Memoirs are nonfiction; the whole point of the genre is that you’re writing a story about your own life. 

But memoir is also an art form, a kind of storytelling. Good memoirists know that writing about their own life does not mean retyping their obsessive diaries that recount exactly what time they ate breakfast and what the precise humidity was in the air that day. No, if you’re writing about your relationship with your mother, you’ll focus on a series of events, and maybe you’ll write out events from her own life before you were born. 

Omitting some things is obvious, but is there ever a point where a memoirist should outright lie? 

The Safety of Others

Many of the most influential memoirs focus on traumatic events. Authors write about the worst things that have happened to them in order to raise awareness of uncomfortable truths, make connections with other people who have experienced similar traumas, and to help themselves process their own experiences. 

Sometimes these sensitive topics mean that you need to conceal someone’s identity with a fake name and enough changes in detail that they can’t be identified. Sometimes, you might need to make what’s called a composite character, which is one character who serves as more than one real person from your life. For example, if you’re writing about your time at summer camp, and there were multiple counselors who encountered you in different years and did different things for you, you might combine those people into one character who follows you over time. 

Composite characters are more common in something like a TV adaptation of a memoir, something that’s not meant to be as close to the truth. But depending on your situation, the story you’re meaning to tell, and whom you need to protect, it might be an option. In that case, you should include that as a disclaimer at the beginning of your book so readers know you made those kinds of changes due to privacy concerns. 

Creative Expression

Another reason you might bend the truth is creative expression. Memoir is nonfiction, but it can still bend genres. Carmen Maria Machado’s critically acclaimed memoir In the Dream House plays with form and expression in a way that makes her emotional experience of an abusive relationship feel devastatingly real. 

Or you could push it further, to the point where maybe your memoir wouldn’t even sit on the memoir shelf. Are there emotional themes that you can express better if you set your story in outer space, where characters can do things like teleport themselves to other planets or meet real aliens? Or are there historical figures whose stories mirror your own, and you want to intersperse your own story with passages of historical fiction, or straightforward nonfiction, so you can include them? 

Focus on what you really want to share with your readers, and ask yourself if there are tools in the writers’ toolbox that will help you on that mission, even if they push boundaries you assume memoirists can’t push. 

Interpretation

There are some who say, “people don’t change,” but you’re almost certainly a much different person now than you were when you were six or sixteen. If you were grounded as a teenager, your memory of the fight with your parents might be one where a tyrannical mother ruins your social life when she says you can’t go to a particular party. But ten, twenty, or more years later, you might instead remember that as a moment when a teenager exercised poor judgment in sneaking out the week before. 

More than that, you might remember your last fight with your ex-partner much differently than they do. For normal disagreements between couples, you might want to ask yourself if painting your breakup as you being dumped simply because you didn’t do the dishes is really true. It might be true to your experience, but your experience isn’t all there is. 

It’s good advice for any memoirist to look for nuance and multiple perspectives, even on their own life. That doesn’t mean you need to excuse abusive behavior—it’s just that an effective memoir usually involves self-reflection and admission of your own biases. 

Honesty over Truth

Truth is tricky; there are many ways to interpret it, it’s different for different people, and it can be shared in more ways than a dry recitation of events. Honesty, however, is something different. 

You should not, in any context, look to deceive your reader, aside from protecting privacy. At best it’s morally wrong; at worst it could be illegal, depending on the context. Any version you take on truth should serve to open things up for your readers, not close them down. When in doubt, talk to your editors about writing a good author’s note so readers know what you changed and why. Other than that, don’t make the mistake of thinking that nonfiction can’t be creative. 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.