The Memoir Writer's Secret Weapon: Not Knowing

It happens in every residential course I teach. We’ll be gathered around the table, maybe halfway through a long morning of sharing ideas, and someone will put their pen down with a sigh. They’re writing a memoir, or other creative nonfiction, and they’ve hit a wall.

“I just don’t know,” they’ll say. “I don’t know exactly what happened. I don’t know what she was thinking. I wasn’t there. And I can’t just make it up, can I? That wouldn’t be right.”

Picture drawn at Arvon.

This happens a LOT. The last time that I recall, the person who said this was writing a book about a distant relative who died a century ago. All she had was a collection of letters.

I understand the problem. I really do. There’s a pact we make with readers when we write nonfiction. We’re saying: this happened, this is true, you can trust me. Anxiety about breaching that trust – perpetrating some kind of historical inaccuracy – can freeze you, and the best stories may remain untold because you weren’t there with a notebook and a tape recorder.

But acknowledging what you don’t know doesn’t have to be a weakness in your writing. It can be a door, an entry to something rich.

I’m going to show you what I mean, and along the way I might just demonstrate the very thing I’m talking about.

I often think about my friend Alice Jolly when I’m puzzling over how to teach something in writing. And when I need a way to show students what playful uncertainty looks like on the page, I reach for the opening of the first story in her collection, From Far Around They Saw Us Burn. Goes like this:

They tell stories about him in the village pub. Used to work in the cider factory. No, the morgue in Hereford. Son of a farmer out near Monmouth. Only twenty-five. No, nearer fifty. Son of a millionaire-film-star-celebrity with a Bentley and all. Family keep him out of the way down here. Well, you would do, wouldn’t you?

The stories go around with the pints of Westons and the salt and vinegar crisps. An ex-con, a former dustbin man. Grows a ton of wacky baccy out the back somewhere. Used to be married, you know, but his wife was eaten. Yeah, eaten. Well, you’ve seen the teeth on them, haven’t you? Buried her in the garden. Yeah. Ever actually seen him? Nah. Only the one time at night, digging. Yeah. Great big hole in the garden. Body shaped. Yeah.

- Alice Jolly, “Ray The Rottweiler”

Now, this is fiction, of course. But watch what Alice does. She (or, rather, her narrator) doesn’t tell us who the man is. She doesn’t pretend to. Instead, she shows us the process and ongoing experience of not knowing. She lays out the rumours, the contradictions, the sheer glorious variety of speculation. Cider factory or morgue? Twenty-five or fifty? Millionaire’s son or ex-con?

And what’s the effect? We know the facts are unclear, but we still get a huge amount of information – the texture of village life. We feel the gossip moving, the pints being pulled, the stories building themselves. Uncertainty may not be the point, as such. But it’s rich in specifics and more truthful, in a way, than any single, authoritative statement could be.

It also drags us in, an opening like that, because it raises so many questions in the reader’s mind.

For a memoir writer, what Alice wrote can be a permission slip.

Here’s an example of a nonfiction attempt to play with various possibilities, uncertain but based in fact, and not lacking in specifics:

I couldn’t tell you exactly how I first came to know Alice. Possibly one of the first times we met was in a cafe in Clerkenwell, just after whenever it was that I became aware that we were both teaching at Arvon and both published by Unbound.

I remember reading Alice’s memoir, Dead Babies in Seaside Towns, in a proof edition I was given by someone at Unbound, at the offices near Buckingham Palace. I read it while I walked to Westminster Tube station, was instantly impressed and took a photograph of the book which I posted, if memory serves, on Twitter, with a note saying I was looking forward to working with this person, previously unknown to me, called Alice Jolly. But this is just conjecture, and I can’t check because I deleted my Twitter account quite a while ago.

As for when we actually met, there’s a photo somewhere of us sitting in a Clerkenwell cafe. I’ll look for the picture after I’ve finished writing this.¹ Point is: I can no longer remember exactly how we met, only that it happened, and we became friends. None of the uncertainty about the first meeting makes our friendship any less real.

- John-Paul Flintoff, writing on his blog (right here)

So, that’s my version. What’s yours?

You don’t know what your grandmother was thinking the day she left? You don’t know exactly what was said between your parents that night? You don’t know why your employer closed down the business?

Then don’t pretend. Instead, play.

Create conjecture. It could have been this. It could have been that. Lay out the possibilities, even the ones that contradict each other. Your mother might have been angry, or she might have been terrified, or she might have been both at once. She might have been thinking of her own mother, or she might have been thinking only of the road ahead.

By showing the sheer variety of what might have been, you do something remarkable. You invite the reader into the act of wondering alongside you. You replace the flat, certain statement with something three-dimensional, something alive. You show the reader that you’re trustworthy because you’re not pretending to have all the answers.

The past is not a photograph, preserving people and places in a single moment. It’s a story we tell ourselves, and the telling shapes the thing itself. So tell it honestly, with all the gaps and shadows and contradictions. Let the possibilities multiply.

¹ Photo of Alice and me. Can’t find it anywhere, sorry.