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Linda Grant on the nature of fiction
Apr. 3rd, 2008 09:20 amBang on the nail, madam. Right on every count.
She gave me a stare, at first appraising, then bewildered, then accusing. "You're too young!" she cried. "You couldn't have written that book - you weren't there." It was true, I was not in Palestine in the last days of the British Mandate. "Then none of this happened to you?" she said. "Nothing. I made it all up. It's fiction."
One of the worst things about misery memoirs (apart from the fact that they're unreadable; so the writer had a lousy childhood, why should I give a damn?) is that they seem to have confused readers about what to expect from fiction, particularly when they encounter the "I" voice, which against their apparent expectations is almost always a lie. Not only that, there seems to be a feeling in some readers that fiction based on truth is intrinsically superior to invention, which has always seemed to me if anything the reverse of the case.
I sometimes get queries from A-level students along the lines of "in your poem about the sandman, who's the woman on the beach?" If I reply; well, she's the poem's protagonist, I get the comeback "no, I mean who is she in your life, is it you, your mother, a friend?" When, like Grant, I reply "she's someone I made up for the purposes of the poem", I sense disappointment, as I do if I explain that even when poems are partly based on truth, writers monkey around with the facts, change he to she, set it in a different place, write a better ending than real life did.
The poem I get the most queries about is ( this )
Kids invariably want to know who was who; was the grandmother yours (one asked if I was the grandmother!); was the boy your brother. I explain, patiently, that the whole point of the poem is that you can't ever know; the writer is a liar and you have to accept that, because the lie is the way into the kingdom of story. But I sense that they want desperately to pigeonhole things, perhaps because exam questions are slanted that way.
She gave me a stare, at first appraising, then bewildered, then accusing. "You're too young!" she cried. "You couldn't have written that book - you weren't there." It was true, I was not in Palestine in the last days of the British Mandate. "Then none of this happened to you?" she said. "Nothing. I made it all up. It's fiction."
One of the worst things about misery memoirs (apart from the fact that they're unreadable; so the writer had a lousy childhood, why should I give a damn?) is that they seem to have confused readers about what to expect from fiction, particularly when they encounter the "I" voice, which against their apparent expectations is almost always a lie. Not only that, there seems to be a feeling in some readers that fiction based on truth is intrinsically superior to invention, which has always seemed to me if anything the reverse of the case.
I sometimes get queries from A-level students along the lines of "in your poem about the sandman, who's the woman on the beach?" If I reply; well, she's the poem's protagonist, I get the comeback "no, I mean who is she in your life, is it you, your mother, a friend?" When, like Grant, I reply "she's someone I made up for the purposes of the poem", I sense disappointment, as I do if I explain that even when poems are partly based on truth, writers monkey around with the facts, change he to she, set it in a different place, write a better ending than real life did.
The poem I get the most queries about is ( this )
Kids invariably want to know who was who; was the grandmother yours (one asked if I was the grandmother!); was the boy your brother. I explain, patiently, that the whole point of the poem is that you can't ever know; the writer is a liar and you have to accept that, because the lie is the way into the kingdom of story. But I sense that they want desperately to pigeonhole things, perhaps because exam questions are slanted that way.
