A colleague brought this article to my attention. Interested in a lot of the genre questions that a "novel from life" raises, Susanna Kaysen's new book Cambridge seems to be better labeled a memoir than a novel.Curtis Sittenfeld, in her review, identifies issues with plot (as in there's not enough of it), characterization (people come in and out of the narrative too often), and detail (why not fabricate the particulars of events you can't remember?) that would be minimized if this book was billed as a memoir rather than a novel. As Sittenfeld suggests, "the burden of being interesting for the sake of being interesting is greater with novels, when the writer isn't bound by the truth and therefore has more imaginative tools at her disposal. With memoir, the burden is to be faithfully lifelike."
Of course posts here at Visual Memoir--as well as my academic research--aim to nuance such claims about memoir, but let's have a bit of fun with these categories and consider what, exactly, a novel accomplishes that a memoir does not (and vice versa).
In a google search--yes, summertime has infected my research habits and slowed everything down--that aims to define a "novel from life" against a more traditional memoir, I found no definitions but dozens of sites that weighed the pros and cons of writing a novel versus writing a memoir. Kaysen is certainly not the first to novelize her life. Authors such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway (and many other Modernists) Philip Roth, Tobias Wolfe (and a host of others that can be found on this wiki page) have integrated autobiographical elements into fictional works (or, depending on how you see it/where you are standing, integrated fictional elements into autobiographical works!)
There is a kind of burnout that authors of memoir experience after they publish wildly successful life stories. After receiving critical acclaim for Girl, Interrupted, she published some novels but also another memoir: The Camera My Mother Gave Me but in a recent interview with the Boston Globe she admits that her novelizing her most recent book allowed her to play more loose and fast with her memories:
"I didn’t want to be hampered by the fact that my memory was not reliable, especially the early memories. I felt a great obligation to be scrupulous about my memories with ‘Girl, Interrupted.’ I really didn't want to fudge that. And although I changed a few things to muddle identification, as far as I can tell I was very much being truthful about what happened. I didn’t want that constraint here."
Memory seems to be the hinge upon which questions of genre--and its inadequacies--turn. Kaysen says that, for this project, her memories (and their imperfections) were too constraining. But memories are always imperfect and we are always approximating rather than transcribing them when we construct life narrative. Also, and not to throw the whole system in disorder here or anything, but aren't we always writing from memory of one kind or another? We use working memory to recall what we just wrote, we use semantic memory to give continuity to the bits and pieces of data (dates, history etc.) that make our (fictional) stories seem "true to life." We are told to write what we know, whether that be for fictional pieces or autobiographical ones. Memory and imagination are linked so that even when we are writing from "the Imagination" memory is still implicated in the processes of simulation that make our imaginings plausible. Memory, in short, is always underpinning our creative (and I would argue even less creative) writing.
I find genre distinctions such as Kaysen's fascinating. From Sittenfeld's review, it seems that Cambridge could have been more successful if it had fallen more decidedly in the fiction or non-fiction camp. Her writing, nevertheless, appears to be unhampered--honest, personal, engaging, etc. So, does calling it a "novel from life" really change much about the narrative at hand? I'm not so sure...
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