OnStage - Goodman Theatre

IN THE ALBERT
Where the Truth Lies:
Memoir and Memory
By Neena Arndt
“How often do we tell our own life
story? How often do we adjust, embellish,
make sly cuts? And the longer life
goes on, the fewer are those around to
challenge our account, to remind us
that our life is not our life, merely the
story we have told about our life. Told to
others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”
–Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
In Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities,
Brooke Wyeth arrives at her parents’
Palm Springs mansion for the holidays.
In her baggage is a draft of her soon-tobe-published
book, a tell-all memoir that
dissects her parents’ relationship with
her older brother, a leftist activist who
was implicated in a bombing decades
earlier. Brooke, a gifted writer who loves
her parents but thinks poorly of their
right-wing political views, has suffered
from depression that has prevented her
from writing for several years, but writing
this personal story has unmuted her
voice. She gains strength from telling the
truth about her family—but her parents
question whether Brooke’s truths are
objective truths or merely her garbled,
biased understanding of the events of
her youth. Her mother, Polly, points out
that, “you may of course write whatever
you like, but the ice gets thin when it
involves we the living. We, the living,
would like to go out gracefully.”
While novels spring primarily from
imagination and non-fiction writing relies
on research as its foundation, memoirs
depend heavily on memory, personal
perception and interpretation of events.
But there are at least two sides to every
story—interpretation is subjective and
memory is unreliable, malleable and
slippery. And while events might occur
at random, we long to connect our own
dots, creating narratives from the scattershot
of our lives. To what extent,
then, are memoirs accurate? Is accuracy
a reasonable expectation? Do other
people get a say in our memories?
In the past decade, countless incidents
of memoir forgery have surfaced; examples
include Herman Rosenblat’s Angel
at the Fence, the touching tale of a
young girl passing him food through the
barbed wire of his concentration camp,
and Matt McCarthy’s Odd Man Out,
in which he describes his misadventures
on a minor league baseball team.
Evidence suggests that neither story is
entirely true. But while these authors
may have been deliberately deceitful,
their stories both sprang from objective
“...you may of course write whatever
you like, but the ice gets thin when it
involves we the living. We, the living,
would like to go out gracefully.”
—Polly, Other Desert Cities
LEFT: Herman Rosenblat and his wife, Rosa, the subject
of his forged memoir, Angel at the Fence. AP Photo/J.
Pat Carter.
truth. Rosenblat, indeed, survived the
Holocaust in a concentration camp,
and McCarthy, without a doubt, played
for the Provo Angels. Because the
stories rely on people accurately reporting
incidents that happened years or
decades ago, teasing out the truth from
lies proves difficult. And could it be possible
that, rather than being liars, these
authors truly believe they remember
incidents that never occurred?
Since the early twentieth century, psychologists
have consistently found that
our minds don’t work like video cameras;
they neither passively record information,
nor play it back the same way they
recorded it. In the 1930s, psychologist
Frederic Bartlett told study participants
Native American folktales with which
they were unfamiliar, then asked them to
retell the tales. While most participants
recalled the gist of the folktales, they
forgot details and provided false informa-
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