I turn life into writing.
My memory becomes my story. That's what writers do.
But I think everyone does this with memory, whether or not they write. Anyone who's ever told a memory to another person has given to that memory the shape of a story. Our memories are, after all, the stories we tell ourselves about our lives so that we can remember what we've learned.
But here's my point: Stories aren't really memories any more. They're more particular, more precise. Memories-turned-into-stories have gained a usefulness - a moral, if you will - that wasn't there in life. Memories-turned-into-stories are, in a very fundamental way, made up.
If the story you've made of your life carefully follows life's outlines, then your artifice will be slight. But if, for one reason or another, you've changed around life's details a good little bit, then you present yourself a problem. How to remember where memory leaves off and story, or artifice, begins?
Lately, I find myself facing this problem more and more. I've become so compulsive a story-teller, changing every incident I meet into story, that often I can no longer tell what I actually remember and what details I've made up because they seem to me to improve the story.
I don't intentionally lie (at least, not often), but I continually improve, embellish, rearrange - the details of my own life, and of yours as well. Tell me a charming or interesting incident, and I'll put it into a story. After that, it's no longer your memory; it's my story. And, because I'm getting so confused about this lately, I might appropriate it for my memory, too, while I'm at it.
I don't think this is a heinous crime, as crimes against humanity go. But I recognize that it makes me a difficult relative. ``Uh-oh, don't tell her that,'' I hear more and more. ``She'll put it in a column.''
She probably will, too.
But she won't put it there quite the way it happened. Or quite the way you told it, either. She'll twist it around, some way or other, to suit her own purposes.
And then, she'll forever insist that the way she wrote it is the right way, the way it was, and that you're the one who's remembering it all wrong.
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB