Edmund White: 'I try to be honest. If I lose someone's friendship, so what?'
Why a memoirist’s contract with a reader is to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth
Friday 29 January 2016
Ihate the phrase “creative nonfiction.” It sounds like a synonym for lying. You have to tell the truth when you’re writing what purports to be a memoir. I started off writing autobiographical fiction with my third novel, A Boy’s Own Story. That was in 1982. In those days, normal people like me couldn’t write memoirs. You had to be the hero of Iwo Jima or something. The story of someone who’d merely lived and suffered wasn’t sensational enough.
I moved to Paris in 1983. While I was living there, the “normal person memoir” fad began to catch on in the US. Usually the author was someone with a painful childhood. I remember coming back to America on holiday and seeing an ad in The New York Review of Books that said, “Have you been raped as a child? Incested? We can put you on the lecture circuit.” That’s how I knew that memoir was in.
I called A Boy’s Own Story and Beautiful Room “novels.” And indeed they were. I thought I could redress the balance between truth and invention by calling them novels. I think fiction should be representative, and memoir should be extremely honest and personal. It should show the author for who he is, warts and all.
The opposite of an autobiographical novel is a novelistic memoir. Unless they’re written for humorous effect, like the work of David Sedaris, they’re reprehensible. A memoirist’s contract with the reader is that you’re telling the truth and nothing but the truth. Maybe I think that because I do both. For me it’s been interesting to write about the same episodes in my life in both fiction and non-fiction forms and try to make them not repetitious. For instance, in My Lives I tried not to write at all about my childhood. I tried not to write chronologically, but by topic. The chapters were “My Blonds”, “My Shrinks” and so on. The structure was almost essayistic.
Another distinction is that in fiction you cannot have opinions about things. You present the action, the dialogue. You don’t say, “She’s a good person,” or “That was a formative experience”. Only bad novels are explicit like that. People can draw that information themselves from a good novel. When you write a memoir about the five shrinks you had over 25 years, you’re almost obliged at the end of it to say what it did for and against you. You have to have an opinion.
A novelist has a different contract. Novels are more work for the reader. The novel is meant to be a normalised, representative version of the class of person the author is writing about. Jane Austen writes about young, often poor gentry women who make advantageous marriages in spite of their ridiculous fathers or mothers. Her heroines are attractive and representative of their demographic in their times. In real life, Jane Austen never married, concealed the fact that she was a writer, and slept on a couch in the living room. If she had written an autobiography, it would have seemed very strange to most people.
I know that mine is an extreme view. In A Passage to India, EM Forster leaves out his own homosexuality altogether. He did write a gay novel, but he didn’t allow it to be published until after his death.
Proust is another case. In Remembrance of Things Past, almost all of the characters are gay. But the narrator, who is called Marcel, is not gay, and he’s also not Jewish, as Proust actually was. In other words, he is almost normalised in that he’s straight and Catholic. The bizarre aspects of his own life are completely suppressed. Proust never wrote a real autobiography, though in letters he sometimes referred to his novel as a memoir. It obviously wasn’t. He changed men into women, and he made himself into a good Catholic.
My protagonist in A Boy’s Own Story was much less precocious intellectually and sexually than I was. He was shyer. If I’d written about myself as the freaky boy I really was, very few people could have identified with the novel. That book came out in 1982. I didn’t think it was quite the period yet for my own true story. In real life, I had had sex with 500 men, most of them older than I was, by the time I was 16. The boy in the book has one or two experiences, with boys his own age.
I made several efforts to make him relatable. I didn’t name the decade he was growing up in. I didn’t name the place. I didn’t give him a name. Not a week goes by that I don’t get a letter about that book from someone like the 16-year-old gay black guy from Ghana, who wrote to me recently, “My life is exactly like yours.” It’s kind of crazy that a 16-year-old from Ghana thinks his life is like that of a white boy in the Midwest. By taking away the name of the decade, the name of the place, and his name, I kind of made my protagonist like every boy.
I have a tough time, because I’m aware of writing for many middle-aged, middle-class women, and I’m writing about something most women don’t like at all: male homosexuality. Straight men are turned on by lesbians, whereas straight women – unless they’re young and kinky – are not turned on by gay men. Years ago Playboy had a quiz in which they asked, “What’s your most exciting forbidden fantasy?” Half the women asked said they wanted to try lesbianism. Only 3% of men wanted to try sex with another man. It has to do with the sexist nature of our culture. Men are taken much more seriously. So I have to try to place my experiences in a perspective that’s more general, told in a voice that’s kind of sympathetic and brotherly.
In general, I try to be very honest in my memoirs. If I lose someone’s friendship because of that, so what? I believe what Czesław Miłosz, the Nobelwinning Polish poet, said: “Whenever a writer is born into a family, that family is destroyed.”
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