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Roundtable Literal versus Invented Truth in Memoir 'The Person to Whom Things Happened": Meditations on the Tradition of Memoir Jocelyn Bartkevicius One ice-cold January many years ago, I worked in a state mental institution , a dreary gothic building with granite walls and barred windows . That month, a long-term patient ready for release to a half-way house caused a minor stir when she refused the only coat that would fit her. After years offatty institutional food and confinement to a small locked ward, this patient had expanded from a size seven to a size eighteen, but fervently believed that she could still wear her original coat. Even after confrontations with mirrors and hours oftalk therapy, nothing shook her perception, and she insisted upon wearing her old coat. In the institution's records, that incident was recorded roughly as follows: The patient, a size eighteen, refuses the coat of the appropriate size, and under the delusion that she remains her size upon admittance, demands her old coat. Because ofthis kind ofincident I left the field ofpsychology to become a teacher and writer. Summaries that recap externally observable facts may be necessary to therapy, but don't reflect the complexity of human character , and I wanted to study character. I began to imagine what nuances ofthe selfmight be revealed by looking at that old coat through the patient's eyes, remembering with her the day she threw caution to the wind and chose bright yellow over practical gray, how she saved up for it, how she wore it when she met her first lover, how heads turned when she stepped out ofhis car. Looked at through layers of memory, the coat is just right for her; it is her. It fit the self she was upon being snatched out of her life and committed to the institution. 133 134Fourth Genre It is just such an interior, memory-bound sense ofself that memoir has traditionally revealed. In memoir, the patient could depict the astounding moment when her arm would not enter the sleeve of her old coat, and explore the disjuncture between her perception and that of the institution staff. Or my memoir could include a scene in which I watch that patient, imagine what she is thinking and seeing, and change not only my career path but my way of living. Nancy Mairs maps out just such an interior landscape for memoir in Voice Lessons when she explores how, viewed from outside, she must seem Pollyanna (if not insane) for considering herself lucky despite her own multiple sclerosis and her husband's melanoma. But "the outside," Mairs writes, "never provides a good vantage point for life study." Although historically memoir has studied life from the inside, for the past two years, newspapers have been printing polemics against that very interiority, chastising memoirists for not sticking to what they narrowly define as "the facts." (See, for example, recent pieces in the Times by Joyce Carol Oates and Doreen Carvajal, and last year by Anna Quindlen and others .) Critics who favor the visible, verifiable, and rational over perception, memory, and imagination often dub the '90s "the age ofmemoir" (usually in sneering tones). Their articles tend to share two unexamined, unsubstantiated assumptions: 1) as nonfiction, memoir must be a form ofjournalism and therefore devoid oftechniques like characterization, story development, and imagination (that "should" be left only to poets and fiction writers); and 2) memoir is a new American form that, having sprung from "The Oprah Winfrey Show," is characterized by whining and self-indulgence. Of course it is true that some current memoirs lack insight and are poorly written. But when they judge the whole genre by pulp memoirs, and in terms ofjournalistic rules, critics ignore history. This ignorance may be innocent; my own experience teaches that it's possible to get through an undergraduate degree in English and a master's degree in writing without running into much nonfiction prose older than TomWolfe's The NewJournalism (which can leave one with the impression that narrative nonfiction was invented by hip reporters in the '60s and is a form ofslantedjournalism). Still, ifthe wave ofself-proclaimed critics ofthe age of memoir would look at...

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